Companies rarely decide to run five websites across four vendors. It accumulates. A campaign site here, an acquired brand there, a regional site somebody’s agency built in 2019. Each decision was reasonable. The total is expensive in ways that never appear as a line item.
The costs you can see
Hosting on four accounts, none negotiated. Four retainers, each with a minimum. Licences bought per site instead of once. Individually modest. Together, usually more than a single arrangement covering all of them.
The costs you cannot
This is where the real money is.
- Waiting. A price change goes live on one site the same afternoon and on another three weeks later, because that vendor is busy. The cost is the three weeks, not the invoice.
- Coordinating. Somebody in marketing spends a day a week chasing four suppliers. That is a quarter of a salary spent on being a switchboard.
- Repetition. The same cookie banner, the same analytics fix, the same accessibility issue, solved four times by four teams who never talk.
- Risk. Nobody can tell you whether all five sites are patched, backed up or monitored. The honest answer is usually no.
Ask your team a simple question: are all our websites up to date? If nobody can answer without making three phone calls, that is the problem.
What changes with one team
Not magic, just arithmetic. One hosting arrangement. One set of standards. Fixes applied everywhere at once. One person accountable, and one report that says what is running, what changed and what needs attention.
The short version
Fragmentation rarely shows up as an invoice. It shows up as delay, duplicated work and risk nobody is tracking. Add those three up before you decide the current setup is cheap.