Blog 4 min read
How much does website maintenance cost in the UK?
What website maintenance costs in the UK, what you get at each price, and what the cheap plans leave out.
Between £29 a month and about £8,000. That's the spread in the UK, and on its own it tells you nothing.
A July 2026 price check by Jamie Grand found WordPress maintenance plans running from £29 to £379 a month, with most small business plans landing at £40 to £99 plus VAT. At the top, agencies like iNeedSocial publish retainers from £2,000 to £8,000. Ours are £150, £500 and £2,000 a month plus VAT.
Nearly all of that difference is about whether a human being ever looks at your website.
What each band buys
| Monthly cost | What you get | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Under £50 | Automatic updates and a daily backup. Changes cost extra, support is by email | A hobby site, or a website nobody relies on for work |
| £50 to £150 | The above plus security scans and a monthly report | A small business whose website is a brochure |
| £150 to £500 | Hosting included, monthly checks by a person, fixes, phone support, SEO reporting, time each month for changes | A business that gets enquiries or sales through its website |
| £2,000 and up | A team on retainer, many hours a month, design and content as well | Businesses where the website is a department on its own |
The bands overlap and every company names them differently. Read what a plan lists, then go hunting for what it doesn't mention, because that's the part that matters.
The cheap plans are automation with a logo on
A plugin runs the updates. Somewhere else a monitoring service pings your homepage every five minutes to check it's still standing. Both worth having. Neither has the first idea what your website is for.
So the update runs at 3am, something conflicts, and your contact form stops sending. The monitor stays quiet, because the homepage still loads fine. Three weeks later, a customer mentions they emailed about a job and never heard back (it's nearly always the contact form).
The other things that get skipped at that price: backups kept on the same server as the website, so when the server goes they go with it. Nobody testing that emails from the site arrive. Hosting billed separately by a different company, which is how you end up with two suppliers pointing at each other while your website is down. And the small stuff charged by the job, so changing a phone number on the contact page turns into a billable task and you leave it wrong for a year.
A £40 plan is fine for a website nobody relies on. Ours aren't built for those.
Try this now
Go and fill in your own contact form. Then check the inbox it's meant to land in.
You'd be surprised how often nothing turns up.
What we charge
Better, £150 a month. Hosting, SSL, a content delivery network, daily backups to a data centre run by a different provider, WordPress and plugin updates, brute force protection, security and uptime monitoring around the clock, performance monitoring, a check that your emails and forms actually work, and a monthly health report.
Better+, £500 a month. Everything above, plus a proper monthly dig through the site: Search Console, GTmetrix, PageSpeed and Semrush looked at together, broken links, redirects, page titles and meta descriptions, contact form spam protection, and a Screaming Frog crawl to catch whatever's left. It adds SEO work, 10 tracked keywords and content edits to hold those positions. You also get 45 minutes of our time each month for changes.
Better Marketing, £2,000 a month. Everything in Better+, dedicated support and infrastructure, and digital advertising on top.
All plus VAT, all monthly. The full lists are on our pricing page.
What we don't do
Our support line is open 10:00 to 16:00, Monday to Friday. No weekends, no 3am. The monitoring runs all night, but if you want somebody picking up the phone at 2am on a Sunday, that's not us.
We don't build new features on a maintenance plan either. A booking system or a members' area is a project and we'll quote for it. We'll upload the words you send us. Writing them is somebody else's job, and the 45 minutes doesn't roll over, so there's no banking six months of it and asking for a redesign in March.
Is it cheaper to do it yourself?
On paper, yes. WordPress is free and the update button is right there.
The cost is your Tuesday mornings and the risk. Somebody has to run the updates, check nothing broke afterwards, test the form, keep an eye on security, and argue with the host when the site goes down on a Friday at half four. If that somebody is you and your time is worth more than about £30 an hour, two hours a month already costs more than a basic plan.
Then there's the day it goes properly wrong. Script kiddies get into a neglected WordPress site and start emailing your dad 50 times a day about viagra. Cleaning that up costs more than a year of any plan on this page, and it's a miserable week for everyone.
This is the bit where we tell you to buy a plan. You should have one, and obviously we'd say that, we sell them.
Seven questions before you sign anything
- Is hosting included, or is that a separate bill from somebody else?
- Where are the backups kept, and how fast can they put one back?
- Does a person check the site after updates, or does a plugin just run them?
- Is the contact form tested, and how often?
- How much time for changes is included, and what does going over cost?
- Who do you ring when it breaks, and when are they there?
- Does anyone explain the monthly report, or does it just land in your inbox as a PDF nobody opens?
We've written up what website maintenance should include if you want to hold a plan up against it line by line.
And if a £49 plan somewhere else covers what your website actually needs, we'll say so on the call. Taking money for work nobody needs is a rubbish way to run a business.