What website maintenance costs in the UK, and what the monthly fee should buy

What do the published prices actually look like?

Very few providers publish their prices, and the ones that do sell in tiers. We checked four UK WordPress maintenance providers' published plans on 7 October 2026. Three of the four sold three tiers, and the spread looked like this:

Two of the four quoted before VAT, so add 20% to compare like with like: a £60 plan plus VAT is £72. We are not VAT registered, so our prices are what you pay. Only one of the four said its price included hosting, which is the single biggest reason two plans at the same price are not the same deal.

What should a maintenance plan include?

At the entry level, a plan worth paying for covers software updates where the platform has any, backups kept away from the server, uptime monitoring, security patching and small content changes. The middle and top tiers add time: an hour or more of changes each month, performance checks and a faster turnaround.

What a plan should not do is quietly absorb project work. New pages, new features and a redesign are projects, quoted as projects. A plan that promises unlimited changes for a small fee either does very little or loses money, and neither ends well.

Monthly plan, or pay as you go?

Pay as you go suits a site that changes twice a year and runs on a platform that updates itself. You pay for a fix when you need one, and nothing in between. The risk is that nobody is watching: a backup that stopped running in March is only discovered when you need it.

A monthly plan suits a site that changes often, takes enquiries or payments, or runs on WordPress, where updates are frequent and skipping them is how sites get compromised. The cost of one emergency clean-up usually buys several months of a plan.

Does the platform change the cost?

Yes, more than anything else. Squarespace, Wix and Shopify host the site and update the software themselves, inside the subscription you already pay, so maintenance there is mostly content changes and checking things still work. WordPress hands all of that to you: core, theme and plugin updates, backups and security are somebody's job, and if it is nobody's, the site degrades.

WordPress is still the most common choice by a distance: it runs 40.1% of all websites, according to W3Techs on 7 October 2026. Its own security guidance is plain about the cost of skipping updates: "Older versions of WordPress are not maintained with security updates."

What does it cost over a year?

On our plans, £588 a year at £49 a month, £948 at £79 and £1,788 at £149. Add hosting if you do not already pay for it: ours is from £9 a month on its own, and a site we did not build can stay with its current host. Domain renewal is a separate few pounds a year, paid to the registrar. A security certificate should cost nothing, because most hosts now include one.

When do you not need a plan at all?

When the site is on a hosted builder, changes a couple of times a year, takes no payments, and you are happy making those changes yourself. Paying monthly for that is paying for reassurance, which is a choice, not a necessity. Keep a note of your logins, check the site on your phone once a month, and book a one-off fix when something breaks.

If the site is so old or fragile that every fix costs more than the last, a plan is the wrong answer too. That is a redesign question, and it is cheaper to face it once than to pay for it monthly.

How our pricing works

Three plans at £49, £79 and £149 a month, the same for sites we built and sites we did not, with no contract and no minimum term. Hosting is included when we host the site. Emergency fixes start at £99 and are priced before we start, with or without a plan, and the first look at a site somebody else built is free. The detail is on website maintenance and support, WordPress sites have their own page, and every price we charge is on the price list. If the question is what the site costs to build in the first place, see what a website costs in the UK.

Questions about website maintenance costs

How much does it cost to pay someone to maintain a website?

For a small business site in the UK, most published maintenance plans start somewhere between £30 and £150 a month in our own reading, depending on how much change each month includes and whether hosting is included. Our plans are £49, £79 and £149 a month with no contract, and one-off emergency fixes start at £99.

What is the average monthly cost of website maintenance in the UK?

There is no official average. Four UK WordPress maintenance plans we checked in October 2026 started between £49 and £90 a month at the entry tier, and two of the four quoted before VAT. The platform, how often the site changes and whether hosting is included move the price more than anything else.

How much does it cost to maintain a website in the UK for a year?

On a typical small business plan, roughly £600 to £1,800 a year. Ours is £588 a year at £49 a month, £948 at £79 and £1,788 at £149, plus hosting if the site is not already hosted somewhere, and the domain renewal paid to the registrar.

What does website maintenance include?

Software updates where the platform has any, backups, uptime monitoring, security patching and a set amount of content and design changes each month. New pages, new features and redesigns are projects, not maintenance, and should be quoted separately.