How much does website maintenance cost in the UK?
£25 to £60 a month for a small business site on a plan that actually includes hosting, backups, updates, monitoring and small fixes. Hosting on its own is £3 to £20 and includes none of that. Shops and busier sites run £60 to £250, and web apps are usually a retainer above that.
Below: what those plans should contain, the exclusions worth reading for, our own £45 plan itemised, and how to compare two quotes that both say "maintenance included".
By Lucas Reddington, full-stack developer and AI engineer, Northbytes. Last updated .
Hosting and maintenance are not the same thing
This is the confusion that costs people money. Hosting is space on a server and the bandwidth to serve your pages. That's all it is. A £4 a month hosting account will happily serve a site with a three-year-old vulnerability in it until somebody exploits it.
Maintenance is the work of keeping the software healthy: applying updates and checking nothing broke, watching for errors and downtime, verifying that backups restore, and fixing the things that break on their own. It is ongoing effort by a person, which is why it costs more than disk space.
When you compare two quotes, work out which of the two each one is selling. A £10 plan and a £45 plan are usually not the same product at different prices; they are different products.
The four price bands
What UK providers charge, by what you're actually getting.
Hosting only
£3 - £20 / month
Shared hosting, or a static site on a modern platform.
Somewhere for the site to live, and nothing else. Nobody updates anything, nobody watches it, and when something breaks it stays broken until you notice. Fine for a personal site, risky for a business one.
Basic care plan
£25 - £60 / month
The common small-business tier, and where our £45 plan sits.
Hosting, backups, software and plugin updates, security patches, uptime monitoring, and usually a small allowance of changes. What varies enormously between providers is whether fixing a bug is included or quoted.
Managed plan with support
£60 - £250 / month
Busier sites, shops, or anywhere downtime costs money the same day.
Everything above plus faster response commitments, staging environments, performance work and a monthly allowance of content or development changes. Reasonable for e-commerce; overkill for a brochure site.
Application support
£250+ / month
Web apps, portals, SaaS products and bespoke systems.
This is software, not a website, so it needs dependency management, security review, database care and a developer who knows the codebase. Usually a retainer, not a plan off a menu.
Our £45 plan, itemised
Since this guide sits next to our own service, here is exactly what the fee covers, instead of a list of adjectives. £45 a month, or £90 if your site runs a database, current at the date on this page.
Hosting and TLS
The server, the certificates and a CDN in front of static assets. Ours runs on Fly.io in London, with HTTPS issued and renewed automatically.
Backups and tested restores
Automated daily backups with a defined retention window, and restores actually rehearsed. An untested backup is a hope, not a plan, and this is the line most cheap plans quietly skip.
Monitoring and alerting
Uptime checks and error monitoring that page us, not you. The point is that we usually know before your customers do.
Dependency and security updates
Libraries, frameworks and platform versions kept current so you never fall three years behind and face a forced rebuild disguised as an upgrade.
Bug fixes
When something breaks, it gets fixed as part of the plan instead of quoted. Ask any provider this question specifically; the answer separates a maintenance plan from a hosting bill.
Not included: new work
New features, new pages and design changes are development work, quoted separately. Heavy usage above the plan is charged as capacity used. Everything else above is in the fee.
One more line worth stating: if your site gets seriously busy, with high bandwidth, lots of stored data, or enough simultaneous users that we scale you onto extra servers, usage is charged on top, because we scale instead of letting the site fall over. If you'd rather have certainty than elasticity, we'll cap your maximum monthly charge and you never pay above the cap.
Six exclusions to read for
Not accusations, just the places the word "maintenance" most often does less work than the reader assumes. Ask about each one specifically.
"Updates" that mean the server only
Some plans patch the operating system and never touch your site's own dependencies, which is where the vulnerabilities that get exploited actually live.
Backups with no tested restore
Everyone says backups. Ask when a restore was last performed successfully, and what the recovery time would be. The silence is informative.
Support hours you can't carry over
Two hours a month, use it or lose it, and every real job is quoted anyway. Worth checking what counts as using an hour.
Fixes charged as changes
The most common one. The contact form stops working, and it turns out that's a change request, not a fix.
Exit fees and hostage hosting
A site you cannot take elsewhere, because the code was never yours or nobody will hand over the accounts. Establish this before signing, not after.
Renewal at a different price
An introductory rate for twelve months, then a rise you'll notice on the direct debit, not in an email.
What you're really paying for: the bad day
A maintenance plan is insurance, and insurance is judged on the claim. So here is the sequence that decides whether £45 a month was worth it, and the questions that reveal whether a provider can actually run it.
Something breaks at 9pm. With monitoring, an alert fires within minutes and reaches somebody. Without it, you find out tomorrow from a customer, or on Monday. That gap is the first thing you're buying.
Then diagnosis: was it a bad deploy, a dependency, the host, or an attack? Then recovery, which is where tested backups earn their keep, because the difference between a backup that restores in twenty minutes and one nobody has ever tried is the difference between an incident and a catastrophe. Then, if personal data was involved, an assessment of whether it's reportable to the ICO, which has a 72-hour clock attached to it.
Ask any provider three questions: how would you know, how fast would you respond out of hours, and when did you last actually restore a backup. Confident specific answers to those are worth more than a lower monthly number.
A checklist for comparing plans
- Is a bug fix included, or quoted? Get this in writing, with an example.
- What exactly gets updated: the server, the platform, or my site's own dependencies too?
- How often are backups taken, how long are they kept, and when was a restore last tested?
- What's the response time out of hours, and who actually picks it up?
- Are there change hours included? Do they roll over? What counts as using one?
- If I leave, do I get the code, the domain and the data, and is that written down?
- Is the price fixed, or introductory? What happens at renewal?
If you're still deciding what to build in the first place, the website cost guide covers the build side, and our hosting and maintenance page has the full terms of the plan described above.
Common questions
How much does website maintenance cost in the UK?
For a small business site, £25 to £60 a month is the normal range for a plan that includes hosting, backups, updates, monitoring and small fixes. Hosting alone is £3 to £20 a month but includes no maintenance at all. Busier sites and shops run £60 to £250, and web apps or bespoke systems are usually a retainer above £250 because they need a developer rather than a plan. Ours is a flat £45 a month, or £90 if the site runs a database, with bug fixes included.
Do I really need a maintenance plan?
If the site is a static brochure page you built yourself and would not mind losing, honestly no. If it takes enquiries, payments or bookings, or holds any personal data, then yes, and the reason is security rather than tidiness. Sites are attacked automatically and indiscriminately by software looking for known vulnerabilities in out-of-date components, and being small is no protection. The cost of one incident, in recovery and in trust, dwarfs a couple of years of maintenance.
Why is WordPress maintenance more expensive?
Because there is more of it to do. A typical WordPress site runs a theme and a dozen or more plugins from different authors, each updating on its own schedule, and updates occasionally conflict with each other or with the theme. That needs testing on a staging copy rather than applying blind. A custom-built site has far fewer moving parts and a much smaller attack surface, which is one reason our flat fee can be flat.
Can I just do it myself?
You can, and for a simple site it is a genuine option. The honest job description is: apply updates promptly and check nothing broke, verify a backup restores and does not merely exist, watch for downtime, renew certificates and domains, and keep an eye on security advisories for whatever the site is built on. Call it an hour or two a month when nothing is wrong. What you are really buying from a provider is that the hour happens even when you are busy, and that somebody competent is available on the day something breaks.
What happens if I stop paying?
With us, you take everything: the code, the domain, the data and a documented handover, and we will help you move it. That should be the standard answer, so ask anyone else the same question before you sign. The arrangements to avoid are those where the site was built on a platform you cannot export from, or where the domain and hosting accounts are in the provider's name rather than yours.
Sources
Figures quoted from outside Northbytes come from these sources, checked on 26 July 2026. Our own prices are our published rates.
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