Website maintenance is the part of the budget nobody quotes. Everybody quotes the build, then the site goes live and a series of separate bills starts arriving that nobody warned you about.

This article puts a real number on it. What UK website maintenance actually costs, what each line in it is for, which parts you can drop without regretting it, and how to work out your own annual total in about twenty minutes.

If you want to know what should be inside a maintenance or care plan rather than what it costs, we have written about that separately. This one is about the money.

The five things website maintenance actually covers

A live website has five running costs. Some businesses pay all five separately without realising, and some pay for two of them twice.

The domain name

Your address. A .co.uk runs about £10 to £15 a year, a .com nearer £15 to £40 depending on the registrar. It renews annually and it is the one bill you must never miss, because a lapsed domain can be bought by anyone the moment it expires.

One thing worth checking today: whose name is the domain in? If your previous designer registered it on your behalf, it may still be registered to them. That is the single most common reason a business ends up unable to move.

Hosting

The server your site sits on. Shared hosting starts around £60 a year. Decent managed hosting for a business site runs £180 to £600 a year. Anything more than that usually means either a large ecommerce site or a package with a lot of other things bundled inside it.

The cheap end is not automatically wrong, but you get what you pay for in three ways: how fast pages load, how quickly someone answers when it breaks, and how good the backups are. A £5 a month host with no backups is not a saving, it is a bet.

The SSL certificate

The padlock in the address bar. This should cost you nothing. Free certificates are now the industry standard and are perfectly adequate for the overwhelming majority of business sites. If you are being billed £80 a year for one, ask why. The honest answers are rare.

Email

Often forgotten in website budgets because it feels like a separate thing. Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 run roughly £60 to £140 per user per year. Worth counting, because "the website costs" conversation usually includes it in the client's head even when it does not in the invoice.

Care and maintenance

The biggest and most variable line, and the one most worth understanding. This covers software updates, security patching, backups that are actually tested, uptime monitoring, and somebody to ring when something goes wrong. On a bespoke site it also covers content changes.

UK care plans generally run from about £25 a month at the light end to £150 a month or more where changes and support are included. The number matters much less than what is inside it, which we have written about separately.

What website maintenance costs per year in the UK

For a typical UK small business site, without email:

• Bare minimum, self managed. Domain and cheap hosting, no care plan. Around £80 to £120 a year. You are your own IT department, and if it breaks on a Friday it stays broken.
• Sensible, looked after. Domain, decent hosting, a light care plan. Roughly £400 to £700 a year.
• Fully maintained with changes included. Domain, good hosting, a care plan that covers real content changes and support. Roughly £900 to £1,800 a year.

Add email at £60 to £140 per person on top of any of those.

Most businesses we speak to have been assuming a number closer to the first band while actually needing the second.

What about "free" website builders?

Platforms that bundle everything into one monthly fee usually land between £180 and £400 a year for a business plan. That is genuinely competitive, and for a very small site it can be the right answer.

The costs that do not appear on the invoice are the ones to think about. You cannot take the site with you if you leave. You are limited to what the platform allows. And the time you spend maintaining it yourself is real, even though nobody invoices you for it.

The lines you can drop

Three things are commonly charged for and rarely worth it.

Paid SSL certificates. Free ones are fine. Almost nobody needs an extended validation certificate.

SEO tools you never open. A £40 a month subscription to a platform nobody in the business logs into is money set on fire. Either somebody uses it weekly or it goes.

Duplicate backups. Plenty of businesses pay their host for backups and pay a plugin or a third party for backups as well. One tested backup beats two untested ones.

The lines that are worth paying for

Two are worth more than they look.

Hosting that answers the phone. The difference between cheap and decent hosting shows up exactly once, on the day something breaks, and on that day it is worth every penny of the difference.

Somebody who knows your site. Not a ticket queue. The value in a care plan is rarely the software updates, which are largely automatic. It is having a person who can be asked a question and knows the answer without a discovery call.

How to work out your own number

Take twenty minutes and write down four things.

1. What you pay for the domain, and who it is registered to.
2. What you pay for hosting, and whether backups are included and tested.
3. What you pay for a care plan, and what it actually covers in writing.
4. Anything else billed annually that relates to the site.

Most people find one surprise on that list. Usually it is a subscription nobody uses, or a certificate being charged for something that should be free.

What we do

For our own clients, hosting, security updates, monitoring, backups and content edits sit inside one monthly care plan, from £29 a month, so there is no annual surprise and no separate invoices to reconcile. That is not the only sensible model, but it is the one that produces the fewest awkward conversations in year three.

Whoever looks after your site, the thing worth insisting on is that the annual total is written down somewhere you can find it, and that you know which lines are yours and which are theirs.

If you want the annual number for your own site written down in one place, ask us and we will do it whether or not you end up working with us.

Frequently asked questions

How much does website maintenance cost in the UK?

For a typical small business site, between about £400 and £700 a year covers a domain, decent hosting and a light care plan. Self managed and minimal is nearer £100. Fully maintained with content changes included runs £900 to £1,800.

Do I have to pay for hosting and a care plan separately?

Not always. Many studios, ourselves included, bundle hosting into the monthly care fee. Check which model you are on so you are not paying twice.

Is a paid SSL certificate worth it?

For almost all business websites, no. Free certificates provide the same encryption and the same padlock.

What happens if I stop paying?

It depends on the line. Stop paying for hosting and the site goes offline. Stop paying for the domain and you can lose the address entirely. Stop paying for a care plan and the site stays up but stops being updated and patched, which is a slower problem and usually a bigger one.