Do I Need a Website? What It Actually Cost Me to Get Online

Somebody has told you that you need a website. Maybe a work coach, maybe a relative who means well, maybe just the feeling that real businesses have one and you don’t.

And the next thought is the one that keeps you awake: how much is this going to cost me?

Here’s the honest answer — including whether you need one at all.

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Do you actually need one?

Let me take the pressure off first.

If you sell on a marketplace and that’s where your buyers already are, you may not need a website. The marketplace is doing the finding for you, and a separate site won’t bring people who were never looking.

You need one when somebody has to check you out before they trust you:

• you see people in person
• you take appointments
• someone is paying you for a service rather than a parcel

They’ll look you up first, and finding nothing is worse than finding something plain.

So the honest test isn’t whether your business is “real enough” yet. It’s this: does somebody have to decide to trust me before they buy? If not, save your money.

One related thing worth knowing: the official guidance for the self-employed interview lists “your business website” as one example of evidence of business activity. It’s an example, not a requirement — but if you have one, it’s worth bringing up.

What people will try to sell you

Almost every website company sells a subscription: a monthly fee for as long as you have the site. Stop paying and the site stops existing. When your income moves around, that’s a bill that arrives whether or not you had a good month.

And ask what a website costs and you’ll often hear a number in the thousands. Neither is a lie — agencies do charge that, builders do cost that monthly. They’re just not the only option, and nobody selling you one has a reason to mention the alternative.

What it actually cost me

	What I paid
Hosting (Cloudflare, free plan)	Free — not a trial, not a first-year discount
Domain name (the address people type in)	About £12 a year
Total	About £12 a year

A handful of companies host small sites free, because a few pages cost them almost nothing and they hope you’ll grow into a paying customer. For a site like mine, I never will.

Free hosting has limits. If you need card payments or a proper online shop, you’ll outgrow it — and that will cost money.

The one thing worth not cutting corners on

Buy the domain name yourself. Your own card, your own account, your own name on it.

If somebody else registers it for you — a friend who’s good with computers, a company building your site — then they own the address to your business. Not you. Getting it back can be slow, awkward or impossible, and you find out at the worst moment.

It takes five minutes. Everything else can be rebuilt. The address is yours or it isn’t.

Bookings without a monthly fee

If you take appointments, there are free booking tools that put a calendar on your site: someone picks a day and a time, it goes into your calendar, and they get a confirmation — no more negotiating by text at ten at night.

Add two short questions to the booking form: what they need, and roughly what they can spend. The time you’re protecting isn’t just the appointment. It’s the half hour with someone who was never going to book.

It’s a business cost — keep the receipt

A domain name is a cost of running your business, the same as your packaging or postage. If you’re self-employed and claiming, you already report what comes in and what goes out each month.

I’m not going to tell you what counts or how to put it in your report — I’m not qualified to, and it depends on your circumstances. HMRC’s guide to self-employed expenses and the Universal Credit guidance are linked below. What I will say: keep the receipt, every time, from the start, and if you’re not sure whether something belongs, ask in your journal rather than guessing.

What a website won’t do

A website won’t bring you customers on its own. Nobody searches for a business they’ve never heard of. It converts someone who already found you — from a marketplace, a leaflet, a recommendation — into someone who gets in touch.

It closes. It doesn’t find. It fixes being invisible when somebody goes looking for you, and that’s all it does. It happens to be enough to matter.

Two things I nearly got wrong

I nearly signed up to a website builder on a monthly fee. Not much a month — which is exactly the problem, because small amounts leaving your account are the ones you stop noticing. I happened to read what happens when you stop paying: the site goes with it.

And I nearly let somebody else register a domain for me, because they offered and I was relieved someone was helping.

Neither would have been a disaster. Both were avoidable. Ask whose name it’s going in. That isn’t being difficult. It’s your business.