The hidden costs of web design, and how to spot them

Most of these charges aren't scams. A website genuinely has running costs, and someone has to pay for them. The problem isn't that the costs exist. The problem is when they're left out of the conversation until after you've signed, so the number you compared against other quotes was never the real number.

A good designer names the full picture up front, even the awkward parts. A weak one quotes low to win the job, then lets the extras drift in later. So the useful skill isn't memorising every possible fee. It's knowing which questions to ask so nothing can hide.

Your domain name (the yourbusiness.co.uk part) is a real yearly cost, usually around £10 to £20. Fair. An SSL certificate, the padlock that makes your site secure, is often free these days through the hosting, so being charged a separate yearly fee for basic SSL is worth questioning. Hosting, the service that keeps your site online, is also a genuine cost, commonly a few pounds to a couple of tens of pounds a month depending on the setup.

None of these should be a surprise. The red flag isn't being charged for them, it's being charged without being told, or being locked into hosting you can't leave. Ask two things: what are the yearly and monthly running costs after launch, and do I own the domain in my own name? If the domain is registered to the designer rather than to you, you can be held hostage later. That one matters more than the money.

Here's where quotes quietly diverge. Many designers price the build assuming you hand over finished text and photos. If you don't have them, and most small businesses don't, then copywriting and images become an extra. That's a fair charge for real work, but only if you knew it was coming. Ask directly: does this price include writing the words, and does it include images, or am I supplying both?

Stock photos are a smaller version of the same thing. A licensed image might be a few pounds to a few tens of pounds each. Fair enough, but you should know whether they're included or billed on top. Revisions are the sharpest one. Some contracts include unlimited tweaks until you're happy. Others include two rounds, then charge per change after that. Neither is wrong, but you need to know which you're getting, because a fixed price with two revisions can climb fast if your idea of finished and theirs don't match.

Ongoing maintenance is the cost people forget entirely. Software needs updating, security needs watching, and small changes need making. Someone does that work, or nobody does and your site slowly rots. A monthly maintenance fee is fair. Being sold a build with no plan for upkeep, then charged by the hour every time you need a phone number changed, is the expensive version.

If you sell online, watch for transaction fees. The card processor (Stripe, PayPal and the like) takes a small cut, typically under 2 percent plus a few pence per sale, and that's normal and unavoidable. What's not normal is your website platform taking an extra cut on top of that just for using their checkout. That's a red flag worth naming out loud before you build a shop. Then there's SEO. Some SEO work is real and valuable. But a vague monthly SEO retainer with no defined deliverables, sold as essential the moment your site goes live, is the classic upsell. Ask exactly what you get for the money each month. If the answer is fog, keep your hand on your wallet. We wrote more about these quiet charges in what your website builder doesn't tell you.

You don't need to be technical to protect yourself. You need one email. Before you agree to anything, ask the designer to confirm, in writing: the total to launch, every running cost after launch and how often it's charged, whether content and images are included, how many revisions you get, who owns the domain and the finished site, and what happens if you want to leave. Any honest professional will answer this happily. If the reply is vague or defensive, that tells you what you needed to know.

The reason bundled pricing has become popular is that it removes almost all of this guesswork. When hosting, security, updates, small content changes and support all sit inside one predictable monthly figure, there's nothing left to surprise you. That's the thinking behind our own pay monthly website approach and how our pricing is laid out: no setup fee, one monthly fee, and the running costs already inside it rather than arriving later as separate bills.

If you take one thing from this, take the email. Getting the full cost in writing costs you nothing and saves you the nasty surprises almost everyone else runs into. A paid website isn't right for every business, and monthly billing isn't right for everyone either. If you'd rather own a site outright and never see a recurring charge, that's a perfectly sensible choice, and a decent designer will tell you so.

If you want to see exactly what you'd be getting before any money changes hands, we'll rebuild your current homepage as a real, working prototype and send you a link within three working days. No card, no commitment. You try it on your phone, compare it to what you have now, and only go ahead if it genuinely looks like a better deal than the one you're on. If it doesn't, keep the screenshot and owe us nothing.