What does website maintenance cost in the UK?

What maintenance is meant to cover

A website is not a printed brochure. The software it runs on gets security updates, browsers change, phones change, and the things you actually sell change too. Maintenance is the standing arrangement that somebody applies those updates, keeps a backup that works, notices when the site goes down, and makes the small changes you need without a negotiation each time.

Everything above that line is real work. The trouble is that all four price bands below describe it using the same handful of words.

The going rate, by band

£30 to £75 a month Basic

Automated updates, backups and uptime monitoring. Largely a script running, with someone to ring if it stops.

£75 to £200 a month Standard

The above plus a human actually looking: performance monitoring, a monthly report, and a small allowance of development time for changes.

£200 to £550 a month Shops and larger sites

Account management, priority support, checkout testing. Justified when an hour of downtime costs real money.

£700 a month and up Growth retainers

Maintenance plus ongoing improvement work. Worth naming separately, because it is a different product wearing the same word.

Locally the picture is tighter. Around Carmarthen and Llanelli, published maintenance prices cluster between roughly £25 and £100 a month, and at least one local firm makes a £100 monthly plan mandatory with the build. Agencies charging by the hour for the same work tend to be nearer £95 an hour.

Doing it yourself is not free either

The honest comparison is not maintenance against nothing. Running a site properly on your own means hosting, a domain, an SSL certificate, business email, security cover and the updates themselves. Added up, that lands somewhere around £70 to £215 a month before you have valued a single hour of your own time. Plenty of maintenance plans are cheaper than doing it badly.

The question that actually matters

Maintenance on top of what? A £50 monthly plan sitting on top of a £2,000 build is a different deal from £50 a month with no build fee at all, and the monthly figure alone will never tell you which you are looking at. Work out the first two years. A £2,000 build with £50 a month care is £3,200. The same £50 a month with nothing up front is £1,200. Identical monthly line, two thousand pounds apart.

Then ask the follow-ups: is there a minimum term, what does leaving cost, and whose name is the domain in? Our guide to reading a quote goes through all three.

Watch for maintenance that is really hosting

At the bottom of the market, “maintenance” sometimes means the site is on a server and nothing else. That is hosting, and hosting costs a few pounds a month. The test is simple: ask what happened last month. A real arrangement has an answer, even if the answer is that everything was fine and two updates were applied. If nobody can say, you are paying a subscription for a server.