Website maintenance cost in the UK

What website maintenance costs in the UK

Published UK prices for website maintenance are wide. GoDaddy's UK guide, updated in May 2026, puts maintenance from a web design company between £50 and £10,000 a month, and about £600 a year for a basic site a designer looks after.

The same guide puts hosting alone at £3.99 to £179.99 a month and a domain name at up to £30 a year. The spread is about how much the site does, not about the work being different in kind.

With Fixr Systems there are two prices. Looking after a site somebody else built is £50 an hour, and a site we built gets a monthly plan sized to the site, agreed before it starts.

Website maintenance cost by type of site

A brochure site, the kind with a few pages and an enquiry form, needs the least looking after: the certificate, updates, backups and the odd text change.

A site that takes bookings or payments has more moving parts, so it needs closer monitoring and a test after every update, because a broken checkout costs money the same day. An online shop adds products, stock and orders on top of that.

With Fixr Systems, the type of site sets the size of the monthly plan on sites we build. On a site somebody else built, it changes how many hours the work takes at £50 an hour.

Why paying for website maintenance beats doing it yourself

The monthly jobs sound simple: check the site is up and fast, apply updates, confirm backups ran and make content changes. The catch is that they have to happen every month without fail, and each one needs logins, know how and time you would rather spend on the business.

Paying for maintenance means somebody checks every day and spots problems before your customers do. On Fixr Systems' plans the hosting and small changes are included, and the person doing it is the person who built the site.

What a website maintenance plan actually covers

A maintenance plan covers hosting, which keeps the site on the internet at all, and the security certificate, which stops browsers warning people away from you.

It covers monitoring, so somebody knows the site is down before your customers tell you, and updates to the things the site runs on. The National Cyber Security Centre tells small organisations to keep all their devices up to date, including the software and apps they use.

It covers backups, taken regularly and tested, so a bad day costs an hour, not a rebuild. And it covers small changes, because prices move, hours change and staff come and go.

Why maintenance on a site we did not build is hourly

A site somebody else built is new to us, and the work it needs varies more from site to site. Charging £50 an hour means you pay for the time a job takes, and nothing for the months it needs nothing.

A site we built is different, because we know exactly what is under it. That is why sites we build go on a monthly plan, sized to what the site does, with small changes included instead of quoted one by one.

What happens when nobody maintains a website

When nobody maintains a website, the security certificate is usually the first thing to go. The widely used free certificates from Let's Encrypt last 90 days, so a renewal that fails without anybody noticing turns into a warning screen on every visit within weeks.

Speed goes next. Sites get slower as they fill up with images nobody compressed, and you can test your site speed for free to see where yours stands.

The third is the one nobody sees coming. Software that never gets updated is how sites get broken into, because a published fix that has not been applied is a door somebody already knows about, and the government's Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 found half of small businesses (50 per cent) had a breach or attack in the previous year.

What is not part of website maintenance

New pages and new features are not maintenance. Adding a service page, a booking system or a whole new section is a project, and it gets quoted as one so you know what it costs before it starts. Business email is usually a separate cost too: Google Workspace's Business Starter plan is £5.90 per user per month on an annual commitment.

The line we draw is simple. Keeping what exists working is maintenance, and building something that did not exist before is a build, priced on our pricing page.

What you should expect for the money

For any maintenance price you should expect a named person who answers, and changes made when you ask for them.

You should also expect the hosting, the certificate and the updates to be handled as part of the price, with no extra bills. On a Fixr Systems plan they are, and your content and customer data are always yours.

That matters more than the figure itself. The best maintenance is the kind you never have to think about, because the site just keeps working.

How often the maintenance jobs actually happen

Monitoring runs constantly, so a site that goes down is noticed in minutes, not when a customer mentions it. Every site we look after is checked every day.

Backups run on a schedule and get tested, because a backup nobody has ever restored is a hope rather than a backup. Updates go on as they are released, since the gap between a fix existing and being applied is the way in.

The certificate renews automatically and is checked, and speed is looked at as the site fills up with new pages and photographs.

A website maintenance checklist

Every day, somebody should check the site is up, the certificate is valid and the pages load quickly. Every month, apply updates, confirm a backup ran and can be restored, and make the content changes that have piled up.

Every year, renew the domain, review every page for prices, hours and staff that have changed, and check the privacy notice still matches what the site collects. On a site Fixr Systems built and looks after on a plan, the daily and monthly jobs are ours, and the yearly review is a conversation.