What a Website Actually Costs to Run for a Year

The build is a project with a number attached. The running costs are a series of small surprises spread over the following year, and they are rarely discussed before someone signs.

This is the complete list. We are not putting figures against the lines — a price list for this would be a fiction, because the same line varies enormously by platform, traffic and country. What we can do is tell you which lines exist, which ones scale, and which ones people forget until the site breaks.

The lines that always exist

The domain. Annual, small, and the one thing that must never lapse. Turn on auto-renew and make sure the card on file belongs to the company rather than whoever registered it four years ago. Expired domains get bought within hours, and buying yours back is not a negotiation you will enjoy.

TLS certificates. Effectively free and automatic on modern hosting. If you are paying meaningfully for one, ask why.

Hosting. The line with the widest range. A static site — HTML and assets on a CDN, nothing executing per request — sits comfortably on free tiers at ordinary business traffic. A site with a database, an application server and a CMS costs real money every month whether anyone visits or not, and it scales with traffic.

This is the single largest structural decision affecting your annual cost, and it is made during the build. Our comparison of headless and WordPress covers the trade-off.

Email. Business mailboxes at your domain, per user, monthly. Small, permanent, and separate from your web hosting even when the same company sells both.

The lines people forget

Third-party services the site depends on. Analytics, forms, search, maps, scheduling, chat, payment processing, error monitoring, transactional email. Each is modest; together they are routinely the largest running line and nobody has a list of them.

Make the list. We have opened sites that were paying for three analytics tools and two chat widgets, two of which were not loading and one of which nobody could identify the account for.

Plugin and theme licences. Mostly a WordPress phenomenon. Annual, per site, and they stop delivering security updates when they lapse — which is exactly when they become dangerous rather than merely outdated.

Backups you can actually restore. Many hosts include backups. Fewer include a tested restore. An untested backup is a belief, not a safeguard. Restore one to a staging environment once a year; the exercise costs an afternoon and occasionally reveals the backups have been silently failing for months.

Monitoring. Something that tells you the site is down before a customer does. Free tiers are adequate for most businesses. The alternative is finding out on Monday.

The line that dwarfs the others

People. Almost always the largest annual cost, and almost never in the quote.

Content that stays current — new work, updated services, prices that match reality, staff who still work there. Security updates for anything with a database or plugins, applied promptly rather than eventually. Small fixes and changes as the business shifts. Answering the enquiries the site produces.

For a static site with no admin surface, the technical part of this can be genuinely small. For a WordPress site with twenty plugins, unattended is a decision to accept eventual compromise — it is a question of when, not whether.

What actually drives the number up

Anything executing per request. A server rendering pages costs money continuously. Files on a CDN do not.

Anything storing personal data. Backups, access control, retention policy, and an obligation when something goes wrong. This is a compliance cost as much as a technical one.

Anything with a login. User accounts mean password resets, support, and a security surface that needs attention.

Anything integrated. Each connection to another system is something that can break when the other end changes, usually without warning.

Traffic, but later than you think. Bandwidth is cheap. What scales badly is a database under load — and that is a build decision showing up as a hosting bill.

How to keep it low without cutting corners

Build static where you can. Most business sites do not need anything computing at request time. Static delivery removes hosting cost, most of the security surface, and a whole class of outages simultaneously.

Audit your third-party services annually. Open the site, list every external request it makes, and match that against what you pay for. Cancel what is not used. This exercise pays for itself most years.

Prefer fewer dependencies. Every plugin and SDK is a licence, an update obligation and a supply-chain risk. The cheapest component is the one you did not install.

Own your accounts. Domain, hosting, analytics, DNS — all registered to the company, with billing on a company card and access not dependent on one person or one agency. This costs nothing and saves a great deal when relationships end.

Budget for content deliberately. It is the line most likely to be cut and the one that most determines whether the site produces anything. A technically excellent site nobody has updated in two years is a running cost with no return.

The question to ask before you build

Not "what will this cost to build" but "what will this cost to keep, and who is doing it?"

If the answer to the second half is nobody, you are choosing a site that will be out of date within a year — and that is a legitimate choice for some businesses, as long as it is made rather than discovered.

If you want an honest read on what your current site costs to run, and which lines could go, tell us what you are paying for.