What website maintenance actually costs in the UK

For a small business website in the UK, keeping it alive costs somewhere between about £100 and £1,200 a year, and the gap between those two numbers is mostly about who does the work. At the bottom end you are paying for hosting and a domain and doing everything else yourself. At the top end somebody is being paid to look after it properly every month.

The reason this catches people out is that maintenance is almost never in the quote for the build. You agree a price for a website, you pay it, and then six weeks later the bills start arriving one at a time. Here is the whole list, with realistic UK numbers, so you can add it up before you commit rather than afterwards.

What is actually being maintained?

A website is not a document sitting on a shelf. It is software running on a computer somewhere, connected to the internet, being visited by strangers and scanned constantly by bots. Five things need attention.

• The server it lives on. It has to stay switched on, stay fast enough, and stay patched.
• The software the site is built with. If it is WordPress, that means the core software, the theme and every plugin, each on its own release schedule.
• The security certificate. The padlock in the address bar expires and has to be renewed, usually automatically.
• Backups. Taken regularly, stored somewhere other than the same server, and occasionally tested by actually restoring one.
• The things that quietly break. Contact forms that stop sending, images that vanish, a payment plugin that falls out with an update.

None of that is dramatic. It is closer to servicing a van than fixing one. Skipped for long enough, though, it turns into a bigger bill than the servicing would have been.

What does each part cost in the UK?

Rough market rates, and they move around, so treat these as a sanity check on a quote rather than gospel.

• Domain renewal. A .co.uk is usually £8 to £15 a year, a .com nearer £10 to £25. Watch for the cheap first year that renews at four times the price.
• Shared hosting. £3 to £15 a month for the sort of thing a small business site needs. The headline price is normally an introductory rate on a long prepayment.
• Managed WordPress hosting. £20 to £50 a month. You are paying for someone else to handle updates, caching and backups at the server level.
• SSL certificate. Should be nothing. Free certificates have been standard for years and any host still charging £60 a year for a basic one is charging you for weather.
• Business email. £4 to £12 per mailbox per month if you buy it separately from one of the big providers.
• Plugin and theme licences. The one people forget. A booking plugin, a forms plugin and a decent security plugin can easily be £150 to £400 a year between them.
• A maintenance retainer. £25 to £100 a month from a freelancer or small agency for updates, backups and a bit of support. Agency retainers with content changes included run higher.
• Fixing something that broke. £50 to £90 an hour is the usual UK range for a decent freelancer, with a minimum charge.

If hosting itself is the bit you are unsure about, we pulled it apart properly in website hosting explained without the jargon, including why the cheapest tier is almost always oversold.

A realistic year, added up three ways

The same five page site, maintained three different ways. No hidden assumptions beyond the ones stated.

Doing it yourself on shared hosting

Domain, budget shared hosting, a couple of paid plugins, no retainer. Call it £250 to £400 for the year in cash. The real cost is the hour or two a month you spend on updates and the afternoon you lose when something breaks the week before Christmas.

A freelancer on a small retainer

Managed hosting, plugin licences, a modest monthly retainer. Realistically £700 to £1,200 for the year. You get someone who knows the site, but usually not unlimited content changes, and their response time depends on how busy their month is.

Renting the whole thing

One monthly figure that covers the build, hosting, SSL, email and the maintenance, with nothing else to add up. Ours run from £49 a month for a one page site to £149 a month for ten pages, all excluding VAT, with the first three months paid up front and no setup fee.

One thing to watch across all three: the small renewals are the ones that catch people, because they arrive separately, months apart, on cards that expire. A domain lapsing is the worst of them. It is a few pounds, it is easy to miss, and getting a lapsed domain back is a great deal harder than keeping it. Whoever looks after your site, make sure the renewal notices go to an address somebody actually reads.

Which of the three is cheapest depends entirely on how long you keep the site and how much of the work you genuinely want to do yourself. That comparison is set out over five years in how much a small business website should cost in the UK.

Why is WordPress maintenance the expensive kind?

Because there are more moving parts, and they are made by different people who do not test against each other. A typical small business WordPress site is the core software, a commercial theme and somewhere between eight and twenty plugins, all updating on their own schedules.

Most months, nothing happens. Occasionally an update to one plugin falls out with another and the contact form stops sending, or the layout shifts on mobile, and nobody notices until an enquiry does not arrive. That is the real reason people pay retainers: not the updating, but the checking afterwards.

This is not an argument against WordPress. It is an argument for being honest about the running cost when you choose it, which we went through in the real cost of a free WordPress website.

How do you tell whether your site is being maintained at all?

Quite a lot of small businesses are paying something every month and have no idea what it buys. Five checks you can do yourself this afternoon, none of which need any technical knowledge.

1. Send yourself a test enquiry. Fill in your own contact form from your phone, with a real message, and see whether it arrives. Do this monthly. It is the single most valuable habit on this page.
2. Click the padlock in the address bar. Your browser will show you the certificate and its expiry date. If it has weeks left and renews automatically, fine. If it has already gone, that is urgent.
3. Search your own site. Type site: followed by your domain into Google and look at what comes back. Pages you do not recognise, in a language you do not speak, mean the site has been got at.
4. Ask when the last backup was taken and where it lives. A backup on the same server as the site is not really a backup. Ask whether anyone has ever restored one.
5. Look at the footer and the prices. If the copyright year is old and the prices are wrong, nothing is being maintained, whatever the invoice says.

What gets sold as maintenance but is not?

Maintenance packages often quietly include work that belongs in a different budget. That is not dishonest, but it makes comparing two quotes very hard, so separate them out on paper.

Search work is the usual one. Writing new pages, building links and chasing rankings is marketing, it is charged monthly, and it lands on the same invoice as the hosting. It may well be worth buying. It is not what keeps your site switched on, and you should be able to see the two figures separately.

The other is content work. Some retainers include a blog post a month, or a set number of hours for changes. Again, fine, but it is the part most likely to go unused. If you have not sent a change request in six months, you are paying for a service you are not taking, and it is worth saying so at renewal.

What happens if you just do not bother?

Usually nothing, for a while. Then one of four things, in rough order of how often we see them.

1. The contact form stops sending. The most common and the most expensive, because enquiries vanish silently. Send yourself a test enquiry once a month.
2. The certificate lapses. Browsers put a warning in front of your site and most visitors turn round.
3. An out of date plugin gets exploited. Sites get defaced or filled with spam pages that show up in search results under your name. Cleaning that up costs more than a year of maintenance.
4. The site gets slow. Nothing breaks, it just gets heavier, and visitors on a phone signal leave. We covered the fixes in why a slow website costs you work.

What can you safely skip?

Plenty, actually. Maintenance packages are often padded with things that sound reassuring and do very little for a small business site.

• Paid SSL certificates. Free ones are fine for an ordinary business site.
• Monthly performance reports. Nice to look at, rarely acted on. Ask for a plain email when something needs doing instead.
• Premium security suites on a five page brochure site with no logins. Keeping things updated does most of the work.
• Anything sold on the threat of what might happen. If the pitch is fear rather than a list of tasks, ask exactly what gets done and how often.

What you should not skip: backups stored away from the server, software updates, and a working contact form.

Questions to ask before you sign a maintenance package

1. What exactly gets done, and how often? A task list, not adjectives.
2. Are backups stored somewhere other than the same server, and has a restore been tested?
3. Are content changes included, or billed by the hour? Get the hourly rate and the minimum charge.
4. What is the response time when something is properly broken?
5. Are plugin and theme licences included in the fee or billed to me separately?
6. If I leave, do I take the site and the domain with me?

The short version

Budget for maintenance at the same time as the build, not later. Somewhere between £250 and £1,200 a year covers most small business sites in the UK, and where you land depends mostly on whether you are paying with money or with your own evenings.

Renting is one way to make the whole thing a single number. We build the site, host it, keep it updated, handle the email and redesign it every year, and content changes stay unlimited and free. If you would rather see what that looks like for your size of site, you can price up your website without giving anyone an email address.