What website maintenance costs
Maintenance plans range from genuinely useful to a monthly fee for nothing. Here is what the work actually involves and how to tell the difference.
Every website needs some upkeep. How much depends almost entirely on what it is built on and whether it takes payments.
| Site type | Typical monthly | What it should cover |
|---|---|---|
| Static or Squarespace/Wix | £0 – £30 $0 – $40 | Very little. The platform handles updates and security itself. |
| WordPress brochure site | £30 – £100 $40 – $130 | Core, theme and plugin updates, backups, security monitoring, uptime checks. |
| WooCommerce or larger site | £80 – £250 $100 – $320 | All of the above, plus checkout testing and faster response times. |
| Large or business-critical | £250+ $320+ | Staged updates, monitoring, a defined response time in writing. |
What a maintenance plan should actually include
Ask for these specifically. A plan that cannot answer them is selling you reassurance rather than work.
- Backups — how often, where they are stored, and how quickly a site can be restored. Ask when a restore was last tested.
- Updates — what gets updated, how often, and whether it is tested on a copy first.
- Security monitoring — what is monitored and what happens when something is found.
- Uptime monitoring — who gets alerted at 3am, and whether anyone acts on it.
- Response time — a stated maximum for urgent issues, in writing.
- Included changes — how much content editing is covered, and what counts as a change versus a new project.
If a plan does not include restoring your site after a failure, it is not maintenance. Backups you cannot restore from are not backups.
Warning signs in a maintenance contract
- You cannot leave without losing the site. If cancelling means the site goes down, you do not own it. That is the problem to fix, not the fee.
- The hosting is in their account. Your domain and hosting should be in your name with your billing details, and you grant access. Not the other way round.
- No detail on what is done. "We look after your site" is not a scope. Ask for a monthly report and see whether one actually arrives.
- Content edits are excluded but never priced. You will find out the cost when you need something urgently.
- A long minimum term. Twelve months for routine maintenance is unusual. Monthly rolling is normal.
Common questions
01Do I actually need a maintenance plan?
If your site is on Squarespace, Wix or similar, mostly no — the platform handles updates and security. If it is WordPress, something needs to apply updates and take backups, and if that is not you it needs to be someone. If it takes payments, treat maintenance as essential rather than optional.
02What happens if I do not maintain a WordPress site?
It keeps working, until it does not. Outdated plugins are the most common route into a compromised WordPress site, and a compromised site can be blacklisted by Google or used to send spam. The risk builds quietly over months rather than appearing suddenly.
03Can I do maintenance myself?
Yes. Updating plugins and running a backup plugin is not difficult. What you are paying someone for is remembering to do it consistently, testing updates before applying them, and knowing what to do when an update breaks something.
04Is hosting the same as maintenance?
No, though they are often bundled. Hosting is the server your site runs on. Maintenance is the work of keeping the software on it current and functioning. Good hosting does not protect you from an outdated plugin.
Get a fixed quote in writing
Answer five questions and we come back with one number, inside a day. You are not committing to anything by asking.
Or email contact@hire-web-designer.com