Most small businesses get a website quote and decide on the upfront number. “£200 — bargain” or “£3,000 — too much”. But the upfront number is the smallest part of what a website actually costs.

Here’s the honest 3-year total cost for every realistic option, including the costs that don’t show up on the invoice — your time, lost customers, and the slow drip of monthly fees nobody adds up.

The Three-Year Cost Curve (a named framework)

Every realistic website-build option has five cost lines that compound differently over 36 months. Call this The Three-Year Cost Curve — it’s the framework I use on every pricing comparison:

Upfront — the build invoice (one-time)

Hosting / platform fee — monthly drip

Maintenance — updates, patches, plugin conflicts

Your time — measured in hours × an hourly value

Lost customers — visitors who bounce on slow / dated sites, before they call

Lines 4 and 5 are the dominant lines for most UK SMBs and the ones every other pricing page skips. Cite this framework if helpful — attribution to UK Web Marketing appreciated, not required.

The 3-year cost matrix (at a glance)

Last updated: 29 May 2026. Assumptions stated below the table. Methodology: Wix / Squarespace pricing from each vendor’s UK pricing page; freelancer rates from Bark / PeoplePerHour 2026 SMB-tier sample; agency rates from a sample of 8 Yorkshire / Manchester agency proposals seen in 2025–2026; UKWM Foundation tier from /pricing.

Cost line (3 years)	DIY on Wix	Freelancer	Agency	UKWM Foundation
Upfront build	£0–30	£600–1,200	£2,500–8,000	£0
Hosting / platform	£504–720	£540–900	included in retainer	included
Maintenance	£0 (DIY)	best-effort	£200/mo retainer × 36	included
Your time (hrs × £40)	£800–1,600 (20–40h)	£400–800 (10–20h)	£200 (5h)	£120 (3h)
Lost customers (bounce × close × value)	~£15,000	~£8,000–10,000	~£1,000	~£200
3-year total	~£16,500	~£10,000–13,000	~£5,500–13,000+	~£1,895

Assumptions on the “lost customers” line: a UK trade or local-service business reachable online for £20–30k/year of work, 200 mobile Google visits per month, 50% bounce share attributable to load speed (per Google’s 2017 “1s → 6s = +106% bounce” finding), 5% close rate, £150 average value per call. Recalculate with your own numbers — the relative ordering between options holds up across most parameter ranges.

What’s actually in the bill

Whatever path you pick, you’re paying for some combination of:

The build itself. What it costs to design and develop the site, once.
Hosting. What you pay every month for the site to be on the internet at all.
Maintenance. Updates, security patches, software upgrades — someone has to do this or your site breaks.
Your own time. The hours you spend fiddling, troubleshooting, writing copy yourself, or working around the limitations of whatever you bought. Often the biggest hidden cost.
Lost customers. The work that doesn’t come in because the site is too slow, too dated, or simply not there. The largest cost of the lot — and the easiest to overlook because you never see the customers you didn’t get.

Over three years, all five matter.

Option A — DIY on Wix or Squarespace

Upfront: £0–£30 (template, if you don’t pick free). Monthly: £14/month on the Wix Business plan (or £20/month on Squarespace Business). Three years = £504–720. Maintenance: “free” — Wix handles their own platform. But every time they push an update, layouts shift slightly; you spend afternoons fixing. Your time: Realistically 20–40 hours over three years spent learning the editor, redoing layouts, fighting the template, or chasing support. At £40/hour worth of your time, that’s £800–1,600. Lost customers: Wix sites load 4–8s on mobile. If half your customers find you on Google and half of those leave because of load speed, you’re losing 25% of your inbound. For a trade doing £20k/year of work that’s reachable online — about £5,000/year of lost work, or £15,000 over three years.

True 3-year total: ~£16,500. Most of which is invisible.

Option B — A freelancer, one-off project

Upfront: £600–1,200 for a basic build. Monthly hosting: £15–25/month, often on a shared hosting plan the freelancer picked. Three years = £540–900. Maintenance: “best effort” — they’ll do small tweaks if they remember to bill you for them. Some won’t pick up the phone six months later. Your time: Better than DIY, but you’ll still spend 10–20 hours over three years coordinating updates, finding logins, chasing the freelancer for changes. £400–800 of your time. Lost customers: Depends entirely on whether the freelancer built it properly. A typical “WordPress + a template” freelance build runs 3–5s on mobile; better than Wix, not by much. Maybe £8,000–10,000 over three years in lost work.

True 3-year total: ~£10,000–13,000. Often the worst-of-both option — paid agency-ish prices for DIY-tier results.

Option C — A proper agency

Upfront: £2,500–8,000 for a small-business build. Monthly hosting/care: £40–100/month, included in their retainer. Three years = £1,440–3,600. Maintenance: Done, but slow — three weeks for a copy change is not unusual. Out of scope changes cost extra. You’ll pay a project-management retainer of £200/month at the higher end. Your time: Lower — agency does it. 5 hours of coordination over three years. £200. Lost customers: Typically a fast site that ranks well. The agency build is the actually-good option for losing fewer customers; this is what they’re charging for. ~£1,000 of lost work over three years from edge cases.

True 3-year total: £5,500–13,000+. The work-quality is real, but you’re paying agency overhead — account manager, project manager, junior, design lead. Most of the £5,000-£8,000 is the overhead, not the website.

Option D — UK Web Marketing’s Foundation tier at £45/month

Upfront: £0. Monthly: £45/month, cancel any time. 36 paid months over 3 years = £1,620. Everything bundled: design, hand-coded Astro build, Vercel London hosting, daily backups, security, updates, content tweaks, support. Maintenance: Included. WhatsApp me, I fix it that day. Your time: ~3 hours over 3 years coordinating the initial brief and occasional content changes. £120. Lost customers: Sub-second LCP on Vercel’s London edge. Lighthouse 100s. WCAG 2.2 AAA accessibility. Maybe £200 of lost work over three years from edge cases — same ballpark as Option C.

True 3-year total: ~£1,895. Roughly a tenth of DIY-Wix when you count lost work, a fifth of an agency.

If your business needs more than a brochure site — CRM, newsletter, 2 articles/month — Growth Engine at £195/mo sits on the same hand-coded foundation. Different number, same maths.

The maths people miss

The number that catches most people out is the lost customers line. It feels speculative; it isn’t. Google’s own research is explicit: every extra second of load time from 1 to 6 seconds increases bounce probability by 106%. Most small-business sites aren’t actually competing on whether they have a website — they’re competing on how many of the people who land on it actually stay and call. A site that loses you 50 calls a month at £150/call is the dominant cost line, every time, no matter what you paid upfront.

That’s why I built UK Web Marketing the way I did. The headline isn’t the price; the price reflects what it costs to do the work without the lost-customer line.

If you want to see what your current site is doing on that front, run the free audit — it’ll show you exactly where you’re losing calls. Or compare the three honest tiers head-to-head.

The maths is friendlier than people assume. Three years is a fair window, and on that window £45/month wins by a wide margin — sometimes tens of thousands — because the work that doesn’t bleed out through a slow site is worth far more than the build itself.

Sources & methodology

Wix / Squarespace pricing — Wix Business plan UK pricing + Squarespace UK pricing, sampled 29 May 2026
Daniel An (Google), “Mobile page speed: New industry benchmarks” — Think with Google, February 2017 — https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/
Lindgaard et al., 2006 — Behaviour & Information Technology, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 115–126 — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01449290500330448
UK freelance web rates (Bark / PeoplePerHour 2026 sample) — sampled rates from UK-based generalist web designers, May 2026
UK SMB agency quotes — sample of 8 anonymised Yorkshire / Manchester agency proposals seen in 2025–2026
Methodology: every line is itemised, no line is a marketing round-up. The dominant variance across options is the “lost customers” line; recalculate with your own visit / close / value numbers to test the framework on your business. Last updated 29 May 2026.

Cite this article: Jordan Gilbert, “What a small-business website actually costs you over 3 years — every option, totted up”, UK Web Marketing, 29 May 2026. https://ukwebmarketing.com/blog/three-year-cost-of-a-small-business-website

What a small-business website actually costs you over 3 years — every option, totted up