Hosting

Every website needs to live somewhere. Hosting is the server that stores your website files and delivers them to anyone who visits. There are a few different tiers:

Shared hosting means your website shares server resources with hundreds of other websites. It's cheap — £3-10/month — but can be slow, especially during peak times. Slow sites rank lower on Google and convert fewer visitors into enquiries.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting gives your site dedicated resources on a shared machine. Faster and more reliable than shared hosting. Costs £15-40/month depending on the provider and spec.

Managed WordPress hosting from providers like WP Engine, Kinsta or Flywheel runs £25-60/month and includes automatic updates, backups and performance optimisation built in.

In a managed monthly website plan, hosting is included in the fee. You don't need to think about it, choose a provider, or manage it yourself.

Domain registration

Your domain name — yourbusiness.co.uk — costs roughly £10-15/year to register and renew. A .co.uk domain is around £8-10/year. A .com is closer to £12-15/year. This is a small cost but it's a real one, and it needs renewing annually or the domain expires and your site disappears.

In a managed plan, the domain is typically included and renewed automatically. You don't lose your site because you forgot to renew a domain.

SSL certificate

SSL is what makes your site show "https" instead of "http" and display the padlock in the browser bar. Google has used HTTPS as a ranking signal since 2014 — sites without it are flagged as "Not Secure" and rank lower.

Most hosting providers now include a free SSL certificate via Let's Encrypt, which auto-renews every 90 days. If your managed plan provider includes hosting, SSL is almost always included too.

Security and software updates

WordPress powers around 43% of all websites. It's also the most commonly attacked platform, not because it's insecure, but because it's everywhere. The attack surface comes from plugins and themes — third-party code that needs updating regularly as vulnerabilities are discovered and patched.

A typical WordPress site has 10-20 active plugins. Each one releases updates. An unmaintained site drifts further out of date with each passing month, increasing the risk of a security incident. A hacked site can be blacklisted by Google, which removes it from search results entirely.

Maintaining a WordPress site properly — updating core, plugins and themes, checking for conflicts after updates, restoring from backup if something breaks — takes 2-3 hours per month minimum. That's either your time or someone else's.

Security incidents are real: In 2024, over 4 million WordPress sites were compromised via outdated plugins. Recovery typically costs £150-500 and you lose Google rankings during the period your site is flagged.

Content updates

Your business changes. You add a new service. You change your phone number. You want to add a photo from a recent job. You increase your prices. Every one of these changes needs to be made on the website.

If you own the site outright and built it on WordPress, you can make these changes yourself — if you know how to use the CMS. If you don't, you call your developer. At £50-100/hour with a minimum charge, a two-minute change can cost £50.

In a managed monthly plan, content updates are included. You send a message, the change gets made, done.

SEO monitoring

A website that ranked well last month doesn't automatically rank well this month. Google updates its algorithm hundreds of times per year. Competitors add new pages, collect more reviews, and improve their sites. Your rankings can drift without any change on your part.

Monitoring ranking positions, checking Google Search Console for crawl errors or manual penalties, tracking which pages are getting traffic and which have dropped — this is ongoing work. A managed provider does it as part of the service. On your own, you either do it yourself (time) or pay an SEO consultant (money).

Google Business Profile management

Your Google Business Profile needs attention beyond the initial setup. Posts should go out regularly. Reviews need responses. Category selection needs reviewing as Google adds new options. When Google asks you to "confirm your business information", someone needs to do it — missing the prompt can lead to your listing being suspended.

This is 30-60 minutes of work per month that most business owners don't do because they don't know they need to. A managed provider handles it.

Technical support

Sometimes a form stops working. A page returns a 404 error. The site goes down for an hour. With a managed service, you report it and someone fixes it. Without one, you're googling the error message at 10pm hoping to find a StackOverflow answer.

The hidden costs of owning a site outright

The upfront-built website model looks cheaper on paper. Pay £1,500 once and you own it. But over three years:

The upfront build's real three-year cost: £1,500 + £720 + £36 + £300 + £750 = approximately £3,300. A managed monthly service at £99/month over the same period: £3,564. Similar total cost, but the managed service includes active maintenance, content updates and SEO monitoring that the upfront site doesn't.

For a trade business that wants the work to come in and not think about the website, managed monthly is almost always the right answer.