What website maintenance actually costs, and what should be in it

Short answer: a small business website in the UK costs somewhere between nothing and about £150 a month to keep running properly, and most of that range is decided by who is doing the work rather than how much work there is. Hosting alone is £5 to £30 a month. Hosting plus updates, backups and someone answering the phone is more like £30 to £80. Add content changes, monitoring and a named person who knows your site and you are into £80 to £150. Above that you are usually buying retained development time, which is a different product with a different name.

The reason those numbers are hard to find is that almost nobody publishes them. Search for website maintenance and you get directories, listicles and a lot of pages that say "packages available" with a contact form underneath. That is not an accident. A price on a page invites comparison, and comparison is uncomfortable when the thing being sold is mostly time.

What you are actually paying for

A care plan is four different things sold as one, and it is worth separating them because you may already have two of them.

• Hosting. The server the site sits on. Cheap, commoditised, and the part people overpay for least.
• Updates. Core software, plugins, dependencies, certificates. On WordPress this is the part that breaks things if nobody is watching, and the part that gets you hacked if nobody does it at all.
• Backups you have actually tested. Everyone sells backups. Far fewer have ever restored one. An untested backup is a receipt, not an insurance policy.
• Changes. New photo, changed price, a paragraph reworded, a staff member who has left. Small jobs that are quick for whoever built the site and slow for anyone else.

The three lines that make a cheap plan expensive

Cheap plans are not usually a con. They are usually a plan that covers the first two items and quietly excludes the second two, and the exclusions are where the money goes.

• "Support" that means a ticket form. Ask what the response time is in writing, and ask what happens at 4pm on a Friday when the site is down.
• Content changes billed by the hour with a minimum. A fifteen-minute job at a one-hour minimum, four times a year, costs more than most care plans.
• No stated backup retention. A backup from last night is no use if the problem started three weeks ago and nobody noticed.

What a plan should tell you before you pay for it

Not a feature list. Four specific answers, and any supplier who cannot give them in writing is asking you to trust a process they have not defined.

• How often updates are applied, and whether they are tested before they go live.
• How long backups are kept and when one was last restored.
• What counts as an included change and what gets billed.
• Who you contact, and how quickly they answer when the site is down rather than when it is fine.

When you do not need one

Worth saying, because it costs us work to say it. If your site is a handful of static pages with no login, no database and no plugins, there is very little to maintain. Good hosting and a yearly look at the content may be all it needs, and paying a monthly fee for updates that do not exist is money for nothing.

The calculation changes the moment the site earns. If enquiries come through it, a week of downtime is not an inconvenience, it is a week of lost work, and the cost of a plan stops being the number to compare against.

What we charge, since this page is about not hiding it

It would be a poor look to write all of the above and then ask you to fill in a form to find out what we charge. Our hosting and care is £180 a year. That is the hosting your site runs on, looked after, billed annually rather than monthly because a yearly invoice costs us less to administer than twelve of them and there is no reason for you to pay for that difference.

At £15 a month that sits at the lower end of the hosting band above rather than the middle of the plan band, and that is the honest place for it. It is not a managed-everything retainer and we are not going to describe it as one. If your site needs more than that, a busy shop, a booking system, something with a login, tell us what it does and we will tell you what looking after it actually takes.

Care plans run with no lock-in, you get a plain account of what was done, and you deal with the people who built the site rather than a queue. For the build-side figures, they are on the pricing page and in our guide to what a website costs in the UK.