You’re preparing to build a new website for your business. You know how the build process should work, you know what metrics you need to track, but something’s missing: the ongoing expenses. How much will your new digital home actually cost to maintain each year?
This article explains exactly what expenses a ‘standard’ SMB website can expect over a 12-month period. I’ve also shared an example at the end of this article if a long read isn’t your cup of coffee. Enjoy.
(And, if you need help calculating costs for your own business, just email duncan@ionline.com.au – I’m more than happy to run the numbers for you.)
All prices discussed in this article are in Australian dollars and exclude GST.
Website Hosting
Unless you’re running your website on your own computer, you’ll need to pay for hosting. Your website is, basically, a lot of different files that users ‘open’ when they type in your website address. But those files can’t just exist in the ether – they need to be stored somewhere.
That’s where your host comes in. They’ll keep all the information that makes up your website – code files, images, videos, and so on – on servers. When someone goes to your website, your host will load all those files on their browser, letting them view and interact with your web pages.
Now, not all hosting types (or hosts) are built equal. Shared hosting, for example, means your website shares its server and the underlying resources with other sites. Normally, that’s fine for small businesses with low levels of website traffic. But a shared hosting environment can sometimes lead to ‘noisy neighbours’ – other sites that hog server resources. That’s a problem if you get a lot of site visitors and need a fast, stable site.
If you’re concerned about performance drops, it can be worth paying for virtual private server (VPS) hosting. Unlike shared hosting, a VPS is completely isolated. Your site gets a fixed percentage of the underlying physical server’s resources – CPU, RAM, and storage – with no risk of another site stealing them.
Keep in mind that a VPS and a dedicated server are 2 different things. A VPS is virtualised, which means it only has access to a percentage of the physical server’s resources. (Other sites are also hosted in private virtualised ‘rooms’ that sit on top of the same physical server.) A dedicated server means you get a whole physical server to yourself – no virtualisation or other tenants.
Domain
A domain is the URL that you type in to access your website, such as ‘ionline.com.au’. Different domains come with different price tags.
Normally, that cost variance comes down to the top-level domain (TLD) – everything to the right of the first dot in a domain. Dot com, .net, and .org are all examples of TLDs. TLDs can also be country-specific (known as ccTLDs). Dot com.au and .co.nz are both examples of ccTLDs. To register a .com.au domain, you need to have a valid ABN.
On average, domains cost between $25 and $45 a year. Dot com and .com.au domains typically cost more than less popular generic TLDs (like .net, .blog, and .shop).
DNS Hosting
To connect your domain to your website, you need DNS hosting. Think of DNS a bit like an address book. When someone types in your domain, your DNS records tell their browser the location of your hosting server – which then allows your website to pop up on their screen.
Your DNS host is the middleman in that process. They control nameservers that contain your actual DNS records (which are basically instructions about where users’ browsers need to go to load your website).
If that all sounds confusing, don’t worry. Understanding the details isn’t particularly important. The main takeaway: DNS hosting is necessary to make your site work.
On average, DNS hosting costs $10 to $13 per month.
Copy and Content Hygiene
Your web hosting, domain registration, and DNS hosting are prerequisites for a working website. They’re necessary, but they definitely aren’t sufficient. You also need information on your website – and that information needs to stay up to date.
The process of maintaining your website’s information is known as ‘copy hygiene’ or ‘content hygiene’, depending on what kind of information you’re talking about.
Remember, copy and content are different things. Copy is text that exists primarily to encourage consumers to take a specific action. Content is any work that exists primarily to add value for consumers.
You can work out how much your site’s copy/content hygiene will cost by calculating your copy/content debt. Copy/content debt is the annualised time or monetary cost required to review, update and/or retire all copy/content assets. For example, the content debt associated with 20 blog posts on your site might be $1,100 – each post costs an average of 0.25 hours to check (at $220 per hour) and needs to be checked once a year.
Generally, copy has a higher level of debt than content because it needs to be updated more often. For example, you might revisit your Home page and services pages once a quarter, but only review your blog posts every 12 months.
Plugins
If your new website is built on WordPress, you’ll probably need to pay for at least one plugin. (Plugins are third-party features that enhance your site’s core functionality. Like smartphone apps, some are free and some aren’t.)
A contact form plugin is the most common kind of paid plugin. While options like Contact Form 7 are technically free, integrating them with other software (like your CRM) does come with a small annual price tag. Keep in mind that your marketing agency may have access to discounted licencing – ask before you move forward with a website build.
Updates and Hardening
Like all software, your website needs updating regularly to stay fast, secure and user-friendly. If it’s built on WordPress, that involves:
- core updates (which update the underlying WordPress software, typically to align with new PHP versions)
- theme updates (which may or may not be necessary, depending on your theme)
- plugin updates (which upgrade and patch third-party plugins).
Now, you can simply enable auto-updates for both the WordPress core and plugins. That’s a good idea if you won’t remember to log in weekly to check your site – the last thing you want is to get hacked because you forgot to hit ‘Update’ on a plugin with a known vulnerability.
But toggling auto-updates also comes with risk. Theme and plugin updates can contain bugs or create conflicts that break some part of your site’s functionality, particularly if you have a large number of plugins enabled.
The fewer plugins you have, the better. Each additional plugin slows down your site, expands your attack surface, and increases the risk of something breaking. Try to keep your stack under 10 plugins and always disable anything you aren’t currently using.
For many businesses, it’s easier and safer to simply pay their website developer to manually roll out updates and patches. If that’s you, your developer will back up your site whenever an update is required, test the backup, roll out the core/theme/plugin update on a staging site (a test version of your live website), address any issues there, then push the update to your live site. They’ll then double-check the live site, clear the cache, and keep monitoring for post-update issues.
On average, manual patching costs $50 per month.
Uptime and Performance Monitoring
For most small businesses, the occasional website outage doesn’t matter. (Most sites have semi-regular outages of a few minutes or less.) The odds are that none of your site visitors will be affected – and, if they are, the site will be working by the time they hit ‘refresh’.
In some cases, though – busy e-commerce shops, online services providers – every minute of downtime costs money. If that’s you, it could be worth paying for uptime monitoring. You’ll get notified as soon as your site becomes unavailable, which means you can contact your host if the outage persists.
Performance monitoring is similar, but works a little differently. Rather than checking uptime, your website’s Core Web Vitals (indicators of loading speed) are measured on a regular basis. If they change significantly or dip below benchmarks, your host will suggest changes you can make to either your hosting or your web pages.
Investing in performance monitoring a good idea if, for example, your web pages need to load very quickly – think live auction sites, for example, or video hosting sites.
On average, uptime and performance monitoring costs $10 per month.
Example: Small Service Business Site
Let’s look at an example. Sparkline is a Gold Coast-based electrical business with 12 employees and around $2 million in annual revenue. Its website has 10 pages, including 2 legal policies.
- Home
- About
- Services
- Lights and GPOs
- Switchboard Upgrades
- EV Charger Installations
- Work
- Contact
- Privacy
- Terms of Use
Hosting costs Sparkline $39.95 per month. (It uses an Australian host for faster site speed and better data security.) Its domain name clocks in at $99 a year. DNS hosting, which it needs to connect its domain with its site, is $150 a year.
To keep its website copy up to date, it also reviews the Home, Work and service pages quarterly, then checks the About page, Contact page, and legal policies annually. Each check (and subsequent changes) averages out at around 15 minutes per page, with an estimated cost of $220 per hour.
Finally, it pays $99 a year for its WordPress form plugin.
Let’s run those numbers.
(39.95 * 12) + 99 + 150 + ((6 * (0.25 * 220)) * 4) + (4 * (0.25 * 220) + 99 = $3,027.40
If Sparkline follows budget best practices, it will set around 15% of its annual revenue as its marketing and business development budget. That comes to around $300,000 a year, which means the cost of maintaining its website is roughly 1% of total budget.
Next Steps
So, you now know how to calculate your website’s annual maintenance costs. Your copy/content hygiene will be the biggest contributor, but high monthly costs for plugins can also add up.
If those costs exceed more than 5% of your annual marketing budget, talk to your marketing team about reviewing them. Keeping your digital home running smoothly matters – but so does having enough funds to actively grow your business.
