How much does a domain name cost in the UK?
A domain name for a UK business costs from £10 a year when we register it, whether it ends in .co.uk or .com. We bill it at cost and register it in your name. The domain is the smallest line in a website's running costs, and the one that causes the most trouble when nobody can say who holds it.
Picture a salon that wants a new website. The domain turns out to be registered to the freelancer who built the first site six years ago, under an email address that no longer answers. The new site can be finished and tested, and the salon still cannot point its own address at it until that person replies.
Whose name sits on the record matters more to us than what the domain costs. We register a client's domain in the client's name from the first day, and the content and the code are theirs from then on as well. If a former designer still holds yours, ask them to move it across now, while the two of you are on good terms.
Domain prices for a .co.uk or .com
The price on a registrar's front page is often for the first year only. Names.co.uk, for one, gives new customers a .co.uk free for a year and charges for each year after that. A free first year is a fair offer, as long as you know the renewal price before you sign up, because the renewal is what you pay for every year the business trades.
For a business that trades in the UK we would pick the .co.uk when it is free, and buy the .com as well if it costs little, so a competitor cannot take it. Only one of them needs to carry the website. The other forwards to it and costs its yearly fee and nothing more. We would stop at those two, since a .net or a .online version of the same name adds another renewal for an address your customers will not type.
Set the renewal to happen on its own, on a card that will still be valid next year. A domain that lapses takes the website and the email down on the same day, and a customer who tries either one may conclude the business has closed.
Email at your own address
A domain also gives you an address such as bookings@yourbusiness.co.uk, and the mailbox behind it is billed separately, per person, by whoever runs it. Google's UK price list showed its cheapest business plan, Business Starter, at £5.90 per user a month when we checked, as a first-year price for new customers, with Google's standard price after that. For a team of three, that adds up to more each year than the domain.
We would rather an owner started with one address, read by whoever answers the phone, and added mailboxes once there are people to read them. A plumber working alone needs one inbox. A salon with four stylists may want four, and that is a decision for the day the fourth one starts.
The padlock should be free
The padlock in the browser's address bar should cost you nothing. It comes from a security certificate, and Let's Encrypt, a non-profit, issues those free to more than 700 million websites. A host that charges a yearly fee for the certificate on a small business site is charging for something you can have without paying, so ask about it before you sign.
Add the domain to hosting at £10 a month and you know what a small site costs to keep online before anything is built. The build is a separate figure, and our guide to what a small business website costs in the UK sets it out next to these. If you are not sure whose name your domain is in, send us the address and we will tell you where it is registered and how to bring it into yours.
Written by Maksym Gavrylenko · Published