Learn · Pricing & costs
Beyond the build fee, budget for hosting, a domain renewal, SSL (usually free now), premium plugins or licenses, professional content and photography, ongoing maintenance and security updates, and future changes. These are easy to forget at quote time and add up across the first year.
The most commonly missed one is maintenance. Software needs updates, links break, and content goes stale. A site left untouched slowly degrades in security and search performance. Plan for either time or a support arrangement to keep it healthy.
The other quiet cost is change. Businesses evolve, and the site has to keep up. A build that's cheap because it's rigid can cost more later when every small edit needs a developer. Ask how updates work before you sign.
Updated July 2026
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Both. There's a one-time build cost and a smaller ongoing cost to keep the site live and healthy: hosting, domain renewal, maintenance, security updates, and content changes. Treating a website as a launch-and-forget purchase is the most common budgeting mistake.
Maintenance covers updates, security patches, backups, small content changes, and fixes. For a simple site it can be a few hundred dollars a year or handled in-house. For a larger or business-critical site, a support plan commonly runs a percentage of the build cost annually, since more moving parts need more attention.
A very cheap website often cuts the parts you can't see: security, performance, accessibility, mobile quality, and support. It may look fine on launch day and cost you later through slow pages, poor search rankings, security issues, or a rebuild when it can't grow with you.