Before you decide to have a website for your business, the cost to maintain a website is one of the things you should consider. Maintaining a website is not an inexpensive venture. If you have a small business, you will need to budget for monthly or yearly hosting and domain name fees and the cost of any design work that needs to be done. There are many ways to cut your costs while still maintaining a professional-looking site.
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3 steps to reduce the cost to maintain a website
To bring some light on how much it costs to maintain a website, we will name and discuss three essential things in this blog post.
1. Web hosting
Many options are available, some of which may even be free depending on where your site lives. You can either host it yourself if you know how by purchasing web space and renting server time, or you can have it hosted through your website design company or by a hosting service they recommend. You can choose to host your website either monthly or yearly.
Monthly fees are generally lower than yearly fees, but you will be committing to continue hosting your site for that entire year. The average monthly hosting fees are usually around €20 per month but can vary depending on the company you choose for hosting services. Yearly hosting fees, however, are usually a little more expensive.
Still, if your business is not sure about having an online presence and wants to “test it out” or wants to make sure they can afford the website design before committing money for hosting fees, yearly fees might be a better option. Yearly fees will depend on how much storage space your website requires, and that would depend on the size of your site or how many pictures you have uploaded to it.
A good rule of thumb when choosing between monthly and yearly web hosting fees is, if you think that your site will be up and running for more than a few months, you should probably go with annual hosting. If your business is unsure if it wants to have an online presence or does not want to commit money until they are ready to launch their website design project, monthly options may be best because the payments are lower.
2. Domain name fees
Domain name fees are a fee that your website designer or hosting company will require you to pay. Your web design business may have an already selected domain name for your site. If so, they can transfer it free of charge as part of the package deal when designing and launching your new website. If not, don’t worry because there are many domain name companies online that will be happy to sell you a domain for between €10 and €20 per year.
When choosing your website, make sure the URL is straightforward to remember because when customers want to visit or revisit your site in the future, they may not remember complicated web addresses. There’s nothing worse than having them go through the trouble of having to look up your domain name when they could have found you much more accessible.
If customers cannot find your website easily, it will not help grow and maintain a solid customer base. Customers should be able to type in a few words or letters from their favorite product that you sell online into any search engine and then immediately see your company website come up on their screen. Domain name fees are paid either yearly or monthly, depending on the package deal you choose.
Usually, if you purchase a full year of hosting up front, then the cost of your domain comes with it free for one year. After that, you have the option to buy more years or not. You can choose to renew, but you are not required.
3. Content updates
Content updates are also important when considering the cost to maintain a website. Content updates will include things like uploading new images, changing the content on your site, etc. Content updates can be done by you or a member of your company if you have a website designer available for support who will train and help guide your employees through this process if it is something that they do not already know how to do.
Content updates are also going to be a one-time fee that is paid either monthly or yearly, depending on the hosting package deal you choose. Usually, if your business chooses to pay for some of it up front, then content updates will come free with your site design and web development services for usually at least six months after the initial launch date. After that time, you can choose to renew or not.
Examples of content updates include uploading new images, changing the product description on a specific page where your customers go for information about a particular item you offer online, adding more products and services if applicable, etc. Content upgrades will be vital because they will give you fresh material that shows up in search engine results and keeps your clients coming back to check out what’s new.
Conclusion
As you can see, when it comes to the cost to maintain a website, there are many different costs that come into play depending on what your business wants and needs. If a company only plans on doing a few updates over the course of a year, then monthly hosting with no domain name fee might be their best bet. However, if they have more content that they would like to upload and more products that they would like to add and services, then it might be best for them to choose yearly hosting with a domain name purchase included.
