What a small-business website actually costs you over 3 years — every option, totted up

Most small businesses get a website quote and decide based on the upfront number. “£200 — bargain”, or “£3,000 — too much”. But the upfront number is the smallest part of what a website actually costs. Here’s the honest 3-year total cost for every realistic option, including the costs that don’t show up on the invoice.

What’s actually in the bill

Whatever path you pick, you’re paying for some combination of:

• The build itself. What it costs to design and develop the site, once.
• Hosting. What you pay every month for the site to be on the internet at all.
• Maintenance. Updates, security patches, software upgrades — someone has to do this or your site breaks.
• Your own time. The hours you spend fiddling, troubleshooting, writing copy yourself, or working around the limitations of whatever you bought. Often the biggest hidden cost.
• Lost customers. The work that doesn’t come in because the site is too slow, too dated, or simply not there. The largest cost of the lot — and the easiest to overlook because you never see the customers you didn’t get.

Over three years, all five matter.

Option A — DIY on Wix or Squarespace

Upfront: £0–£30 (template, if you don’t pick free). Monthly: £14/month on the Wix Business plan (or £20/month on Squarespace Business). Three years = £504–720. Maintenance: “free” — Wix handles their own platform. But every time they push an update, layouts shift slightly; you spend afternoons fixing. Your time: Realistically 20–40 hours over three years spent learning the editor, redoing layouts, fighting the template, or chasing support. At £40/hour worth of your time, that’s £800–1,600. Lost customers: Wix sites load 4–8s on mobile. If half your customers find you on Google and half of those leave because of load speed, you’re losing 25% of your inbound. For a trade doing £20k/year of work that’s reachable online — about £5,000/year of lost work, or £15,000 over three years.

True 3-year total: ~£16,500. Most of which is invisible.

Option B — A freelancer, one-off project

Upfront: £600–1,200 for a basic build. Monthly hosting: £15–25/month, often on a shared hosting plan the freelancer picked. Three years = £540–900. Maintenance: “best effort” — they’ll do small tweaks if they remember to bill you for them. Some won’t pick up the phone six months later. Your time: Better than DIY, but you’ll still spend 10–20 hours over three years coordinating updates, finding logins, chasing the freelancer for changes. £400–800 of your time. Lost customers: Depends entirely on whether the freelancer built it properly. A typical “WordPress + a template” freelance build runs 3–5s on mobile; better than Wix, not by much. Maybe £8,000–10,000 over three years in lost work.

True 3-year total: ~£10,000–13,000. Often the worst-of-both option — paid agency-ish prices for DIY-tier results.

Option C — A proper agency

Upfront: £2,500–8,000 for a small-business build. Monthly hosting/care: £40–100/month, included in their retainer. Three years = £1,440–3,600. Maintenance: Done, but slow — three weeks for a copy change is not unusual. Out of scope changes cost extra. You’ll pay a project-management retainer of £200/month at the higher end. Your time: Lower — agency does it. 5 hours of coordination over three years. £200. Lost customers: Typically a fast site that ranks well. The agency build is the actually-good option for losing fewer customers; this is what they’re charging for. ~£1,000 of lost work over three years from edge cases.

True 3-year total: £5,500–13,000+. The work-quality is real, but you’re paying agency overhead — account manager, project manager, junior, design lead. Most of the £5,000-£8,000 is the overhead, not the website.

Option D — UK Web Marketing’s £45/month

Upfront: £0. Monthly: £45/month, first month free. 35 paid months over 3 years = £1,575. Everything’s bundled: design, hand-coded build, fast UK-edge hosting, daily backups, security, updates, content tweaks, support. Maintenance: Included. WhatsApp me, I fix it that day. Your time: ~3 hours over 3 years coordinating the initial brief and occasional content changes. £120. Lost customers: Sub-second loading on Cloudflare’s UK edge. Lighthouse 100s. WCAG-compliant. Maybe £200 of lost work over three years from edge cases — same ballpark as Option C.

True 3-year total: ~£1,895. Effectively a tenth of DIY-Wix when you count the lost work, a fifth of an agency.

The maths people miss

The number that catches most people out is the lost customers line. It feels speculative; it isn’t. Google’s own research is explicit: every extra second of load time from 1 to 6 seconds increases bounce probability by 106%. Most small-business sites aren’t actually competing on whether they have a website — they’re competing on how many of the people who land on it actually stay and call. A site that loses you 50 calls a month at £150/call is the dominant cost line, every time, no matter what you paid upfront.

That’s why I built UK Web Marketing the way I did. The price isn’t the headline. The price reflects what it actually costs to do this work without the lost-customer cost line. If you want to see what your current site is doing on that front, run the free audit — it’ll show you exactly where you’re losing calls.

The maths is friendlier than people assume. The upfront price is the smallest part of what a website actually costs you. Three years is a fair window to measure across, and on that window £45/month is the cheapest option by a wide margin — by tens of thousands of pounds in some cases — because the work that doesn’t bleed out through a slow site is worth way more than the build itself.