Website Maintenance: What It Covers and What It Costs (UK)
Most people buy a website the way they buy a shop sign: pay once, hang it up, forget about it. Websites don’t work like that. They sit on a server that needs paying for, run software that gets updated, use a certificate that expires, and point at a domain that renews every year or two. Ignore all of that and one morning the site is showing a security warning, or a blank white page, or somebody else’s gambling adverts.
“Website maintenance” is the catch-all term for keeping that from happening. The trouble is that it means completely different things depending on who’s quoting you — which makes it very easy to pay twice for the same thing, or to pay nothing and discover the gap the hard way. Here’s what it actually covers, what UK businesses typically pay, and the questions worth asking before you sign anything.
What website maintenance actually covers
Strip away the jargon and a maintenance package is some combination of these six things.
Hosting. The server your site lives on. Without it there’s no website. This is a running cost forever, not a one-off.
The SSL certificate. The padlock in the address bar. Certificates expire — often every 90 days, renewed automatically if it’s set up properly. When one lapses, browsers put a full-page security warning in front of your customers. Modern hosting should include this free; if someone is billing you separately for it, ask why.
Backups. A recent copy of the site stored somewhere that isn’t the site. This is the one people skip and the one that saves them. Ask two questions: how often is it taken, and how quickly can it be restored?
Software updates. If your site runs WordPress, it has a core platform, a theme, and usually a dozen or more plugins — each releasing updates, some of them security patches. Someone has to apply them, and then check nothing broke.
Security and monitoring. Firewall, malware scanning, and something that tells you the site has gone down before a customer does.
Content changes. New prices, new opening hours, a fresh photo, a member of staff who’s left. Some packages include a set amount of this; many don’t include any.
Notice how different those are. The first five are technical housekeeping. The sixth is somebody’s actual time. Bundles that look similar on price often differ enormously on that last line.
Why an unmaintained site is a genuine liability
A brochure site with nothing on it worth stealing still has value to an attacker — as a place to host spam pages, redirect traffic, or send email from. Known vulnerabilities in old plugin versions are published openly, and automated tools scan the whole internet for sites still running them. This isn’t about being targeted. It’s about being unlocked.
The consequences are unglamorous but expensive: your site starts serving content you didn’t write, Google flags it as unsafe, your rankings drop, and you pay someone to clean it up. All of which costs more than the maintenance would have.
Self-hosted WordPress is where this bites hardest, because you own the whole stack. Hosted builders like Squarespace or Wix handle the platform updates themselves — one of the genuine advantages we mentioned in our comparison of website builders for small businesses — though backups and content changes are still on you.
What it costs in the UK
Prices vary by provider and region — expect the top of each range in London and the South East — but these are the typical shapes of the deal:
| What you’re buying | Typical UK cost | What it usually includes |
|---|---|---|
| Basic hosting only | £5–£30/month | Server space and bandwidth, usually free SSL. Updates and backups are your problem. |
| Managed WordPress hosting | £20–£50/month | The above, plus core and plugin updates and automated backups |
| Maintenance retainer (on top of hosting) | £30–£100+/month | Updates, backups, monitoring, security, often a small allowance of content edits |
| Pay-as-you-go fixes | £40–£90/hour | Whatever’s broken, when it breaks |
| Recovering a hacked or broken site | Several hundred pounds, one-off | Malware removal, restoring from backup, resubmitting to Google |
Two things to notice. First, a retainer and managed hosting overlap heavily — if you’re paying for both, check you’re not buying the same updates and backups twice. Second, the pay-as-you-go column looks cheapest right up until the month something goes wrong.
Domain renewal sits outside all of this and catches people out constantly: a .co.uk is typically £5–£15 a year, and letting it lapse takes your site and your email offline at once. Set it to auto-renew and check the card on file hasn’t expired.
Retainer, or hosting that includes it?
There are broadly three models.
Hosting plus a separate maintenance retainer. Common with freelancers and agencies. Transparent, and you can drop the retainer if you stop needing it — but it’s two bills, and the boundary between them is where things fall down the gap.
All-in monthly. One figure covering hosting, maintenance and support, with no separate build fee to amortise. Simpler to budget for, but check what “support” means in practice and whether content changes are included or extra.
Do it yourself. Perfectly viable if you’re comfortable logging in monthly, running updates, and checking nothing broke. The cost is your attention, and the risk is that a busy quarter goes by without you looking.
Here’s where we declare our interest, openly: Ready Set Web runs the all-in model. We build the website free from your Google Business Profile, give you a free .co.uk domain, and the only cost is hosting at £24 a month including VAT — that’s £288 for your first year, on a 12-month minimum, with no setup fee. Hosting, SSL, backups, updates, security and small content changes are all in that figure, so there’s no separate maintenance bill and nothing to forget to renew. Here’s why we do it that way.
Questions worth asking before you sign
Whoever you go with, get straight answers to these:
- How often are backups taken, and how fast can you restore one? “Nightly, restored within a few hours” is a real answer. “We have backups” isn’t.
- Is SSL included, and does it renew automatically?
- Who applies the software updates, and who checks the site afterwards? Automatic updates that nobody verifies are how sites quietly break.
- How many content changes are included per month, and what’s the charge beyond that?
- What’s the response time when something’s down? Ask what happens on a Saturday.
- Who owns the domain? It should be registered to you or clearly yours to take. This matters far more than it seems until the day you want to leave — worth thinking about before you even register it, as we covered in choosing a domain name.
- What happens if I cancel? How much notice, and what do I keep?
The honest summary
Maintenance is not an upsell invented by web people. It’s the actual cost of a website continuing to exist and stay safe — hosting, certificates, backups, updates. Every site has that cost. The only variable is whether it’s on your bill, in your calendar, or nowhere at all.
If you’re weighing up the whole picture rather than just this piece of it, our breakdown of what a small business website really costs in the UK puts maintenance alongside the build, the domain and the extras. And whichever route you take, the useful test is simple: if your site went down this afternoon, would you know, and would you know who to ring?