How much does website maintenance cost in the UK?

Website maintenance in the UK typically costs anywhere from under £20 a month for a simple, mostly hands-off site to £500 or more a month for a busy shop or a site that's actively developed. For most small business websites, a realistic all-in figure is roughly £300 to £2,500 a year, covering hosting, the domain, updates, security and a little support. Where you land depends on how the site is built and how much you want someone else to look after it.

Here's what that money actually pays for, typical ranges for each part, and what you can safely skip.

The short answer

These are typical UK ranges per year, including hosting, domain and a sensible level of care. They aren't any one supplier's price list.

• Simple brochure site, mostly self-managed: roughly £150 to £600 a year. Hosting, domain and the occasional fix.
• Small business site with a care plan: roughly £600 to £2,500 a year. Updates, backups, monitoring and a small amount of support time each month.
• E-commerce or plugin-heavy WordPress site: roughly £1,500 to £6,000 a year. More moving parts, more updates and more at stake when something breaks.
• Larger or actively developed sites: £6,000 a year and well beyond, once you're paying for regular improvements as well as upkeep.

A common rule of thumb is to budget 10 to 20% of the original build cost each year to keep a site healthy. It's a rough guide rather than a law, but it's a useful sense check against any quote.

How much is a website per year? The individual costs

Domain name

A .co.uk domain typically costs somewhere around £5 to £15 a year to renew, and a .com a little more. It's small, but make sure it's registered in your name and set to auto-renew. A lapsed domain can take your website and email down with it.

Hosting

Hosting ranges from free or a few pounds a month for a simple static site, to £20 to £50 a month for good managed WordPress hosting, to hundreds a month for high-traffic platforms. Cheap shared hosting is often slower and less secure. We cover the options in detail in our guide to website hosting costs in the UK.

Email

Business email through Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is usually billed per person per month, and it's separate from your website. It's easy to forget when you're adding up running costs.

SSL certificate

The padlock in the browser. Most good hosts include a free certificate now, so you shouldn't normally be paying extra for one on a small business site.

Software updates

This is the part most people underestimate. A WordPress site has a core, a theme and often a dozen or more plugins, all releasing updates. Some premium plugins also charge annual licence fees, often tens to low hundreds of pounds each. Skipping updates is the most common way small sites get hacked.

A modern site built with a framework like Next.js and a headless CMS has fewer moving parts, no plugin marketplace and a much smaller attack surface. It still needs its dependencies updating from time to time, but the work is lighter and less urgent. Our comparison of Next.js and WordPress for business websites goes into the trade-offs.

CMS or platform subscriptions

Shopify, some headless CMSs and certain page builders charge monthly. Many have free tiers that suit small sites, but check what happens as you add editors or traffic.

Security, backups and monitoring

Daily backups you can actually restore, uptime monitoring and basic security scanning. Some hosts include these. If yours doesn't, this is one of the best value things a care plan covers.

Support and content changes

Small edits, new pages, fixing a form that's stopped sending, adding a tracking code. This is usually billed by the hour or as a monthly pot of hours. If you can edit your own content in the CMS, you'll need far less of this.

What does a website maintenance plan include?

Most UK maintenance plans or care plans bundle some of the following:

• Software, theme and plugin updates, tested before or after applying
• Regular backups and restores when needed
• Uptime and security monitoring
• A set amount of developer time each month for small changes
• Performance checks, such as page speed and Core Web Vitals
• Hosting management, sometimes with the hosting itself included

Read the detail. "Unlimited small changes" usually has a definition of small. And check whether unused hours roll over, what response time you get when the site is down, and whether hosting is included or extra.

What drives the cost up or down?

• How it's built. A plugin-heavy WordPress site needs more frequent attention than a static or headless site.
• What the site does. A brochure site that goes down costs you some enquiries. A shop that goes down costs you sales by the hour, so faster response times are worth more.
• How often you change it. If you're adding landing pages every month, you're paying for development, not just maintenance.
• Integrations. Payment providers, booking systems and CRMs change their APIs. Each connection is something that can break.
• Who does it. Freelancers, small studios and large agencies charge very differently for similar work.

Is a maintenance plan worth paying for?

For most businesses, some level of maintenance is worth it. Whether you need a formal plan depends on the site.

Worth paying for:

• Updates and backups on any WordPress site. This is non-negotiable.
• Monitoring that tells someone when the site goes down, before your customers do.
• A small pot of developer time if you don't have anyone in-house who can make changes.
• Faster response times if your site takes payments or bookings.

Often not worth paying for:

• Plans with lots of hours you never use, month after month.
• Paid SSL certificates for a standard small business site.
• "SEO packages" bundled into maintenance with no clear deliverables.
• Premium hosting tiers sized for traffic you don't have.

If your site is static or headless with very little to update, a pay-as-you-go arrangement with a developer you trust can be cheaper than a monthly plan.

What happens if you don't maintain your website?

Nothing, for a while. Then several things at once. Plugins fall out of date and become a security risk. A form stops sending and nobody notices for weeks. A payment integration changes and checkout breaks. Eventually the site is so far behind that updating it is a project in itself, and a rebuild starts to look cheaper.

Regular, small maintenance is almost always cheaper than fixing a site that's been left alone for two years.

Before you sign up to anything

Make sure you own the important parts: the domain, the hosting account, the code and the content. If your maintenance provider holds all the keys, leaving becomes difficult. Our guide on who owns your website explains what to check.

It also helps to factor running costs in from the start. When you're budgeting for a new site, our guide to how much a website costs in the UK covers both the build and the ongoing costs.

If you'd like a second opinion on what your site actually needs to stay healthy, get in touch and we'll give you an honest answer, even if that's "not much".