Website maintenance costs, honestly.

What "maintenance" actually covers

The word gets used vaguely, usually by whoever's charging for it, so let's unpack the crate. Keeping a small business website alive and useful is six distinct jobs:

• Hosting - the server the site lives on, paid monthly or annually, plus someone noticing when it goes down.
• The domain - your address on the internet, renewed every year without fail, in your name (this clause matters more than any other on this page - see the FAQ).
• Security & certificates - the padlock (SSL), and whatever defends the site from the automated attacks every website receives daily, famous or not.
• Software updates - keeping whatever the site is built on current. Trivial for some technologies, a weekly chore for others; the whole next section is about the difference.
• Backups - copies that exist somewhere other than the server, made automatically, and - the step everyone skips - actually tested. A backup nobody has restored is a hope, not a backup.
• Content edits - new prices, new photos, changed hours, a new team member. The least technical job and, for a trading business, the one that matters most: it's the difference between a website and an archive.

Every pricing model on the market - plans, hourly rates, all-inclusive fees, "my nephew handles it" - is just a different way of allocating these six jobs. When you compare quotes, compare them job by job, and ask which jobs are missing from the cheap one.

Typical UK prices, job by job

Ranges, not gospel - but honest ones, current for 2026. Hosting: shared hosting adequate for a brochure site runs £3-£15 a month; better-quality or managed hosting £20-£80. Domain: £10-£25 a year for a normal .co.uk or .com renewal - and if you're being charged much more, ask why. SSL: genuinely free these days via Let's Encrypt; a line item on your invoice for a basic certificate is a small tell about the invoicer. Maintenance plans: the freelancer/agency market for looking after a WordPress site clusters around £30-£100 a month for updates, backups and security, rising £150+ where content changes are included. Ad-hoc changes: £40-£90 an hour at UK small-agency rates, often with a minimum charge that makes a two-line price change cost £50.

Add it up and the realistic running cost of a professionally maintained small business site lands around £40-£150 a month depending on platform and how often anything changes - on top of whatever the build cost. If that number surprises you, the build quote worked as intended: the industry's habit is to compete on the visible price and recover the margin on the keeping. It's the same pattern we pull apart in our website cost guide, and it's why "what will this cost me per year, all in, with a dozen edits?" is the single most clarifying question you can put to any quote.

The WordPress tax

WordPress powers a substantial share of the world's websites, ours excepted, and it deserves both halves of its reputation: capable of anything, and the most expensive mainstream platform to keep. The reasons are structural, not conspiracy. A WordPress site is a stack of moving parts - the core software, a theme, and typically ten to thirty plugins, each from a different author, each updating on its own schedule, each update capable of quietly breaking one of the others. The core is patched constantly, and because a quarter of the web runs it, every hole is probed by bots within days. Some premium plugins and themes carry their own renewals - £30-£200 a year each - which surface as mystery line items long after the developer who chose them has moved on.

None of this means avoid WordPress; for plenty of sites it's the right tool, and a well-maintained WordPress site is a perfectly safe one. It means the £30-£100-a-month maintenance plan isn't the racket it can look like - the labour is real. The mistake isn't paying it; it's running WordPress and not paying it, which is how a business ends up learning the word "malware" from a customer. If a quote puts you on WordPress, the maintenance plan isn't an upsell to decline - it's part of the price, so add it before comparing. (The alternative is a platform with fewer moving parts - modern static sites like the ones we build have no plugins or database to patch at all, which is a fair slice of how an all-inclusive £29.99 plan is possible. More in the FAQ.)

The cost of not maintaining it

Here's the column the invoices never show. Neglect has a price too; it's just billed irregularly and at the worst times:

• The hack. An out-of-date site gets compromised - not by a person who chose you, but by a bot that found a known hole. Now it's redirecting to a casino, blacklisted by Google with a "deceptive site" warning, or silently mining your enquiry form. Cleanup by specialists costs hundreds to low thousands, plus however long the site spent poisoning your name first.
• The quiet rot. Cheaper per incident, dearer in aggregate: the menu from two owners ago, "Christmas opening hours" in June, prices that undercut what you now charge (you'll honour them or argue - both cost), the retired employee still smiling on the team page. Every visitor who spots one recalibrates how much else on the site to believe.
• The lapsed domain. The renewal card expired, the reminder went to a dead inbox, and the address on your van now belongs to a parking page - or a competitor. Recovering a lapsed domain ranges from an awkward fee to genuinely gone.
• The vanished keeper. The single most common emergency we're rung about: the person who "handled all that" - a freelancer, an agency, somebody's nephew - has moved on, and nobody knows where the site lives, who owns the domain, or what the passwords are. The site is now unmaintained and unreachable, which is the worst of every option. The recovery steps are in the FAQ below, and the full rebuild-from-here picture is on our website redesign page.

Weigh maintenance quotes against this column, not against zero. The question was never "£50 a month or free?" - it's "£50 a month or one of these, eventually, at random."

Doing it yourself, honestly

Plenty of owners maintain their own sites perfectly well, and if that's you, this section is the checklist rather than a warning. The monthly routine: software and plugin updates applied (after a backup, not before), the backup itself verified restorable at least occasionally, the domain and hosting renewal dates in a calendar that outlives any one card or inbox, the contact form actually tested (they fail silently - a broken form looks identical to a quiet month), and a walk through the site reading it as a stranger: prices, hours, phone number, this year in the footer. Perhaps an hour a month on WordPress, a fraction of that on a static site or a DIY builder, where the platform handles the technical layer and leaves you just the truth-keeping.

DIY maintenance fails the same way DIY building does - not through inability but through priority. The updates wait for a quiet week that isn't this one; the quiet weeks are when the business needs attention most. Miss the mowing for a fortnight and you have long grass; miss it for a season and you have a different kind of garden. If a year's honest track record says the routine won't survive contact with your actual diary, that self-knowledge is worth more than any hosting tip on this page - buy the keeping instead.

What to ask any maintenance provider

Five questions separate a fair plan from an expensive shrug, whoever's offering it - including us:

• "Which of the six jobs are included?" Hosting, domain, security, updates, backups, edits - job by job, in writing. Most disappointing plans are disappointing in the gaps, not the print.
• "What do content changes cost, and how fast do they happen?" The commonest friction in the whole industry: a plan that covers the server meticulously while every two-line edit is £50 and a fortnight away. Ask for the hourly rate, the minimum charge and the typical turnaround.
• "Who owns the domain and the hosting account?" The answer must be you for the domain, and known for the hosting. Any hesitation here is the loudest warning available.
• "When did you last restore a backup?" Not take - restore. The pause tells you everything.
• "What happens if we part ways?" A professional has a ready answer covering handover, files and the domain. The vanished-keeper stories in the section above all started with this question unasked.

For the record, our answers: all six jobs are inside the £29.99 monthly plan - hosting, domain, email, security and backups, with content edits unlimited and typically live the same day, because a site staying current is the product, not an extra. The site and domain become yours after 12 months, cancellation is 30 days' notice with a proper handover, and there's no separate maintenance contract because there's nothing separate about maintenance: it's most of what a website costs, and we'd rather that were priced honestly from the start. The full service - including how we take over sites nobody's looking after - is on our website maintenance page.