Every price read at the source
Website maintenance cost in the UK: what you are actually paying for, line by line
Website maintenance for a small UK business costs about £80 to £150 a year if you look after the site yourself, and about £600 a year before VAT if you pay a web firm to do it. That £600 is the middle of nine published UK price lists we read on 30 September 2026, whose entry plans ran from £30 to £180 a month. Below is each line you are paying for, with the price taken from the provider’s own page that night. One thing first: we sell a website service ourselves, so we have an interest in this answer. None of the prices below is ours, and every one is linked so you can check it.
The short version
- The parts are cheap. A .co.uk domain is about £10 a year, basic hosting £7 to £19 a month, and the SSL certificate is free.
- A website builder bundles the parts. Squarespace starts at £12 a month paid yearly, Shopify at £19.
- A maintenance package is mostly someone’s time. Nine UK web firms’ entry plans cost £30 to £180 a month; the middle one was £50.
- Watch the first-year prices. IONOS hosting is £1 a month for 12 months, then £9.
- Watch the VAT. Most plans are priced before it. If you are not VAT-registered, a £50 plan costs you £60.
- Most packages are for WordPress. On a website builder the platform does the updates, so you are paying for much less.
Website maintenance cost, line by line
Every website, whoever looks after it, costs the same few things to keep running. These are the prices each provider showed on its own UK page on 30 September 2026. They are examples to show the scale, not a recommendation.
| Item | What it is | Price on the provider’s page, 30 September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name (.co.uk) | Your address. Renewed every year. | IONOS: £1 for the first year, against a normal price of £10 a year, before VAT. |
| Hosting | The server your site lives on. | Krystal: £7 a month (Amethyst) to £19 a month (Emerald), or £70 and £190 paid yearly, before VAT. IONOS Plus: £1 a month for 12 months, then £9 a month, before VAT. |
| SSL certificate | The padlock. Without it, browsers warn visitors off. | Free. Let’s Encrypt is a nonprofit providing "free TLS certificates", and Krystal, Squarespace and Shopify all list free SSL with their plans. |
| Website builder | Hosting, SSL and software updates in one monthly plan. | Squarespace Basic: £16 a month, or £12 a month paid yearly. Shopify Basic: £25 a month, or £19 a month paid yearly. Neither page says beside the price whether VAT is included. |
| Premium plugins (WordPress only) | Paid add-ons, if your site uses them. | For example Yoast SEO Premium: £118.80 a year, before VAT. |
| Someone’s time | Changes, fixes, advice. | WPMaintain: £55 an hour plus VAT once a plan’s included hour is used. SWS: £35 an hour ad hoc, £30 on a plan. |
We tried to include Wix, but its plans page served us prices in another currency, so we have left it out rather than guess.
Add up the parts for a simple WordPress site and you get about £80 a year before VAT: £70 of hosting and £10 of domain. That is the floor. Everything a maintenance package charges above it is paying for a person’s time and attention.
Website maintenance packages: nine published UK price lists
Plenty of UK web firms publish their monthly maintenance prices. We read nine of them on 30 September 2026, all found through ordinary searches, and noted the cheapest plan each one offered. This is a sample of nine price lists, not a survey of the market.
| Firm | Entry plan, per month | Higher tiers, per month | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| TRdesigns | £30 | £65, £100 | VAT not mentioned on the page. Support time only from the £65 tier (60 minutes). |
| Poppy Design Studio | £39 + VAT | £59 + VAT | Rolling monthly. Includes minor tweaks and blog uploads. |
| SWS | £49 + VAT | £79, £279 | Hosting included. |
| MKX Design | £49.99 + VAT | £89.99, £179.99 | Support time from the second tier: one hour, then two. |
| Red Sentence | £50 + VAT | £100, £250, £500 | Hosting included. One table on the page gives this plan as £50 and a second gives £100, so ask. |
| Gavin Willis | from £60 + VAT | from £120, £240, £499 | 60 minutes of support a month on the entry plan; response within 4 hours. |
| WPMaintain | £79 + VAT | £99 (shops and memberships) | UK hosting and one hour of development time included. |
| Figment | from £150 + VAT | not listed | Only the starting price is published. |
| Neil Patmore | £180 | £360, £600 | VAT not mentioned on the page. |
Sorted by price, the nine entry plans run £30, £39, £49, £49.99, £50, £60, £79, £150 and £180 a month. The middle one is £50, which is £600 a year before VAT. Every one of the nine is written for WordPress sites.
The higher tiers mostly buy three things: more support time each month, faster response when something breaks, and extra care for online shops. MKX Design’s tiers add one hour and then two hours of support. Red Sentence adds support hours, off-site backups and uptime monitoring as you move up.
The two things that change the number
The first-year price. Hosting and domains are often sold cheaply for the first year and then renew at the normal rate. IONOS’s Plus hosting is £1 a month for 12 months, then £9 a month, so £12 in year one becomes £108 a year after it, before VAT. Its .co.uk domain is £1 for the first year against a normal price of £10. Budget on the renewal price, not the offer.
VAT. Most of the plans above are priced before VAT; WPMaintain puts it plainly: "Prices are monthly and exclude VAT". That matters most if your business is not VAT-registered, which is only compulsory once your taxable turnover goes over £90,000, or you expect it to, according to gov.uk. If you are not registered, the extra 20% is a straight cost: £50 a month is really £60, and £600 a year is really £720.
Three example budgets
Our own arithmetic from the prices above, before your time is counted.
| If you… | Roughly, per year | How we got there |
|---|---|---|
| use a website builder and make changes yourself | £144 | Squarespace Basic at £12 a month, paid yearly. Hosting, SSL and a domain for the first year are included. |
| run WordPress and do the updates yourself | about £80 before VAT | Krystal Amethyst at £70 a year plus a .co.uk at £10. Add any premium plugins, and your own time. |
| run WordPress and pay a web firm to look after it | about £600 before VAT | The middle entry plan in our sample, £50 a month. Add hosting and the domain if the plan does not include them. |
Does a website-builder site need maintenance?
Much less. On Squarespace or Shopify, the hosting, the security certificate and the software are the platform’s job. Squarespace’s page says it "automatically creates and configures free SSL certificates". There are no plugins for you to update and no server to patch.
What a builder cannot do is keep your content current or remember your renewals. As we found when we asked whether you can have a website that never goes down and never needs updating, the technical upkeep can be cut to almost nothing, but the content upkeep cannot. An expired domain or a hosting bill on the card of someone who has left will take a site offline just as surely as a broken plugin.
What you should get for the money
If you are paying for a maintenance package, these are the questions worth asking before you sign.
- Are updates applied and checked? WordPress, the theme and every plugin, at a set frequency, with someone looking at the site afterwards.
- Where are the backups kept, and has anyone tried restoring one? A backup on the same server as the site does not help if the server goes.
- Will someone notice if the site goes down? Uptime monitoring means they are told, rather than you hearing it from a customer.
- How much of your time is included, and what does an hour cost after that? This is where two £50 plans differ most.
- What is the response time, in writing? Gavin Willis, for example, publishes 4 hours to respond and 24 hours to fix on its entry plan.
- Are the domain and hosting in your name? If the firm owns the accounts, leaving becomes difficult.
- Is it monthly, and is VAT on top? A rolling monthly contract is easier to leave than an annual one.
Our interest, and what argues the other way
We make beam.page, a website service where your own AI assistant builds and updates the site. A small site on a beam.page address is free, and your own domain is £9.99 a month. So we benefit if you conclude that maintenance should be cheap. Here is the case against that conclusion.
- A good maintenance plan buys a person, not just updates. If your site takes bookings or sells things, an afternoon offline can cost more than a year of a £50 plan. Paying for someone who answers the phone is a reasonable choice.
- WordPress updates are not optional. If your site runs WordPress, skipping maintenance to save £50 a month means nobody is applying the security updates.
- Our sample leans cheap. The firms that publish prices are the ones selling standard plans. Many agencies quote privately, and larger ones often charge more than anything in our table.
- A builder is not free of costs. You rent the platform for as long as the site exists, and moving away later usually means rebuilding the site somewhere else.
Sources, and what we checked
- Every price comes from the provider’s own page, read on 30 September 2026 and read again on 2 October 2026, the day this was published; none had changed. The links are in the tables above. Prices change, so check the page before you buy.
- The nine maintenance firms are the ones whose price lists we could read in full. Two more that searches turned up would not load for us, so they are not included.
- VAT registration threshold: gov.uk, How VAT works: VAT thresholds.
- The yearly figures and the middle price are our own arithmetic from those pages.
- Every quotation above was tested automatically against the text of its source page before publication.