Building the site is the headline number. Running it is the one that quietly repeats every year. For a typical UK small business site, expect £100–£300 a year all in. If you are paying more than that and you do not have a shop or a booking system, something is being marked up.
What the running costs actually are
- Domain name: £8–£20 a year for a .co.uk or .com. That is the real registrar price. Anything above £40 is a mark-up.
- Hosting: £0–£120 a year. Modern static and small business sites run free or near-free on platforms like Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare. Traditional shared hosting runs £5–£10 a month.
- SSL certificate: £0. It has been free and automatic for years. Being charged £50–£150 a year for one is the clearest sign you are being overcharged.
- Business email: £0–£70 a year per mailbox depending on whether you use Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or forwarding.
- Maintenance or care plan: £0–£600 a year depending on what the site is built on and how much you change it.
Add those up honestly and a simple brochure site costs somewhere between £20 and £250 a year to keep alive. A WordPress site with plugins sits at the higher end, because plugins need updating and occasionally break things.
You should never be charged for an SSL certificate. It is free, automatic, and has been since 2016.
What a fair care plan includes
Care plans are not a scam — they are just often vague. A plan worth paying for spells out exactly what you get. Look for:
- Hosting, domain renewal and SSL handled, so you never get an expiry email at midnight.
- Software and plugin updates, with someone responsible when an update breaks a page.
- Off-site backups and a stated restore time.
- Uptime monitoring that alerts them, not you.
- A named allowance of content changes — "up to an hour a month" beats "small changes included".
- A stated response time for something being broken.
For a small business site, £15–£40 a month for that is reasonable. Above £75 a month you should be getting real ongoing SEO or development work, not just updates.
The charges to refuse
- A licence fee to keep using your own website. If stopping payment takes the site down, you never owned it.
- Per-change fees for a text edit that takes two minutes.
- A domain registered in the designer's name. This is the one that really traps people — insist it is in yours.
- SSL, "security" or "performance" line items that are just standard platform features.
- A hosting bill of £40+ a month for a five page site with no shop.
Those overlap heavily with the hidden fees covered in how much should a cheap website cost — which is not a coincidence, because a low build price is often subsidised by the running costs.
Monthly website subscriptions: the real maths
A "£99 a month, no upfront cost" website looks kind. Over three years that is £3,564, for a site you do not own and cannot take with you. A £1,200 fixed-price site plus £15 a month of hosting and care is £1,740 over the same three years, and it is yours at the end. Subscriptions make sense when you genuinely cannot fund the build up front — but check whether the studio offers interest-free instalments first, because that gets you ownership without the long-term premium.
How to cut your running costs today
- Check what your domain actually renews at. Transfer it to a normal registrar if you are paying £50 for it.
- If your site is a brochure site, it almost certainly does not need £15/month hosting. Static hosting is free at your traffic level.
- Cancel any separate SSL charge. Immediately.
- Drop plugins you do not use — each one is a maintenance liability.
- Make sure the domain and hosting accounts are in your name with your email as the recovery address. Do this even if you change nothing else.
That last point costs nothing and is the difference between switching designers easily and losing your website address entirely. It is worth checking this afternoon.
At Luxsite, hosting and SSL are included, the domain is registered in your name from day one, and the care plan is optional — the site keeps working whether or not you take it.
Common questions
How much does it cost to run a website in the UK per year?
For a typical small business brochure site, £100–£300 a year covers the domain, hosting, SSL and light maintenance. A simple static site can run for under £50 a year; a WordPress site with plugins and a care plan sits at the higher end.
How much should website maintenance cost per month?
£15–£40 a month is fair for a small business site, covering hosting, updates, backups, monitoring and a set allowance of content changes. Above £75 a month you should be receiving ongoing SEO or development work, not just maintenance.
Should I be charged for an SSL certificate?
No. SSL certificates have been free and automatically issued since 2016 through Let's Encrypt and are included by every mainstream host. A separate annual SSL charge is a mark-up on something that costs your provider nothing.
Who should own my domain name?
You. The domain should be registered to your business name with your email as the contact and recovery address. If it is registered to your web designer or agency, you cannot move your website without their cooperation.