Updated August 2026 · prices checked on 10 August 2026 · Vynus Designs Ltd, Salford
Running a small business website in the UK costs £94 to £255 a year if you do the work yourself. With somebody looking after it properly the bill is £600 to £2,400 a year. That covers a domain, hosting, email and updates. Hosting is rarely the biggest line.
£94 to £255 a year
Works out at roughly £8 to £21 a month
Yearly totals. Domain, hosting and email figures are real August 2026 UK list prices. Care plan and content figures are compiled from UK agency plus freelance rates seen through 2026. This is an estimate to help you budget, never a quote.
Six things. Only two of them are unavoidable. The domain plus the hosting have to be paid or the site goes off. Everything else is a choice you can make later.
| Line item | Real UK price, August 2026 | Can you skip it? |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | £9.99 a year for a .co.uk at 20i, £15.49 for a .com. The renewal is the same price as the first year | No |
| Hosting | £7 a month including VAT for Krystal Amethyst, £10 a month for 20i Startup, £20 a month for 20i Plan 1 | No |
| SSL certificate | Free. Let’s Encrypt is built into nearly every UK host in 2026 | Already free |
| Business email | £5.40 per mailbox a month for Microsoft 365 Business Basic paid yearly before VAT, £5.90 for Google Workspace Starter | Yes, if you use forwarding to a personal address |
| Updates, backups and security | £20 to £150 a month for a care plan. Nothing if you do it yourself | Yes. This is the one people regret skipping |
| Changes and new content | £250 to £700 a year for occasional work. £100 to £500 a month for ongoing work | Yes |
Something we measured on 10 August 2026. We ran this exact question through the UK results and read the first ten pages that came back. Every one of them priced building a website. Not one of them priced running one.
That is why the number is so hard to find. It is also why this page exists.
£8 to £21 a month for a small brochure site you look after yourself. £50 to £200 a month once somebody else is doing the updates, the backups and the fixes. Over £200 a month should come with named hours of work attached to it.
The monthly figure moves almost entirely on whether a person is involved. Hosting a five page site costs about the same as two coffees. Paying somebody to keep it working, patched and current is the part that costs real money, because it is somebody’s time.
Three honest scenarios, at 2026 UK prices, including the three year total so the difference is visible rather than argued about.
| How you run it | Year one | Three years | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Everything yourself WordPress on shared hosting | £94 to £255 | £282 to £765 | Cheapest possible. You do the updates, the backups and the fixing when it breaks |
| Rented builder Wix or Squarespace on a business plan | £200 to £480 | £600 to £1,440 | Simple, hands off. You are renting, so you cannot take the site anywhere |
| Looked after WordPress plus a care plan | £600 to £2,400 | £1,800 to £7,200 | Somebody else patches it, backs it up and fixes it. You own the site outright |
The rented option looks cheaper than a care plan and it usually is, for the first two years. What it does not include is anybody looking at your site. It includes a platform staying online.
No. For almost every small business site, hosting is the smallest real line on the bill. At £7 to £20 a month it is under a fifth of what a care plan costs and a tiny fraction of what content work costs.
People fixate on hosting because it is the price that gets advertised. The line that actually decides your yearly bill is whether a human being is paid to touch the site.
£20 to £150 a month for a small business site. At the bottom end you are buying updates, backups plus a security scan. At the top end you should also be getting named hours for changes, a monthly report plus somebody who answers the phone when something breaks.
Ask one question of any care plan before you pay for it: how many hours of actual work are included. A plan with no hours in it is an insurance policy, not a service.
Yes. The domain and the hosting are yearly or monthly bills and they never stop. A website is not a thing you buy once. The build is a one off cost and the running is a standing cost, in the same way a van has a purchase price plus tax, insurance and servicing.
If the build price you were quoted did not mention a yearly figure, that figure still exists. Ask what it is before you sign anything.
Different things, at different speeds, depending on which bill you stop.
Month to month, no. A Wix or Squarespace business plan runs roughly £17 to £40 a month, which is more than WordPress on shared hosting at £7 to £20. The builder is cheaper only against a WordPress site with a full care plan on top.
The real difference is not the price, it is what you are left holding. A WordPress site is yours and it moves to any host. A rented site stops existing the month you stop paying. For a business that wants to be found locally, that ownership matters more than the £10 a month.
Our build prices are published, with no call needed to see them. Starter Launch Kit £695 plus VAT, Growth Essential £1,000 plus VAT and Elite Business Suite £2,497 plus VAT. Full detail sits on the pricing page.
On top of a build, hosting plus a care plan runs £20 to £150 a month depending on what the site does and how much work you want included. If you want the build number for your job first, the website cost calculator gives a real range in about twenty seconds. For what a smaller build costs specifically, there is a breakdown of small business website cost.
Send what you have. You get the build price plus the yearly running cost back, in writing, with what is in it and what is not.
Start your project£94 to £255 a year if you do the work yourself. That is a domain at about £10, shared UK hosting at £7 to £20 a month plus a free SSL certificate. Add a mailbox and it is roughly £65 a year more.
Under £300 a year for a simple site you maintain, £600 to £2,400 a year for a site somebody else looks after. Anything over £2,400 a year should include real monthly work, not just hosting with a nicer name on it.
Sometimes. Paying £20 a month instead of £7 buys you faster hardware, better backups plus somebody useful on support. It does not make a slow site fast. Most slow UK small business sites are slow because of how they were built, not where they sit.
Yes. A .co.uk is £9.99 a year at 20i plus £15.49 for a .com. The renewal costs the same as the first year. Watch out for registrars that sell a cheap first year then renew at four times the price.
You can put a page online for nothing on a free subdomain. For a business it is a bad trade. You get somebody else’s name in your web address, adverts you do not control plus no way to move. The £94 a year version is worth the £94.
Either. It matters which one. If the designer holds the hosting plus the domain in their own account, moving away later is painful. Ask for both to be registered in your name from the start, even if the designer manages them for you.
Yes, once we have looked at it. Some sites are cheap to take on plus some are held together with fifteen abandoned plugins and cost more to make safe than to rebuild. We tell you which one yours is before you commit to anything.
Yes. We are based in Salford and we build for clients across the UK, the EU plus further afield. Local pages exist for Salford, Manchester, Bolton, Bury, Stockport plus Trafford.
Vynus Designs Ltd · company 15990192 · Salford, Greater Manchester. Domain, hosting and email prices on this page were read from the suppliers’ own pricing pages on 10 August 2026. Care plan plus content figures are compiled from UK agency and freelance rates seen through 2026. They are an estimate to help you budget, never a quote.
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