Website maintenance cost per month in the UK can be anything from a few pounds, if all you pay for is hosting, to around £100 a month, the figure owners on UK business forums keep asking about. Our own care plans are £79.99, £149.99 and £299.99 a month. What matters is what the money pays for, and most owners I speak to have never had that split out for them.
Domain, hosting, maintenance and support: four different jobs
People ask me about website hosting and maintenance cost as if it were one bill. It’s really four separate jobs.
- The domain is your name on the internet, registered through a company called a registrar. For a .uk name, Nominet calls the person recorded against it the registrant, and that should be you, not your web designer.
- Hosting is the computer that keeps the site online.
- Maintenance keeps everything underneath current: the security certificate, the software, the backups, and someone watching that the site is up.
- Support is a person who makes your changes and picks up when something breaks.
Our own setup shows how spread out it gets: elevantae.com is registered at GoDaddy. Its DNS, the settings that point the name at the right places, sits on Cloudflare, and our email runs on Microsoft 365. Even after adding the email records, I had to switch on DKIM, a signature proving our mail really comes from us, in Microsoft’s Defender portal.
Why a website that never changes still needs looking after
WordPress runs about four in ten websites, according to W3Techs. Patchstack, which tracks WordPress security, counted 11,334 new security holes in 2025. Of those, 91% were in plugins, the add ons most sites are full of, and 46% had no fix ready when they were made public.
WordPress is written in a language called PHP, and PHP version 8.1 has had no security fixes since 31 December 2025. Security certificates, the padlock in your browser, are getting shorter too: any issued since 15 March 2026 last 200 days at most, falling to 47 days from March 2029, so renewal has to happen on its own. And a hacked site can carry Google’s “This site may be hacked” label in search results until the hole is fixed and you ask for a review in Search Console, Google’s free tool for site owners.
A hand coded site with no plugins or database has far less to patch, which is one reason we build ours that way. It still needs watching, just less often.
What does website maintenance include when it’s done properly?
Done properly, it’s dull:
- updates applied and checked, so nothing breaks
- the certificate renewing itself
- a firewall in front of the site
- uptime monitoring, so someone knows the site is down before your customers do
- backups kept off the server, and tested
- search details kept accurate
- a set allowance of changes, and a reply time in writing.
The government’s National Cyber Security Centre says to learn how to restore a backup before you need it. Until someone has restored one, you’re only hoping it works.
Padding is anything you can’t picture someone doing: a “dedicated account manager” for a five page site, or “all minor changes” with no limit, which ends in an argument about what minor means.
If your contact form collects names and phone numbers, UK GDPR expects that data to be kept secure. The ICO has plain data security advice for small organisations. I’m not a solicitor, so for anything serious, ask one.
Website maintenance cost per month in the UK: is £100 fair?
On its own, that number tells you nothing. On UK Business Forums I’ve read thread after thread where someone pays about that and can’t say what for. One package listed a dedicated account manager, access to design and legal teams and partner discounts, and replies still took days.
For a site that brings in work, that money should buy everything in the list above. If you pay £100 a month for a small site to simply sit online, with no changes and no report, I think you’re overpaying.
On 16 October I read 30 adverts from web and digital firms around the West Midlands, and not one showed a price. Ours are on our pricing page, and we’re not VAT registered, so that’s the whole price. Ask any supplier for a written breakdown. One who is proud of the work will send it without fuss.
Extras that should never be a surprise
Three come up again and again on UK forums: a certificate fee, a backup fee and a yearly maintenance contract, none of them in the original quote.
Let’s Encrypt gives certificates away free, and Cloudflare includes one on every plan, its free plan too. If a small site is billed every year for one, ask what it gives you that the free one doesn’t.
Nominet, which runs .uk names, has also warned since the early 2000s about official looking renewal letters from companies that aren’t your registrar. Before paying one, check your domain on Nominet’s lookup tool and make sure the registrar matches the letter.
Our rule is that everything we’re building is in the proposal, and anything that isn’t gets a price before it happens.
Who makes the small changes on our sites
Our sites have no drag and drop editor, on purpose, so every change goes through us. I know that can sound like the “charged for every little change” trap.
They’re hand coded files, which is why they load quickly on a poor phone signal and have no admin login to break into and no plugins to patch. The trade off is real: you can’t change a price yourself at eleven at night. Changes come out of your care plan allowance, or without a plan they’re £60 an hour in 15 minute steps, always quoted first. A new phone number is billed as the quarter of an hour it takes.
Ownership is what stops it being a trap. Once it’s paid for, the design, content, code and domain are yours, and the hosting sits on a Cloudflare account in your name. I’ve written more on who owns your website.
What looking after a website involves in practice
Detailing Sanctuary is my mobile car detailing business in Wolverhampton, and we built its website, bookings and automation. On 24 September 2026 I audited its Google Ads tracking. A conversion tag had no trigger, so it had never fired once, and it was the goal the account was bidding towards. The thank you page counted as an enquiry every time it loaded, so bookmarks and search engine robots counted. From the outside it all looked fine, because nobody was checking. The tracking is fixed now, but the campaigns haven’t restarted, so there’s no result to report.
Our own site went live on 23 September 2026. On 29 September it came first on Google for our name, third for “microsoft 365 support wolverhampton” and nowhere in the top 50 for “web design wolverhampton”, which is normal for a new site. On 15 October an audit found seven pages Google still hadn’t indexed, meaning they weren’t in its results at all. I resubmitted the sitemap, the list of pages you hand Google, and requested indexing in Search Console.
That’s what the search work in a care plan means: checking what Google can see and fixing what it can’t. Nobody can promise you a position on Google. I can promise someone is looking.
Our website care plans, and how you leave one
We have three website maintenance plans, which we call care plans.
- Care, £79.99 a month, suits a site that works like a shopfront and changes a few times a year: hosting and security handled, search details kept accurate, and changes within a monthly allowance.
- Care+, £149.99 a month, adds a bigger allowance, ongoing search work, Google Business Profile posts and a plain monthly report.
- Partner, £299.99 a month, is for a site that’s a main source of work, with the largest allowance, new pages as you grow and a monthly strategy call.
Each has a six month minimum, then runs month to month with 30 days notice. A 12 month term takes 10% off paid monthly, or 15% off paid upfront, and ending one early costs no more than 35% of the payments left.
Once your site is paid for, stopping a care plan never switches it off. It stays on the Cloudflare account in your name, and we hand over everything needed to host it elsewhere. If you’re paying a site off monthly, my post on pay monthly websites covers hosting during the payments. Whoever you pay, get the reply time in writing. Ours is one working day.
When you don’t need a website maintenance plan
Picture a florist on a website builder like Wix or Squarespace who edits her own prices. The platform already does the patching and she pays it every month, so she doesn’t need us on top. And if your site isn’t bringing in any work yet, fix that before paying to maintain it.
Once one of our sites is paid for, you can skip the plan and pay £60 an hour for the odd change, or host it yourself. Ours are static files, and Cloudflare’s documentation says requests for static files on its Pages hosting are free and unlimited, so keeping one online can cost very little.
On WordPress, you can look after it yourself:
- Turn on automatic updates for each plugin, which WordPress has offered since version 5.5.
- Keep a backup off the server, and practise restoring it.
- Use two step verification on every login.
- Delete plugins you don’t use.
If that sounds like a chore you’ll never get round to, that’s when a plan earns its money.
A checklist you can use today
- For a .uk name, use Nominet’s lookup tool to see which registrar holds it, then check with that registrar that you or your business are the registrant.
- Make sure you have the logins for your domain and hosting.
- Ask for a written breakdown of your monthly fee.
- Ask where your backups are kept, and when one was last restored.
- Get the reply time and the change allowance in writing.
Questions people ask about website maintenance costs
How much does website maintenance cost per month in the UK?
Anything from a few pounds for basic hosting to around £100 a month, a figure owners often mention on UK forums. Check what it covers before you judge the price. Our care plans are £79.99, £149.99 and £299.99 a month.
Do I need website maintenance if my website never changes?
Usually, yes, because the software, server and certificates around it keep changing even when your words don’t. A hand coded site needs far less, but someone should still check it’s up and backed up.
What is the difference between web hosting and website maintenance?
Hosting is the computer that keeps your site online. Maintenance keeps everything on it current and safe: updates, the certificate, backups and monitoring.
What happens to my website if I cancel my maintenance plan?
That depends on your contract, so read it before you sign. With ours, once the site is paid for, cancelling never switches it off. If a domain held in a supplier’s name turns into a dispute, Nominet’s dispute service or Citizens Advice can point you the right way.
If you want a second opinion
If you’re not sure what your current fee covers, book a 20 minute call and bring your last invoice. I’ll tell you what each line looks like it’s for, and if you don’t need a plan, from us or anyone else, I’ll say so.