What should your maintenance website cost in the UK?
A small brochure website typically costs £100–£300 per month to maintain. A business-critical custom website commonly costs £300–£900 per month. A web application or frequently changed platform usually starts at around £1,000 per month.
A realistic maintenance website cost depends on what could fail, how quickly it must be fixed and how often the software changes.
UK agency development rates commonly sit around £75–£150 per hour. Hosting can range from roughly £10 per month for a simple site to £250 or more for managed, resilient infrastructure.
That gives indicative annual budgets of:
- Brochure website: £1,200–£3,600 per year
- Revenue-generating website: £3,600–£10,800 per year
- Actively maintained web application: £12,000–£30,000+ per year
These are indicative 2026 UK prices and normally exclude VAT. Technology, commercial risk, integrations and required response times matter far more than the number of pages.
What are you actually paying for?
A care plan described only as “hosting, backups and updates” tells you very little. Those services have different costs and involve different levels of responsibility.
Hosting, SSL and infrastructure
Hosting is the computing environment that serves the website. The price may cover a basic shared server, or it may include managed databases, multiple environments, content delivery, automated deployment and resilience across locations.
SSL certificates are often free, but their configuration and renewal still need monitoring. Domains, email, premium DNS and third-party platforms should be listed separately rather than hidden inside one monthly figure.
Security and dependency updates
CMS, plugin, framework and package updates address security problems, compatibility issues and defects. Clicking “update” in WordPress is not equivalent to engineering maintenance.
A responsible update process may require a staging environment, code review, automated tests, manual checks and a rollback plan. Custom software built with technologies such as React, Next.js or Laravel has dependency relationships that need testing when packages change. Our technology stack shows the range of systems that can sit behind a modern website.
Backups that can actually be restored
A backup policy should state:
- What is backed up, including files, databases and configuration
- How frequently backups run
- How long each backup is retained
- Whether copies are stored away from the production server
- How often a test restore is performed
A backup is not dependable until someone has restored it. Discovering during an outage that an archive is incomplete or corrupted is not a recovery plan.
Monitoring and investigation
Uptime monitoring checks whether a page responds. Error monitoring records application failures. Security and performance monitoring look for different problems again.
The useful question is not simply whether monitoring exists. It is who receives an alert, who investigates it and how quickly they are required to respond. Monitoring without an agreed response is an alarm connected to nobody.
Content, fixes and new development
Routine content changes might include replacing copy, publishing an article or changing an image. Design alterations, integration work, bug fixes and new features require different skills and carry more technical risk.
A package should define these categories. Otherwise, businesses often discover that “monthly changes included” means text edits only, whilst every useful improvement is chargeable.
Website maintenance packages compared
The following ranges are indicative and normally exclude VAT. Response times are examples of sensible contract targets, not universal standards.
| Support tier | Indicative monthly price | Suitable for | Expected response target | Typical inclusions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting only | £10–£100 | Static, non-critical sites | Infrastructure support only; no guaranteed code response | Hosting, SSL and basic platform monitoring |
| Brochure-site maintenance | £100–£300 | Small CMS or marketing sites | One to two business days | Hosting, backups, routine updates, monitoring and limited content time |
| Business-critical website support | £300–£900 | Lead generation, ecommerce or custom websites | Same or next business day, with urgent escalation | Tested updates, error monitoring, restore checks and named engineering hours |
| Web application maintenance | £1,000–£2,500+ | Portals, operational systems and frequently released products | Contracted priority response, potentially out of hours | Managed infrastructure, deployment support, dependency work, incident response and reserved engineering capacity |
“Unlimited changes” rarely means unlimited engineering. It usually depends on narrow definitions, fair-use limits, a work queue or tasks being small enough for junior execution.
A genuine package names its included engineering hours, supported technology, response targets, backup policy, monitoring responsibilities and exclusions. It should also explain what happens when the included time is exhausted.
WordPress page-builder care plans and maintenance for custom websites and web applications are not interchangeable. The former may be mostly administrative. The latter can require software engineering, deployment knowledge and an understanding of business logic.
Monthly retainer or hourly website maintenance?
Pay-as-you-go support at roughly £75–£150 per hour can be economical for a stable, low-risk website with rare requests. The business accepts that work may need to join a queue and that urgent availability is not reserved.
Monthly website maintenance is more appropriate when a site generates leads or sales, connects to other systems, handles regulated or personal data, or changes regularly. The retainer pays for preventative work and predictable access to people who already understand the system.
A maintenance retainer preserves reliability. A development retainer changes what the software does. Combining the two under one vague allowance makes it difficult to see whether essential upgrades are being postponed to make room for feature requests.
Before signing, check:
- Whether unused hours roll over
- Whether work has a minimum billing increment
- What counts as an emergency and which rate applies
- Whether an SLA covers response time or actual resolution time
- Whether the monthly fee reserves developer availability
- What happens when a request exceeds the included allowance
For many businesses, the sensible model is fixed preventative maintenance plus a clearly priced bank of development time. Reliability work cannot then be displaced by a new landing page or integration request.
Calculate your monthly and yearly maintenance website cost
Use this formula:
Annual cost = hosting and licences + 12 months of preventative maintenance + expected development hours + contingency
Include hosting, monitoring, backup storage, software licences, maintenance labour, content requests, planned improvements and an emergency allowance. Do not calculate from the supplier’s headline package price alone.
The following examples publish their assumptions and exclude VAT. They are budgeting examples, not quotes.
Five-page brochure website
Assumptions: basic managed hosting, a small licence cost, one maintenance hour each month at £90, four hours of content work each year and a modest contingency.
- Hosting, monitoring and backups: £240 per year
- Software licences: £120 per year
- Preventative maintenance: 12 × £90 = £1,080
- Content changes: 4 × £90 = £360
- Contingency: £200
- Total: about £2,000 per year, or £167 per month
Lead-generating custom website
Assumptions: managed infrastructure, three engineering hours each month at £110, paid services, 24 hours of planned development and an allowance for unexpected integration or release work.
- Hosting, monitoring and backups: £2,160 per year
- Software licences: £600 per year
- Preventative maintenance: 36 × £110 = £3,960
- Planned development: 24 × £110 = £2,640
- Contingency: £1,000
- Total: about £10,400 per year, or £865 per month
Operational web application
Assumptions: managed application infrastructure, eight maintenance hours per month at £125, 60 hours of planned development and greater exposure to third-party failures.
- Infrastructure, monitoring and backups: £6,000 per year
- Software licences: £1,800 per year
- Preventative maintenance: 96 × £125 = £12,000
- Planned development: 60 × £125 = £7,500
- Contingency: £3,000
- Total: about £30,300 per year, or £2,525 per month
False precision is unhelpful. Round the budget and revisit it when traffic, integrations or release frequency changes. Contingency is particularly useful where an outage, third-party API change or major dependency upgrade could create unplanned work.
Choose support based on risk, not page count
Assess the website against seven factors:
- Revenue dependency: Does it generate enquiries, bookings or payments?
- Data sensitivity: Does it store customer, employee or payment-related data?
- Update frequency: How often are content and software released?
- Integrations: Which CRMs, payment services, APIs or internal systems does it use?
- Traffic: Would a performance problem affect a meaningful number of users?
- Recovery time: How long can the business tolerate an outage?
- Internal capability: Who can diagnose and manage an incident?
Hosting-only support can suit a genuinely static, non-critical site where an owner can handle content and incidents. Preventative maintenance is a better minimum when a site uses a CMS, plugins, third-party services or customer data.
Reserved engineering capacity becomes sensible when downtime blocks sales or operations, releases happen regularly, or the system contains custom code. Ten static pages can require less maintenance than one checkout, booking flow or customer portal.
How to spot a vague care plan
Ask what happens after monitoring detects a failure. Installing a monitoring service is the easy part; diagnosis and recovery are what the business needs.
Require the supplier to state backup frequency, retention, storage location and restore-testing schedule. For dependency upgrades, ask whether the service includes staging, automated tests, manual checks and rollback.
Confirm how content edits, defects, security incidents and new features are classified and billed. Also establish who owns and controls the source code, hosting, domains, analytics and backups if the relationship ends. Get that answer before signing, not during a dispute.
What a credible maintenance quote should contain
A useful quote should identify:
- The website, production environment and staging environments covered
- The supported CMS, framework, language and infrastructure
- Assumptions about the current condition of the code
- Hosting, licence and third-party costs itemised separately from labour
- Recurring tasks and included engineering hours
- Exclusions and rates for additional work
- Response targets, communication routes and emergency arrangements
- Backup, monitoring, update and restore-testing policies
If the supplier did not build the website, the quote should include an initial technical audit. No responsible developer can promise a fixed support scope for unknown code without first inspecting its dependencies, deployment process and existing faults.
Reporting should record updates, incidents, restore tests, performance problems and recommendations. A generic green-tick email proves that a checklist was sent, not that the software is recoverable.
The strongest quote is the one that makes responsibility explicit: what is checked, what is fixed, how quickly people respond and what costs extra.
Talk to us about your website support requirements, and we will help separate the maintenance work from the hosting and development capacity.
Common questions
How much should I charge for website maintenance?
UK agency maintenance work commonly costs around £75–£150 per hour. A monthly package should price hosting, preventative tasks, response commitments and included engineering time explicitly rather than applying a flat fee based on page count.
How much does it cost to maintain a website in the UK?
A small brochure website typically costs £100–£300 per month, while a business-critical custom website commonly costs £300–£900. Web application maintenance usually starts around £1,000 per month, with prices normally excluding VAT.
What is website maintenance cost?
Website maintenance cost is the combined expenditure required to keep a site secure, available and dependable. It can include hosting, licences, backups, monitoring, software updates, incident response, content work and development time.
How much does it cost to hire someone to maintain a website?
Pay-as-you-go developers and UK agencies commonly charge roughly £75–£150 per hour. Retainers may range from £100–£300 per month for a brochure site to £1,000 or more for an actively maintained application, depending on risk and required availability.