Photo from unsplash

Originally Posted On:  How much does it cost to maintain a website | YZ DESIGNS shows you

 

Do you maintain your website? How important do you think it is to keep it up-to-date?

So often maintenance and running costs are overlooked when it comes to your website.

Ongoing costs to maintain a website include domain renewal, hosting, backups, software updates and site maintenance and are all important factors in running a good effective website.

 

Web site maintenance costs

Domain Renewal

This is a small one in terms of cost, but it is of extreme importance as this is the name of your website (the www.YOURNAME.co.uk bit).

If your website and URL are new, you had to purchase the web address (domain) through a register like GoDaddy, Easily, the list is endless, so a good idea to save any admin is to prepay for a few years in advance and try to get your web address/domain to automatically renew when it needs to…again to save any admin or hassle. It’s generally £10 to £20 per year.

If you do forget to renew your domain then your site will go disappear and in a few cases, you can’t get it back.

There is normally a grace period to reclaim your website, but if you leave it too long someone else may be able to snap it up and then you really do have a problem. We try to answer how much does it cost to maintain a website and why it is important to keep it maintained.

 

Hosting for your website

There are a selection of hosting options available to you, both in the UK or from across the globe.

The costs for hosting range from very inexpensive (for smaller sites in many cases it’s less than £5 per month) to somewhat expensive (hundreds of pounds per month).

The main thing to consider is that shared hosting plans mean you are literally side by side with hundreds of other websites that all share the same space…catching a cold in a crowded room springs to mind when you think how easy it is to hack a poorly coded website.

The best thing to think about is a cost you can afford to pay, but generally anything around £100 – £200 per year would be decent to use.

 

Regular backups of your site

Backups are an important thing to have when it comes to having a safety measure in place.

If you lose your site, at least you won’t need to start from scratch again which is timely, costly and also a right royal pain in the arse.

If your website is e-commerce or if there is a lot of data on your website that is of importance to your business, a disaster recovery plan can literally save your business if you get hacked or something goes wrong with your primary hosting.

There are many sites that offer backup services and the cost for backups will be similar to the hosting cost ranges above. If or when your site does go down, you will need technical expertise to be able to restore the site from a backup.

Have a look at some web site maintenance plans that include site back.

 

Software updates / Site maintenance

Unless you have a site that is built in pure HTML/CSS, you are going to have some type of software that uses functionality.

Even open-source content management systems like WordPress require downloads of software and certain types of servers to function properly.

It’s a bit like updates being sent to your iPhone from Apple to keep it updated and secure.

WordPress websites may also use premium plugins that need to be paid for in order to receive regular updates which is especially important when it comes to website security.

It’s not unusual to have 10-20 WordPress plugins that all need updating throughout the year along with WordPress itself, so this is something you should really think of as it is often not thought about or budgeted for.

• Each site you own will need technical expertise to keep it running over time.
• If your site goes down or needs to be restored from a backup, you will need help.
• Expert help and advice costs between £40 – £60 per hour which is the going rate at least (some charge £80+ per hour)

 

Web site maintenance costs planning

How much does it cost to maintain a website?” Well everything should be taken into consideration and planned for because your website is very important to your company and you should take into account ongoing web site maintenance and the costs involved with it.

It’s often not planned or even thought of to save some money but can so often come back to bite you!

 

Redesign of your current website

Making a decision on a website rebuild or re-design need to be carefully considered as you need to ask the question ‘do I actually need to re-build my website’, or can I work with what I have already?

 

The facts about your web maintenance costs

Now that you know all of the facts involved with maintaining your site, you can see that there are indeed lots of points to consider.

The basics to really seriously consider are getting your domain name setting up your hosting plan.

Once these are in place, it is then a case of getting your new website designed and loaded onto the hosting, which should be relatively straight forwards.

Once the site is live, the up-keep and maintenance of the site is often overlooked. That is until something goes wrong and you need some help.

So with this all in mind, a good guide to costs is £250 – £500 each year to keep your website up and running, well maintained and most importantly safe and secure. This also takes into consideration any updates that you might ask your web designer to do for you.

If you need to chat through any of the above, then please feel free to pop in or call us on 0797 4900219.