Website maintenance is the line on the invoice that business owners resent most, mainly because nobody has ever explained what it buys. Some firms pay £30 a month and assume they are covered. Others pay £300 a month and could not tell you what happened for it last quarter. Both are usually getting a bad deal, just in different directions.
This guide sets out what maintenance genuinely covers, what fair UK pricing looks like in 2026 for different kinds of site, and the contract clauses that should make you walk away.
What maintenance actually covers
A real maintenance arrangement is five jobs. If your agency cannot show you evidence of each, you are paying for a retainer, not maintenance.
- Security updates. Patching the software your site runs on before known vulnerabilities are exploited. On WordPress this is core, theme and plugin updates, and it is urgent: unpatched plugins are the single most common way UK small business sites get hacked. On modern frameworks it is dependency updates on a regular cadence.
- Backups you can actually restore. Automated, stored somewhere other than the server itself, and tested. An untested backup is a hope, not a backup. Ask when a restore was last rehearsed; the silence is informative.
- Uptime and error monitoring. Someone should know your site is down or throwing errors before your customers tell you. Monitoring tools cost pennies; the value is a human who responds to the alert.
- Performance care. Speed decays as content, plugins and scripts accumulate. Periodic checks against Core Web Vitals keep the decay visible and reversed - it matters for rankings and conversions alike, as we covered in why fast websites convert better.
- Small content changes. Hours included each month for the routine edits: prices, team members, opening hours, new photos. Check how unused hours are treated.
What maintenance is not: hosting alone (a £10 to £30 commodity often resold at £50 plus), "SEO included" (real SEO work is a separate discipline with its own deliverables), or a licence fee for keeping your own website switched on.
What you should pay in 2026
Fair UK bands, assuming the five jobs above are genuinely being done:
- Brochure site (5 to 15 pages): £30 to £100 per month. At the bottom of the band it is automated patching, backups and monitoring with minimal human time; that can be perfectly adequate for a simple site.
- Content-heavy or lead-generation site: £100 to £250 per month. More moving parts, more regular content changes, and enough traffic that downtime and slowdowns have a measurable cost.
- E-commerce: £250 to £750 per month. Payments, stock, customer accounts and integrations raise both the stakes and the workload. Downtime here is directly lost revenue, so response times should be contractual.
- Web applications and portals: £500 to £2,000 or more per month, depending on complexity. This is closer to having a fractional engineering team than a webmaster: dependency management, database care, monitoring and an on-call arrangement.
Two caveats. First, platform matters as much as size: a WordPress site with thirty plugins costs more to keep safe than a modern static or Next.js build, because there is simply more to patch and more that breaks - one of the reasons we often recommend migration, as set out in how to speed up a WordPress site, or migrate. Second, geography barely matters: maintenance is remote work, so pay for competence, not a postcode.
Red flags in support contracts
We inherit sites from other agencies every month, which means we read a lot of maintenance contracts on the way in. These clauses come up repeatedly, and each one should lower your offer or end the conversation:
- No deliverables, no reports. If nothing arrives each month or quarter showing what was patched, backed up and monitored, assume nothing was.
- Hosting you cannot leave with. The agency owns the hosting account, the domain registration or both, and departure means starting again. Your domain should always be registered to you.
- "Unlimited changes" at a suspiciously low price. Unlimited at £50 a month means a queue, and your job is at the back of it.
- Charging monthly for software updates that do not exist. Static and modern-framework sites need far less patching than WordPress. Paying £100 a month for "updates" on a site with nothing to update is a subscription to goodwill.
- No response-time commitment. "We aim to respond quickly" is not a commitment. For any site that makes you money, there should be a stated response time for the site being down.
- Twelve-month lock-ins with auto-renewal and 90-day notice. Fine for genuine ongoing work; a trap when attached to a £40-a-month arrangement.
The cost of doing nothing
The alternative to paying for maintenance is not free. It is a different set of invoices, later and larger:
- A hacked site costs £500 to £5,000 to clean up, plus the days offline, plus the email blacklisting, plus the awkward conversation with customers if data was involved.
- A site that slowly gets slower quietly sheds rankings and conversions for months before anyone connects the dots.
- A site with no working backup that loses its server loses everything - we covered the full compounding maths in the true cost of a cheap website, and unmaintained sites follow the same curve.
Skipping maintenance on a site that generates business is not saving money; it is borrowing it at a terrible rate.
If you insist on DIY
For a simple brochure site, a competent owner can cover the basics. The honest minimum:
- Automated daily or weekly backups stored off the server, with a restore actually tested once
- Software and plugin updates applied within days of release, not months
- Free uptime monitoring pointed at your homepage with alerts to your phone
- A quarterly speed check on your key pages
- Someone who knows the admin passwords and where the domain is registered, written down, in two places
If you can honestly maintain that list, a minimal plan may be all you need. Most owners keep it up for two months; the value of paying is that it happens in month eleven too.
The bottom line
In 2026, fair UK website maintenance runs from about £30 a month for a simple brochure site to £250 plus for e-commerce, and what you are buying is evidence: patches applied, backups tested, uptime watched, speed held. Pay for that. Do not pay for a mystery line item, and do not pay nothing and call it savings.
Not sure what you are currently getting for your money? Run your site through our free website grader for an objective health check, or talk to us - we will happily give a second opinion on an existing contract, including when the verdict is that it is fine.