Your website is finished and paid for. Then the bills start arriving, a renewal here and a subscription there, from different companies at different times of the year.

Any one of those bills is easy to miss. Together they are what your website actually costs, and not all of that cost arrives as a bill.

What every website needs

Your domain name. A domain is rented until a date rather than owned outright, and it has to be renewed to keep working. Whoever you pay for it is either your registrar or selling it on behalf of one, and the organization keeping the master list for that ending, .com or .org or whatever yours is, is the registry. Ask your registrar what happens once your name expires and how much warning you get, because the answer decides how long you have to put it right. This is the one bill that can take the name itself away from you, and who is listed as holding it is one of the five things unpicked in what you actually own when your website is finished.

Hosting. The monthly or annual cost of the computer your website runs on. The word covers a wide range of arrangements at a wide range of prices, and what comes with it varies as much as the price does. Read what your own plan actually covers rather than assuming backups and support are part of it. If the reason you are looking at hosting is that the website feels slow, is your hosting the problem has a free check that tells you whether the server is the cause.

A certificate, so your address begins with https. A certificate is issued by an organization that confirms you control the address before it issues one. This one is worth a closer look, because it does not have to cost anything. Let’s Encrypt is one of those organizations and its position is plain: “We do not charge a fee for our certificates.” Many hosts include one and renew it for you automatically.

If a certificate appears as a line on your bill, ask what the charge is for. A paid certificate can cover more than one address at once, or carry a warranty, or come with support if something goes wrong with it. A charge can equally cover a person installing it and fixing it when it breaks, which is genuine work. Those are two different purchases, and knowing which one you are making is the point of asking.

The bills that depend on how your website was built

The domain, the hosting and the certificate come with the territory. Paid software is different, because whether you have any depends on how your website was built and what has been added since.

Paid themes and plugins. A theme controls how your website looks. A plugin adds something it could not otherwise do, such as a booking form or an online shop. Many are free. Others are sold with a license renewed each year, and each product’s own terms decide what a lapsed one costs you. Ask whether the software stops working, stops being updated, or both. WordPress puts the reason updates matter plainly in its own documentation: “Older versions of WordPress are not maintained with security updates.” Its guidance on plugins is shorter and points the same way: “make sure your plugins are always updated.”

The price of a paid component is therefore only half the question. The other half is what your website loses once that component stops being updated.

Maintenance

Every bill above collects itself. An invoice turns up or a card gets charged, and the thing carries on working without anybody deciding anything. Maintenance may or may not be one of them. Where it is not, somebody has to decide it is happening.

Applying updates to the website and everything running on it, noticing when something breaks, and confirming the backups can actually be restored rather than simply taken. That is done by you, by somebody you pay, or by nobody.

If you are paying somebody, three things move what you pay. The first is whether you buy hours as you need them or a flat monthly amount, which is the difference between an unpredictable bill and a predictable one. The second is how much there is to look after, which depends on what your website is built from and how much of it needs watching. The third is what the price actually covers, and that is the one to pin down: updates alone, or updates plus backups, monitoring, restore testing and an agreed response time when something breaks. Two companies can both call it maintenance and mean either, so ask which yours covers rather than reading it off the invoice.

If you are doing it yourself, the cost is your hours, and the honest version of that question is how many hours a month you will actually give it once the website stops being new.

If the answer is nobody, that is not free either. It is a bet that nothing will go wrong while nobody is looking. When something does, you are buying somebody’s emergency time rather than their planned time, on a day you did not choose.

Changes to the website after it is live

Changes are the cost that does not look like a cost until the website is live. What they end up costing you was settled earlier, by how the website was built.

Websites are not finished the way a building is finished. Prices go up, a service gets added, a photograph goes out of date, a phone number changes. What each of those costs depends on the job itself and on how your website was built. If you can edit the text yourself, a new phone number takes a few minutes when you notice it. If every edit is a paid request, those same few minutes carry a price and a wait.

Neither arrangement is wrong, and which one suits you is worth settling while the website is being built rather than discovering afterwards. Not every change is worth making when you think of it, and when your website should be left alone covers the ones worth holding back.

Two steps that find what you are currently paying

The two steps below find the money already going out. Your own hours and the changes you will want later sit on top of whatever they turn up.

Ask whoever hosts your website for a list of everything they bill you, and everything they bill on your behalf. They know what renews and when, and asking is quicker than reconstructing it from statements.

Then look through a year of card and bank statements for anything web related that is not on their list. A domain bought separately, a plugin license, a stock photo subscription somebody set up once. A year catches anything billed annually, though not something bought for several years at a time, so treat what you find as an addition to their list rather than the end of the search.

If you would like us to go through what you are currently paying and tell you what each piece is for, e-mail sales@allydrez.com.