Kidderminster and the wider Wyre Forest run on practical businesses. Manufacturers, trades, engineering, logistics, plus the tourism that comes with Bewdley, the Severn and the railway. Most of them need a website that does a specific job: get found, look credible, produce enquiries. Not a showpiece.
That is what I build and maintain. New sites hand-coded in PHP rather than assembled in a page builder; existing sites taken on and kept running, whatever they were built with.
What a website actually costs to run
This comes up more often here than anywhere else, usually because someone has inherited a site and cannot work out what they are paying for. The honest breakdown:
- Domain name. Ten to fifteen pounds a year for a .co.uk. If you are paying substantially more, you are paying someone to renew it for you.
- Hosting. A wide range, and mostly you get what you pay for. The cheapest shared hosting is cheap because your site sits on a very full server.
- SSL certificate. Should be free and automatic. If it is a line on your invoice, ask why.
- Plugin and theme licences. The one people forget. A page-builder licence, a forms plugin, a backup plugin, an SEO plugin. They add up, they renew annually, and they are the reason some sites quietly stop updating.
- Maintenance. Either a monthly fee, or an unpaid job that falls to whoever is least busy and therefore never happens.
The last two are where the money actually goes, and where most inherited sites are leaking. Worth totalling up what you are currently spending before commissioning anything new.
Rebuild, or keep going?
For most Kidderminster businesses the answer is keep going. A site that is a bit dated but loads quickly, works on a phone and gets enquiries is doing its job, and replacing it is a cost with no return attached.
A care plan keeps that site patched, backed up, monitored and fast for a fixed monthly fee. Page-builder sites included. New work does not use Elementor or Divi, but there is no sense throwing away a working site over how it was built.
When a rebuild genuinely is the right answer (usually because the site cannot be made to work properly on a phone, or the underlying build is beyond repair) the development page explains how a hand-coded replacement works.
If your customers are trade rather than public
A lot of businesses around Kidderminster sell B2B, where the website is not making the sale but is absolutely capable of losing it. The buyer checks you exist, checks you look like a going concern, and checks you can be contacted. Three unglamorous things matter: it loads fast, it works on a phone, and the contact form actually delivers.
That last one is worth testing today. A silently broken form is the single most expensive fault a site can have, and nobody finds it by looking at the site.
Nearby
Also covered: Stourport-on-Severn, Bewdley, Wolverley, Blakedown and the Wyre Forest villages. Elsewhere: Worcester, Malvern, and the Worcestershire overview covering Bromsgrove, Droitwich and Redditch.
Not sure what you are paying for or whether your site is worth keeping? Send over the details and you will get a plain answer, including if that answer is to leave it alone.