An author website costs just under £95 a year to run yourself at the cheap end and just under £300 at the expensive end. Done for you here it is £199 to build and £15 a month. None of those are platform fees on their own. Each is a platform, plus a domain, plus a business email address, which is the bill that actually turns up.
Last reviewed by Robert Prime — August 2026.
A working author website has three recurring lines: the platform or the hosting, the domain, and a business email address on that domain. Which of the three were free when you signed up decides nearly everything that happens afterwards.
We sell an author website service at £199 plus £15 a month, so we have an obvious interest in your conclusion. Our row is in the table below on the same basis as everything else, and it does not win.
How much does an author website cost in the UK?
The distance between the two ends is not design. It is two lines nobody picks deliberately: whether your host throws in mailboxes, and whether year one was discounted. Self-hosted WordPress on a UK host is £93.59 a year all in, mailboxes included and the domain bought flat. Squarespace Core in year two is £298.55: £204 for the subscription, plus a domain and a Google Workspace mailbox that were both free the first time round. Same job, three times the money.
Below are three-year totals on annual billing wherever it is offered, every figure taken from the vendor’s own page on 3 and 4 August 2026. Every row carries one .co.uk at £9.59 a year, which is Krystal’s flat rate with VAT added, free in year one where the vendor includes it. Every row carries a business email address at £84.96 a year unless the second column says otherwise. Carrd sells in US dollars, so its row is converted at 0.7437 to the dollar, the rate on 4 August, and rounded. Mailing lists are priced further down and are in none of these totals.
Totals are to the nearest pound deliberately: Squarespace and WordPress.com do not say on their pricing pages whether VAT is in the number, and if it is not, those two rows rise by a fifth. Pence would be false comfort.
| Route | Business email | Year 1 | Year 2 on | 3-year total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted WordPress, Krystal Amethyst + .co.uk | Mailboxes bundled, £0 | £94 | £94 | £281 |
| Carrd Pro Standard + .co.uk | Not included, add £84.96/yr | £109 | £109 | £326 |
| WordPress.com Personal + .co.uk | £84.96/yr | £121 | £155 | £430 |
| Squarespace Basic + .co.uk | £84.96/yr | £229 | £239 | £706 |
| Squarespace Core + .co.uk | Free year one, then £84.96 | £204 | £299 | £801 |
| publishing.co.uk Author, £199 + £15/mo, + .co.uk | £84.96/yr | £474 | £275 | £1,023 |
| BookWebs basic build + support, + .co.uk | £84.96/yr | £845 | £245 | £1,334 |
| Rachel Griffiths Design, The Full Picture, + .co.uk | £84.96/yr | from £1,495 | not published | not published |
Those totals compare cost, not scope. The bottom three rows buy a site designed and built by somebody else; The Full Picture is up to six core pages over six to eight weeks. The top three buy a subscription and your own evenings.
Take the business email out and every row except Krystal’s falls by £84.96 a year, since Krystal is the only one that bundles mailboxes. Carrd plus a .co.uk then comes to £23.72 a year, or £71 over three years: a real number, with no address you can write to a bookshop from.
The rows with a free first-year domain assume you move it to a flat-rate registrar when that year ends. Leave it where it is and Squarespace’s help centre is clear about what follows: “After the first year of domain service, your domain will renew at the annual TLD price.”
Squarespace Core is the row that catches people. Year one is £204 because the domain and one Google Workspace mailbox are both included; year two is £298.55 because neither is, a 46% rise for a website that has not changed. Krystal’s £84 sits still by comparison, although paying it monthly instead of annually costs £100.80 for the identical plan.
The two designer rows sit on each firm’s own published terms. BookWebs publishes a £750 basic build and says hosting and support renewals start at £150 a year from year two; Rachel Griffiths Design publishes from-prices with 30 days of post-launch support and no ongoing figure at all, so year two is left blank instead of guessed.
Wix is not in the table. Its pricing page served us US dollars under the line “Prices and currency vary by location. USD prices displayed for reference only,” and adds that “Prices do not include applicable taxes”. That does not belong in a sterling total.
Every total assumes today’s list prices hold for thirty-six months, which is an assumption and not a forecast. None include a premium theme, a stock photo licence, or the afternoon you lose making the header image stop stretching on a phone.
Where the money goes
The platform or the hosting
The line everyone quotes, and on most routes the biggest one. Squarespace, Wix and Carrd fold hosting into the subscription; self-hosted WordPress separates them, and only the software is free.
The domain
Free for a year on most builder plans, then it renews at the standard rate. The offers are real but narrow: Wix’s own FAQ says its voucher “is only valid with a purchase of a new domain from Wix and cannot be used to renew or extend a domain you already own.”
The business email address
hello@yourname.co.uk instead of yourname.author@gmail.com. Not strictly required. If you are going to approach bookshops, festivals, reviewers or a publisher, £84.96 a year is worth it. On the Carrd route that single line costs three and a half times the platform and the domain put together.
The mailing list, which is not a website cost but arrives with one
None of the totals above include it, and most authors reading this will never pay for it. Kit’s free Newsletter plan runs to 10,000 subscribers: its own pricing page says the plan “is always available for you for up to 10,000 subscribers—for free”, with Kit branding on the emails, one automation and no third-party integrations. Mailchimp’s UK page with GBP selected shows a free plan under 250 contacts and Essentials at £9.75 a month for the first twelve months at up to 500 contacts. MailerLite’s free tier stops at 250 subscribers.
So a list of 800 costs nothing on Kit and puts you on a paid plan at Mailchimp, which is a bigger three-year swing than the gap between most of the website routes above.
And the one you cannot invoice: your time
A first author site (copy, cover images sized properly, buy links that work, nothing broken on a phone) takes a weekend if you are comfortable with this sort of thing and considerably longer if you are not. Price your own hours before you decide anything, then read where the website sits in a full self-publishing budget and what formatting the book itself costs.
Platform prices, plan by plan
If you have not chosen a platform yet, our author website essentials guide compares Carrd, WordPress and Shopify on what they can do. This page is only about what each one costs.
| Platform | Cheapest plan that connects your own domain | Price | Billing |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress.com | Personal | £3/month first year, then £5 | billed annually; £8 month-to-month |
| WordPress.com | Premium | £7/month first year, then £12 | billed annually; £17 month-to-month |
| Squarespace | Basic | £12/month | billed annually; £16 month-to-month |
| Squarespace | Core | £17/month | billed annually; £24 month-to-month |
| Carrd | Pro Standard | $19/year (USD) | annual only |
| Krystal (UK), self-hosted WordPress | Amethyst | £7/month ex VAT, £8.40 inc | £70 ex VAT, £84 inc, billed annually |
Only two of those pages say where VAT sits: Krystal’s toggle turns £7 a month into £8.40, and Carrd prices in dollars with no UK figure. Squarespace and WordPress.com say nothing either way, so their numbers are carried here as printed and the checkout is where you find out.
Carrd’s cheaper Pro Lite tier at $9 a year does not support custom domains, so Pro Standard is the entry point if you want yourname.co.uk on it.
Squarespace’s headline prices are the annual ones and the toggle defaults to annual, which is easy to miss. Month-to-month is a third more on Basic, £12 becoming £16, and 41% more on Core, £17 to £24. Two tiers sit above Core, Plus at £29 a month and Advanced at £79; an author site needs neither.
WordPress.com Personal is the cheapest route onto your own domain in that table, and the price you sign up at is not the price you keep: £3 a month for the first twelve months, £5 after it, both on annual billing. Personal also allows third-party plugins now. Their support documentation states that plugin installation “is available on all WordPress.com paid plans: Personal, Premium, Business, and Commerce plans.” This was Business-tier only, and a good deal of advice still online says so.
What a .co.uk costs, and what it renews at
Roughly £10 to £16 a year, and the figure that matters is the renewal, not the first-year offer.
Krystal publishes a flat rate with no teaser: £7.99 a year for a .co.uk and £11.99 for a .com, both before VAT, which is £9.59 and £14.39 once VAT goes on. Same price in year one, year two and year ten. Cloudflare Registrar is worth knowing about if you want the floor: its product page says Cloudflare “does not mark up domain prices at all”, charging only “the price charged by registries and ICANN”. They do not sell you hosting, which is either the point or the problem depending on how you feel about assembling things yourself.
The teaser offers are where the number moves. 123-reg advertises .co.uk at £3.99 for the first year and .com at £0.01. No renewal price appears on the page carrying the offer. Run a domain search on their own site and the small print reads: “Renewal rates apply after the first year. Regular price for all customers at £12.99 (+VAT).” With VAT that is £15.59, some 63% more per year than Krystal’s flat £9.59, on a domain sold to you at £3.99. The .com results carry a struck-through regular price of £18.99.
For the totals above, £9.59 a year is the domain line on every row. A .com at the same registrar costs £4.80 a year more.
Business email, and the free-year traps
| Option | Price | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace Business Starter | £5.90/user/month ex VAT, £7.08 inc | £84.96 |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic | £5.40/user/month paid yearly, ex VAT, £6.48 inc | £77.76 |
| Mailboxes bundled with UK hosting (e.g. Krystal) | Included | £0 |
Both of those are quoted before VAT, and both companies say so in their own documentation. Microsoft states it on the comparison page itself: the price “does not include VAT”. Google’s pricing page says nothing about tax, but Google’s own Workspace billing help does: “Service prices shown on the Google website do not include VAT.” That is why £5.90 a month is £84.96 a year here, and why business email is the second-largest line on most of these routes.
Google’s UK page was showing £2.95 a user a month on 4 August 2026, flagged as 50% off and limited in the small print to new customers and twelve months. The £5.90 is the number to plan around.
The cheapest business email is usually the one you already have. Krystal’s shared WordPress plans include unlimited mailboxes at every tier, entry plan included, which is why the floor row in the table carries no email line at all.
One free-year trap is worth knowing about. Squarespace includes a free first year of Google Workspace, but their help centre restricts it to “the Core, Plus, Advanced, Business, Commerce Basic, or Commerce Advanced plans” and one “new user (email address) per website”, and says the account “renews at the standard rate” afterwards. On Basic at £12 a month you pay for email from day one.
What UK author-website designers charge
Most do not publish prices at all. Two UK designers who work specifically with authors do, and both sets of figures below come from their own pricing pages.
BookWebs lists a basic WordPress author website at £750; with an integrated blog £850; with mailing list setup £1,000; with a giveaway feature £1,200+. Making the site self-editable is £95 extra. From year two, hosting and support renewals “start at £150 per year”, domain renewal is “typically costing £20–£30 per year”, content updates run around £60 a year, and premium plugins start at about £15 a year each.
Rachel Griffiths Design publishes The Foundation from £800, one page plus a contact form, two to four weeks; and The Full Picture from £1,400, up to six core pages with optional blog, newsletter integration and basic SEO, six to eight weeks. Both include 30 days of post-launch support. The page is careful to say these are “starting points, not fixed prices”, so treat them as a floor.
Two price lists are not a market, and both figures are open-ended at the top. What they show is the shape of the thing: a build fee is one-off, but £150 a year for hosting and support, plus the domain, plus content updates, is a recurring cost that looks a great deal like the platform subscriptions above.
How much does a done-for-you author website cost?
Ours is £199 to build and £15 a month to keep it live and supported, and those are the only two website numbers we publish. That buys a full designed site (home, books, about, contact), up to 15 books with covers and buy links, your own web address connected, the simple editor so you can keep it fresh yourself, and one revision round before it goes live. One revision round means one, which is worth knowing before you buy. There is a second tier, Author Pro, for larger catalogues, quoted on the size of the catalogue.
The domain is not in the £15. Our author website service page says your web address is “always registered to you, never to us”, and registered to you means bought by you: budget £9.59 a year for a .co.uk on top, the same as every other row. Mailboxes are not in the £15 either, so the £84.96 email line sits on our row exactly as it sits on Squarespace’s.
Both our prices include VAT. Our terms state that all prices are displayed in GBP and include VAT where applicable, so £199 and £15 are what leaves your account. Several lines in the tables above are quoted before VAT.
The arithmetic, on the same basis as everything else:
- Year one: £199 + (£15 × 12) + £9.59 domain + £84.96 email = £473.55
- Every year after: £180 + £9.59 + £84.96 = £274.55
- Three years: £1,022.65
Set against the table at the top, £1,022.65 sits above Squarespace Core’s £801.10, which is roughly 28% more. Strip the business email out of both and it is still 22% more. It is 3.6 times what self-hosted WordPress on a UK host costs. It comes in £311 below BookWebs over the same three years, and The Full Picture starts at a price that costs more in year one alone (£1,494.55) than our three years together.
The gap against Squarespace Core is £221.55 over three years, or £6.15 a month. Whether that is worth paying is the next section.
When DIY is the right call
If you have one book and no series, a single page with your cover, a hundred words about you, buy links and an email signup is a perfectly good author website. Carrd Pro Standard does that for $19 a year; add a .co.uk and you are at £23.72, and it will not embarrass you. If you enjoy this sort of thing, self-hosted WordPress on a UK host at £93.59 a year gives you more control than any builder, with mailboxes thrown in. And if you already have a domain and hosting from something else, adding an author site to it is close to free, so do not buy a second one.
If you are pre-launch and money is tight and the choice is between a website and a professional cover, buy the cover, every time; the same order of priority applies to the inside of the book. A free WordPress.com or Carrd page with your name on it beats no page at all, and you can upgrade the day the book earns it.
The case for paying someone is narrower than we would like it to be. You have tried it and abandoned it; or you have enough books that the structure genuinely matters; or, honestly, if you do not delegate it, it will not exist in six months.
So who should pay it? If you have one book, no blog and a free weekend, £6.15 a month to skip a weekend’s work is a poor trade. Build it. If you have three or four titles, a series that needs structuring, and a site that has been nearly finished since last spring, it is the cheapest line in your launch budget and you should have delegated it a year ago.
What to check before you pay anyone
Whose account is the domain in? Register it yourself, in your name, and point it at whoever builds the site. If the builder registers it and the relationship ends, getting it back is a conversation you do not want to have.
Can the site be moved? Wix’s own help centre is blunt: “Since Wix is a SaaS solution, your site must run on Wix’s servers,” and the architecture “does not support external hosting”. Plenty of authors are happy on Wix anyway. Just know it before you put three years of content there.
What is the renewal, not the offer? Free domain year one, free email year one, discounted first term. Write down what year two costs before you sign anything.
Is the editor real? “You can update it yourself” means different things. Ask to see the screen you would use to add a book. If adding a title means emailing someone, price it as a support relationship.
Is VAT in the number? UK hosts and Microsoft quote before VAT by default. Krystal’s own pricing toggle turns £7 a month into £8.40 the moment you tick “include VAT”. Twenty per cent on every line adds up.
Related guides
- Author website essentials: what to build, what to skip
- What book formatting costs in the UK
- Self-publishing costs in the UK
- Selling direct from your website
- Amazon Author Central UK: setup guide
If you would rather have the site handled than researched, our author website service is the £199 build and £15 a month described above.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an author website cost per month in the UK?
Between about £8 and £25 a month if you run it yourself. Self-hosted WordPress on a UK host works out at £7.80 a month with the domain and mailboxes included; Squarespace Core from year two, with a domain and a business email address, is £24.88. Done for you here is £15 a month after the £199 build, with no separate platform subscription on top.
What is the cheapest way to get an author website?
A Carrd Pro Standard page on your own .co.uk: $19 a year for the platform and £9.59 for the domain, so £23.72 a year. That figure carries no business email address; add one and it becomes £108.68, which is why the cheapest fully comparable route here is self-hosted WordPress on a UK host at £93.59 with mailboxes included. Free tiers cost nothing at all but keep you on the builder’s subdomain.
Do I need a business email address, or can I use Gmail?
You can use Gmail, and plenty of published authors do. A domain address costs £84.96 a year through Google Workspace or £77.76 through Microsoft 365 Business Basic, and what it mainly buys is credibility with people you approach cold. UK hosts tend to bundle mailboxes with the hosting, so if you self-host the line disappears.
Can I move my author website to a different platform later?
WordPress yes, Wix no. Wix’s help centre states that a Wix site “must run on Wix’s servers” and that its architecture “does not support external hosting”. WordPress exports its content and moves, whether you are on WordPress.com or self-hosted. Your domain is portable whatever you build on, provided it is registered in your own name and not your builder’s.
Should my author website be a .co.uk or a .com?
Either works, and .co.uk costs less: £9.59 a year against £14.39 at Krystal’s flat rates. If you write for a UK readership and the .com has gone, no reader thinks less of a .co.uk. If you sell on Amazon.com too, the .com reads better to an American buyer. Buying both and pointing one at the other costs about £24 a year.
Can I build an author website for free?
Yes, but not on your own domain name. Wix, Squarespace, WordPress.com and Carrd all have free tiers that put your site on their subdomain. Connecting yourname.co.uk needs a paid plan on every one of them, and on Carrd it needs the $19 tier, not the $9 one. A builder’s subdomain is a fair holding position before launch and a weak one afterwards.
