Do you really need all these website subscriptions?

Add it up. Not the round number you keep in your head, the real one: the hosting, the domain, whatever "site protection" the host talks you into, the plugin licences that renew on four different dates, and the yearly bill for the page builder you cannot remove without the site falling apart.

Most people have never done that sum, and it is not carelessness. The money never arrives as one bill. It arrives as a renewal here, a licence there and a card payment you half remember agreeing to, spread across six or seven companies and a dozen dates.

Here is what each of those companies actually does, why you ended up with all of them, and which ones you can stop paying without touching your website at all.

The cast, and the job each one does

Nobody pays every line. Plenty of people pay five of them, and the total lands somewhere north of £400 a year for a small business website that gets a few hundred visitors a month. The prices above are list prices checked on 19 August 2026, in the currency each company charges in, and the sources are at the foot of this page.

Look at the middle of that table for a moment, though, because the money is not the interesting part.

Why you ended up with all of them

None of it was a mistake, and none of those companies is a swindle. Every line is the honest consequence of the line above it.

You chose a website that is really a program. That is what WordPress is: software that has to run somewhere, so you rent a machine to run it on. Programs sitting on public machines get attacked, genuinely and constantly, so you buy something to guard it. Guarded programs still break, so you buy backups. And a program that assembles every page from a database each time somebody knocks is slow, so you buy something to keep ready-made copies. The plugins that add forms and page layouts each want their own licence, because each is a small business too.

So the pile of invoices is not eight decisions. It is one decision, years ago, and seven consequences. That matters, because it tells you which ones you can cancel today and which need the first decision revisiting. The trade-offs behind that first decision are laid out in Squarespace vs WordPress in 2026 - an honest comparison for a small business.

The two you can fix this week

Neither of these touches your website. You can do them on a site you have no intention of moving.

Your web address. A registrar keeps your name in the official register, and that is genuinely all. The wholesale cost is a few pounds. Most retail registrars sell the first year for pennies and renew at a multiple of it, which is where the markup lives. Notice how hard that renewal price is to find: 123 Reg's own support pages tell you to log into your control panel to see what yours will be, which is not how a company behaves about a price it is proud of. Cloudflare Registrar sells and renews at cost: the registry's wholesale fee plus the mandatory ICANN fee, no margin, with the renewal the same price as the first year. It handles .uk, .co.uk, .org.uk and .me.uk as well as the usual international endings. Transferring takes about ten minutes, nothing about your live site changes, and .uk transfers do not add an extra year the way .com transfers do.

Your phone book. DNS at Cloudflare is free, on their network, with the security extensions switched on. If you are paying a separate line for "premium DNS", that is a line you can delete. The one condition attached to the registrar move is that your domain uses Cloudflare's nameservers, which is where you want the phone book anyway.

Together, those two are the cheapest tidy-up available to a small business, and they are worth doing whatever you decide about the rest.

The button that deletes your website (if you're not careful!)

There is a second reason to keep your address and your phone book somewhere plain, and it is not about money.

On 11 August 2026, a customer of ours connected his website correctly and then went into IONOS, where his domain lived, to sort out the version of his address without the www. He pressed the button whose label matched exactly what he wanted: Forward Domain. IONOS did the forwarding, and quietly deleted the record that was serving his live website. The site stayed up for a few more minutes on the internet's short memory, which is the only reason nobody noticed before we put it back.

He did nothing wrong. He pressed a sensibly named button in a control panel he visits twice a year, and it removed his website. That is the argument for keeping the whole of your domain in one legible place: you go there rarely, and the dangerous buttons should not be sitting next to the ones you want.

While you are in there, check the address is registered in your own name and not your web designer's. Keep your name and details the same everywhere covers why that matters more than anything else on this page.

What happens when the website stops being a program

The rest of the bill needs that first decision revisiting, and the change is one of kind rather than degree.

A bernard site is not a program. It is a set of plain files, built once and served as they are. There is no login page to break into, no plugin sitting three versions behind, no database to fall over under load. Which means the security subscription has nothing left to guard, the backup plugin has nothing left to rescue, and the caching plugin has nothing left to speed up. The category disappears rather than getting cheaper.

The jobs those plugins did still have to happen, and they come with the thing instead of being bought a licence at a time:

• Forms are built in. Contact forms, signup forms, a waiting list, and the entries land in your contacts rather than in your inbox only.
• Search settings are built in and go further than the plugin era did: page titles, sitemaps, structured data, and the newer work of being readable to the AI assistants people now ask instead of searching.
• Backups are replaced by version history. Every change is a revision you approve before it goes live and can undo afterwards. It is not a backup product, it is how editing works.
• Speed is not a product either. Plain files served from a fast network are quick because there is nothing to make them slow.
• A shop or a course can be added if you need them, as separate parts of the plan rather than a rented platform taking a slice of every sale.

Bernard's own number, for a fixed point of comparison: £200 a year, all in, with the move included and nothing added at the checkout, because he is not big enough to be charging VAT yet. Whether that beats what you pay now is arithmetic you can do from your own bank statement in about two minutes.

Before you cancel anything, find your email

This is the one that catches people, and it is worth reading twice.

Your website and your email are separate things that happen to share an address. Moving a website does not touch the records that carry your mail, and it should never need to. But for a great many small businesses the mailboxes are included with the hosting plan, on the same bill, from the same company. Cancel the hosting to save the money and the email goes with it, usually on a Friday.

So the order matters. Move the domain if you are moving it. Get the site moved and working. Send yourself a message and confirm it arrives. Only then cancel the old plan, and if the mailboxes are part of it, move them somewhere first.

To be plain about what we do and do not do: bernard never touches the records that carry your email, and bernard is not your email company either. Your address and your mailboxes stay in your name, with whoever you like.

The move itself is boring, which is the point

Connecting an address to a moved site is three records and a redirect. There is a stretch of about fifteen to thirty minutes where the internet catches up, and a normal wobble in the middle of it where your site can briefly look unavailable. Bernard checks the records himself, tells you what he sees, and never changes your live site without your approval. The care taken over keeping your search results intact through a move is a longer story, told in How to move your website without losing your Google rankings.

What you actually buy by consolidating

The money is the visible part, and for most small sites it is a few hundred pounds a year.

The part you notice later is accountability. When six companies each own a slice of your website, a bad morning becomes a relay race: the host says it is the plugin, the plugin says it is the theme, the registrar says the records look fine to them, and the person running between them is you. One bill means one renewal date, one place to complain and one company that cannot pass the parcel.

Whether that is worth changing anything for depends on how much your website earns you and how many of those companies you are currently refereeing. That judgement is yours, and Is it worth paying someone to manage your website? sets out the questions to ask anyone offering to take the job, Bernard included.

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Figure sources (checked 19 August 2026)

Prices are each company's own list price, taken from that company's own pricing page, in the currency it charges in, and are not converted. UK hosting and domain figures typically exclude VAT, which adds 20 per cent at the checkout for a customer who is not VAT-registered.

• Registrar renewals: deliberately not quoted as a figure. Retail registrars advertise a first-year offer and do not publish the renewal price beside it, and 123 Reg's own support page tells customers to check their control panel for theirs. The claim here is the structure, not a number.
• Cloudflare Registrar at-cost policy and supported .uk endings: Cloudflare's own registrar documentation and its low-cost domains page.
• Hosting renewal: the £13.99 a month renewal figure used in WordPress 2026 pricing, explained - free to start, then the price climbs, sourced there to UK host comparisons from March 2026. Hosting promotions change constantly, so treat this as an example rather than a quote.
• Wordfence Premium: $149 a year for one site, from Wordfence's own pricing page and its December 2024 price-change announcement.
• Sucuri: Basic platform plan $229 a year, from Sucuri's own website security platform page.
• UpdraftPlus: entry Personal plan $84 a year including UK VAT, from the vendor's own pricing page. The product now sells under the Team Updraft brand.
• WP Rocket: 49 euros a year for a single site, from WP Rocket's own pricing page. It charges in euros, not dollars.
• Yoast SEO Premium: £118.80 a year excluding VAT for one site, from Yoast's own product page.
• The IONOS incident: our own record of a customer's domain, 11 August 2026, written up internally the same day. One customer, one day, first hand.