The Hidden and Recurring Costs of Building a Website

January 20, 2023

As I have been talking to people and planning our Better Than DIY Website program, I realized I have been living in website world for a very long time. 

When you do something for 20 years, you forget it can be complicated or foreign to somebody else. 

There isn’t a McDonald’s recipe for starting a web design company. 

It can be tough to compare apples to apples because no two web design companies operate the same. They may have similarities, but how they package their services and promote them differs. 

Some web providers put additional costs in a package and just charge you a monthly lump sum. It’s hard to know what is all covered by your monthly payment, it just falls under the category of “WEBSITE”. You might think it’s for them to update your site. And it might be! But it also probably includes things like the cost of your domain name, hosting, or other hidden costs. 

Take Weebly, Wix, Squarespace and WordPress for example…

If you look at the way Weebly and Wix, Squarespace and WordPress talk about these things, it’s different across the board. I can read it and say, “hmm, that’s basically the same thing.” But not everybody could do that because they’re not like living in a 20-year vortex of web design with me. 

Since you’re not in the vortex, let’s talk about those hidden and recurring things to look for when evaluating the way you build your website. You want to be able to budget, right? You don’t want to get hit with a charge you know nothing about or aren’t expecting. 

Sidebar – I have a podcast episode about What’s Not Included in Your Web Design. If you’re deep in the trenches evaluating a company that’s going to develop your website for you, then you might pop over there and listen to that episode. Afterward, you’ll be prepared to ask great questions when interviewing people and ensure you understand what you’re getting out of your website design. 

Back to our main topic…

With hidden costs, we’re going to start at the beginning of your website process and work our way through. 

1. Hosting

Your hosting provider is where your website lives. Hosting packages can start at $4 a month and can be up to hundreds of dollars a month. You probably want to live somewhere in the middle. For example, MayeCreate’s hosting packages are around $25 a month.

There are cheap hosting packages, but you’ve heard the saying, “you get what you pay for.” And when it comes to hosting providers you can take that analogy to the bank. 

A lot of services, like Weebly or Wix or Squarespace, have hosting rolled into their monthly cost. You’re not just paying for the platform but also for hosting. I have no idea what kind of hosting you get with these services, I don’t use them. I do know some of their sites load really well and others don’t (if your site is mega slow check out our Fast Loading Website Formula post).

Hosting providers are different. 

They have different strengths and different price points. Make sure you’re getting a hosting service that is right for your website. If it’s a really big website and you get tons of traffic, you’ll pay more for it every month, probably $100+. If it’s a small website, and you barely need anything up there, you should pay less, somewhere closer to $15 – $30. 

Regardless of your choice of hosting company, it’s something you will pay on a recurring basis. And it’s not optional, you have to have it for people to be able to see your site.

2. Maintenance

When I say maintenance, I don’t mean switching out the staff members on your staff page. Whatever your website is built on, whether WordPress or any of the others, there is continued maintenance to the website’s core software. 

Some of these services have maintenance rolled into the website cost. With others, you need to pay for it monthly. At MayeCreate, this is another thing our clients can opt into. If they opt-in, we maintain the software of their site. 

Maintenance = Core Software + Addons

With maintenance, you have the core software updates and also plugin updates. You may also have major releases of different software on your website. 

If you’re a WordPress user, this is going to concern you more than if you’re on Squarespace, Weebly or Wix. When you’re on those systems the updates will probably roll out from the provider. With WordPress, because it’s an open-source system, you’re responsible for doing it yourself. 

Whether you end up paying for maintenance with your time or paying a company to do it for you, you can expect to do it every week at the minimum. 

At MayeCreate, we charge $300 a year for maintenance service if you’re hosted on our hosting platform. 

Other companies will include it in different types of maintenance, like a retainer plan. If you have a contract with them to update your website monthly, they might include this in that package. Be sure to ask.

‘Web Lingo’ questions to ask your web developer to learn more about maintenance services.

If your website is with a company that includes maintenance services, make sure you understand what they are covering. Ask them:

• What updates are they doing? 
• What can you expect out of the maintenance service? 
• Are they going to do the security updates? 
• Are they going to update your plugins? 
• Are they going to check to make sure that things didn’t break? 
• If they do break, what’s the plan to go back in and fix them?

You should be planning to spend either time or money to make sure your software is up to date, especially if you are running a WordPress site. If you’re not running a WordPress site and are on another system, you don’t have to worry about this quite as much. 

3. Domain Name

Your domain is what people type to find your website online, like mayecreate.com. 

Thankfully, domains aren’t super expensive.  You have to buy it from a registrar, who will charge you every year or every two years to maintain and host your domain. How weird is that? There’s website hosting, and then there’s domain hosting. They are different, despite sounding like the same thing. 

At MayeCreate, we charge our clients $25 a year to monitor and keep their domains up to date. If you go out and buy your domain from GoDaddy, you will pay anywhere from $10 to $20 a year once you’ve made your initial purchase. The initial purchase may be more expensive, depending on the domain name you choose. 

We use GoDaddy for all of our domains, but there are tons of other registrars out there. If you want more examples of registrars or need help choosing a domain name, you should listen to our episode How to Pick a Domain Name that Doesn’t Suck. 

Whichever route you choose, you’ll pay for domain hosting every year, somewhere between $10 and $30. 

4. Email 

If this is your first time building a website, and you didn’t have a domain name before you started this adventure, then you probably don’t have an email at your domain yet. So you don’t have monica@mayecreate.com. You probably just have monica@gmail.com, right? 

There are so many benefits to having an email at your company domain.

If your email is with your internet service provider, and you ever want to switch internet service providers, your email will go away. 

Having an email with your internet service provider locks you into that internet service provider. Nobody wants that. If you have one at your company name, then you just take it with you if you change providers. 

Having an email at your domain can cost money. 

At MayeCreate, we use and advise our clients to use Google Workspace to set up their emails. 

It’s not super expensive. It starts at $6 a month, I mean $6 a month for a professional-looking email is a pretty good deal. Every time somebody sees your email, they can find your website because it’s inside your email address. That’s a marketing win!

Some hosting companies also include email in your hosting package. 

But the service usually sucks. You’re better off using even the free Gmail and adjusting your DNS to allow you to send email with your domain…(how to do that is a bunny trail that will warrant  its own blog post in the future, stay tuned!) 

5. Plugin Renewals

I’m calling this plugin renewals because I work in WordPress, and that’s what they are called in WordPress. In other systems, like Squarespace or Wix, they may be called upgrades, apps, or add-ons. 

Plugins are like the apps on your phone.  Your phone does normal phone-like things (or if you were born in 1980 like me, phenomenal previously unimaginable phone things). When you want it to do more you install an app. Some apps are free, some are paid. It’s the same with your website.

We like using premium plugins because they often have more features and better support than the free ones. However, we still use many free plugins that are great and absolutely serve the purpose our clients need. 

With paid plugins, be aware that even if you paid for the plugin once, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to pay for it again. This will likely be a yearly cost, so you can continue enjoying the security features and updates. 

You want to continue paying for your plugins instead of installing them once and never paying again because you want the most recent version of the plugin running on your site. 

If you don’t have the most recent version, you are susceptible to hackers. 

Eventually, the plugins might just straight up break and not work anymore. The core of WordPress, the software itself, will continue evolving. The plugins you use have to evolve with it to keep working within the system. 

Back to the phone analogy, sometimes you have to update your phone apps when the overall software updates. Same thing with your website. Sometimes as your website core software evolves your plugins won’t work if you don’t keep them paid for and updated. 

There you have it. 

The big hidden and recurring costs of building a website. 

• Hosting
• Maintenance
• Domain Name
• Email
• Plugin Renewals

I empathize with you as you’re going through this decision-making process about building a website, who will build it and how it will get built. There are a lot of decisions to be made. 

It is difficult to compare apples to apples, which is why I’m giving you this information. With it, you can make great decisions and go into the process feeling informed and in control. The process doesn’t have to be a gigantic pain in your rear end. It can be totally manageable. You just have to know the ins and outs of it. 

If you are in the middle of your website planning journey,  you might also be interested in joining us for our upcoming Website Planning Workshops. 

Join me to learn how to plan a site that will grow your business without you learning to code. We’ll go through outlining the pages of your site and what they’ll do, deciding what to put on your site, learning shortcuts for creating your site content and deciding the best way to build your site. 

So please sign on up! I hope to see you at a workshop, and we can get this website all planned out. Then, you’ll be ready to roll with an awesome website that will help your business grow.