The £500 website, five years on: where the money actually goes

Ask three people what a website costs and you’ll get £500, £2,500 and £8,000, all delivered with complete confidence, all describing something the person quoting genuinely believes is the same thing.

They aren’t quoting the same thing. They’re usually not even quoting for the same length of time.

A website isn’t a purchase like a van. It’s closer to renting a small commercial unit: there’s a cost to move in, and then there’s the bit that carries on every month whether you think about it or not. The move-in cost is the number everybody compares. The rest is where the money actually goes.

The costs that exist no matter who builds it

Whoever makes your website, and however much they charge on day one, these carry on afterwards:

Notice how many of those lines say nobody. That’s not a scandal. It’s just what a one-off purchase means. If you buy a website outright for a fixed sum, you’ve bought the building work, not the caretaking, and the caretaking still needs doing.

Three ways of paying for the same five years

The do-it-yourself builder

You pay a modest monthly fee to one of the big platforms, and you build it yourself. Cash cost over five years: genuinely low, often the lowest of the three.

The cost that never appears on the invoice is your own time. If it takes you two evenings to get started and an hour a month afterwards, that’s roughly seventy hours over five years. Put your own charge-out rate against seventy hours and the cheapest option stops looking quite so cheap. If you’re a sole trader who bills £45 an hour, you have just spent £3,000 of chargeable time to save a few hundred pounds.

Which doesn’t make it wrong. Plenty of businesses have exactly the right website for them on a DIY platform, and we’ll say so cheerfully. It makes it a decision about what your time is worth, not about what websites cost.

The one-off cheap build

Somebody builds you a site for a few hundred pounds and hands it over. Year one feels excellent.

Year three is where it bites. Your prices have changed twice and the page still shows the old ones, because every edit means finding the person who built it, and they now have a full-time job. The platform has had two major updates. One plugin is no longer maintained. Nobody has checked a backup. The contact form has been silently failing since a mailbox change in the spring.

The bill for that isn’t the rebuild you eventually pay for. It’s the eighteen months of enquiries you never knew about.

The monthly package

You pay a set fee that covers building it and keeping it going. There’s no large sum at the start, and the caretaking is somebody’s actual job.

Our own numbers, since we publish them anyway: our Classic package is £30 a month including VAT and our Premium package is £45, with the design work included rather than charged separately. Over five years Classic comes to £1,800, and that figure carries the design, the UK hosting, the SSL, the domain, a mailbox, the backups and the support. There’s no setup fee, no minimum term, and our prices only move in line with inflation. The whole price list is on the site, including our hourly rates for bigger pieces of development work, because it’s easier for everyone if you can see the numbers before you ask.

The honest weakness of a monthly model is that it never stops. If you keep a site for fifteen years and barely touch it, you’ll have paid more than you would have for a one-off build. That’s a real trade-off and it deserves saying out loud.

So which is cheapest?

Over five years, for most small businesses, the three land closer together than anyone expects. What changes dramatically is what you get for the money and who does the worrying.

A useful way to decide is to ask what happens in the worst week. Your site goes down on a Friday afternoon, in the middle of your busiest month. On a DIY platform you’re in a support queue. On a one-off build you’re trying to remember who built it. On a package you ring somebody. That difference is the thing you’re really buying, and it’s worth almost nothing until the day it’s worth a great deal.

When cheap is genuinely the right answer

We’d rather say this than pretend otherwise. A cheap or free website is the sensible choice when:

• You’re testing an idea and don’t yet know whether the business will exist in a year.
• You need something for one event, one season, or one product.
• The website is a courtesy rather than a route to customers, because all your work comes by word of mouth and always will.
• Cash is genuinely tight, in which case a simple site you can afford beats a good one you can’t.

The point at which that stops being true is usually the point at which the website starts being the first thing a customer sees. what happens when a business outgrows Wix covers what moving on actually involves, once you get there.

Two questions worth asking any quote

First: what does this cost me in year two? A quote that only describes month one is not a price, it’s an opening.

Second: what is not included? Ask specifically about content changes, photography, email, backups and what happens when something breaks. The answers are more revealing than the headline figure, and our explainer on website support goes through them one at a time.

If you want our version of those answers, the packages page has them, and we are perfectly happy to tell you when a cheaper option elsewhere would suit you better.