So, you’ve invested in a stunning new website, but just how much will it cost you to maintain it?
This question might seem simple, but like all things tech, when you dig a little deeper it can get more complex.
Let’s look at some of the important steps behind the management of any website.
Introduction
Essentially the principle aim is to keep your website running, and to keep those hackers at bay.
There are seven main components that we as an agency factor into our monthly maintenance plans for our customers.
- Updates
- Fixes
- Uptime
- Errors (bugs)
- Speed
- Recovery (backups)
- Support
In addition to this, if you are an agency providing website maintenance? then also bear in mind your customers are expecting a very high level of responsiveness (uptime), quick turnaround to questions and completion of support tickets, as well as expert advice on just how to get the very best from their websites so they don’t stagnate!
Let’s go into each of these stages in more depth:
Updates
Websites aren’t static, they need to evolve. Regularly updating your content is essential if you want to stay ahead and be a leader in your field.
For informational websites what we term “service-based websites” they provide information that needs to change regularly on a monthly basis. May be your provide website tips on How to save money? How to get rid of pests in your home? What is the best personal bank to setup an account with?
On a fast-moving news or e-commerce website, the content will require updating daily or even hourly.
The beauty of modern Content Management Systems, such as WordPress, Shopify or Magento is that they allow non-technical staff to update the website with confidence and minimal training.
But in many cases, you might want to outsource the updating of your website to your web design or marketing agency.
Whatever the situation, a website management package should offer these updates in your maintenance package.
Therefore, the frequency and complexity of updates will be a key driver of the cost of your maintenance service.
How updates contribute to cost
Your website is typically built on one of these three platforms WordPress, Magento, or Shopify, and the maintenance costs can vary significantly. For example, Magento is considered an enterprise-level solution, which means developers charge higher rates due to the level of learning required, which naturally increases the update and maintenance expenses.
Keeping your website bang up to date is the right way to guard against software bugs that can throw your site offline if it’s not looked after.
Keeping your SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate up to date is also essential for maintaining a secure and trustworthy online presence. An active SSL certificate encrypts the connection between your website and its visitors, safeguarding sensitive information such as passwords and credit and debit payment details. Expired or outdated SSL certificates can expose your site to vulnerabilities, cause browser warnings, and erode customer trust. Regular updates ensure compliance with the latest security protocols, protecting your site from cyber threats and enhancing its credibility with users and search engines alike.
SSL certificates are issued by Certificate Authorities (CAs), such as DigiCert, GlobalSign, and Sectigo, and they are typically the ones charging for them. These companies verify the identity of the website owner and ensure the encryption is secure. While some CAs provide free SSL certificates (e.g., Let’s Encrypt), others charge for different levels of validation, warranty, or support. We suggest a paid for certificate if you website is requiring payments from your customers.
The “tax-like” perception comes from the fact that secure HTTPS connections are now mandatory for user trust, SEO rankings, and compliance (like GDPR or PCI-DSS).
Whilst agencies like ours recommend or implement SSL certificates, we are not responsible for the associated costs..
A CMP (Consent Management Platform) is crucial for websites to ensure compliance with data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA. It allows businesses to collect, manage, and store user consent for tracking cookies and processing personal data. Implementing a CMP builds trust with your audience by providing transparency about data usage and offering clear choices to accept or decline. Without a CMP, your website risks legal penalties, potential fines, and damage to your brand’s reputation. A robust CMP not only ensures regulatory compliance but also demonstrates your commitment to protecting user privacy.
Sorry I have gone all teckie on you all, but this is one of the reasons why, if you try and do this yourself problems can and will occur as all these rules of trading online apply.
SSL’s ensure a high-level of protection from hackers so they are important.
Uptime
Your website needs to be open for business 24/7. Uptime is a tool we use to measure just how long your website is online for, in a given month.
It’s measured as a percentage (the higher the better).
For example, if a website was available for an entire month without any outages or offline time, it would have a monthly uptime score of 100%.
Here is an example of our mailserver and ad-lister software service
If you had 45 minutes of outages during that month, it would have a down time of 10% and an uptime of 90%. This is considered high, and for many ecommerce websites, the site must be online 100% of time otherwise it can result in large losses and a reason for them to switch to another hosting company.
Achieving 99% uptime for a website can be challenging due to various factors such as hackers attempting to disrupt successful sites and the wear and tear on the server hardware. These issues necessitate a comprehensive maintenance plan to ensure optimal performance and security. Don’t go cheap!
How uptime contributes to cost
In terms of uptime, the cost will be driven by two main factors: the reliability of your web server(s) and the reliability of your website content management software (CMS).
The power and reliability of your servers is in turn driven by your needs in terms of the amount of traffic that your site typically receives each month.
But the power needed must cater not just for “average” traffic, but for spikes in traffic caused during busy times e.g. Black Friday. Other causes of website downtime include hardware failure – after all, every website is hosted on some physical machine somewhere in the world (even cloud-hosted websites).
Issues with your DNS – the records that tell the Internet where to go to display your website – are another very common cause. Robust “premium” DNS hosting is advisable but this costs more than “cheap” DNS provided by large-scale web hosting companies. Don’t get caught out!
Denial of Service attacks (DDOS) are another cause of website downtime. These are caused when your site is deliberately bombarded with requests from multiple locations.
This is a type of attack and whilst higher-profile sites are more at risk, it can happen to anybody.
To combat against DDOS, web firewalls are advised but again, these drive up the cost of your website hosting and maintenance.
Hacking: almost all websites are vulnerable to hacking and some types of websites much more than others.
Hackers are always one step ahead of the game and are extremely good at finding new vulnerabilities in the software that runs your website. We often see this with WordPress websites if our customers do not choose a maintenance plan as hackers seek to target older plugins that haven’t been updated.
Maintenance service plans keep your website software up to date at all times in order to ensure the latest updates fix known vulnerabilities.
Errors (bugs)
Errors are problems which cause the website to malfunction.
From the server it’s hosted on, to the database that contains your website content, to the content management system that allows you to update it, it’s often HTML and JavaScript code where bugs can and do creep in.
Some errors don’t cause too big a problem on the site and are more of an annoyance. For example, broken links, missing images, typos or out of date plug-ins.
Other errors are “mission critical”. For example, an error that prevents a customer from making a payment on an e-commerce website would be a high priority bug that needs urgent attention.
For this reason we categorise errors into low, medium and high priority errors. The goal is to reduce and eliminate all types of error, but with a particular focus on the high priority, mission critical errors.
You should expect a website maintenance agency to have different processes in place for dealing with such emergencies (weekend problems too for the high-end websites) than just handling routine maintenance or the updating of plug-ins.
To combat against DDOS, web firewalls are advised but as mentioned above, these drive up the cost of your website hosting and maintenance.
Hacking: almost all websites are vulnerable to hacking and some types of sites much more than others.
Hackers are constantly staying ahead of the game, adept at uncovering new vulnerabilities in the software powering your website. Based on our experience with building WordPress and Magento websites, outdated or legacy code often becomes an easy target. Hackers actively scan for such vulnerabilities, exploiting default or older code to compromise sites, causing disruptions or even taking them offline.
Keeping your website’s software updated is critical to stay protected against these evolving threats.
Maintenance Plans keep your website software up to date at all times in order to ensure the latest updates that fix known vulnerabilities apply.
How error fixing contributes to cost
The frequency of software updates plays a significant role in determining the cost of a website maintenance plan. Regular updates are essential to ensure your website remains secure, compatible with the latest technologies, and optimized for performance. However, frequent updates can increase maintenance costs as they require careful implementation, testing, and monitoring to avoid disruptions. On the other hand, neglecting updates can lead to higher expenses in the long run due to potential security breaches, compatibility issues, and diminished user experience. Striking the right balance between update frequency and maintenance budgets is crucial for maintaining a secure and reliable website.
Speed
We’ve all experienced the irritation and inconvenience of trying to use a website that runs slowly.
Studies show that adding just 1 second of speed to each web page load can reduce e-commerce sales by up to 10%.
Did you know 47% of website users expect a web page to load in under 2 seconds?
And after 3.3 seconds, conversion rates (e.g., purchases or signups) drop off dramatically.
Speed is money in the online world and most users are using a mobile. Can you imagine waiting 4 seconds for a web page to load?
For this reason speed is a key measurement in website maintenance.
Website speed is a critical factor for user experience and search engine rankings, and it is commonly assessed using various online tools. Google Search Console, for instance, provides access to Core Web Vitals—a suite of metrics that evaluate key aspects of website usability, including page loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. These metrics are vital for understanding how well your website performs for real-world users.
In addition to Search Console, tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix offer in-depth performance analysis. PageSpeed Insights evaluates your site across mobile and desktop platforms, providing actionable recommendations to improve speed and efficiency. GTmetrix combines speed metrics with detailed reports on elements affecting performance, such as page size, resource requests, and script optimizations.
Using these tools together helps identify and address bottlenecks, ensuring your website meets modern performance standards and delivers a seamless user experience.
How speed contributes to cost
Most website maintenance programmes include measuring these metrics on a monthly basis. “We certainly do!”
Additionally, you should expect action to be taken if a measure of website speed drops to levels that affect your business.
Website speed is heavily influenced by how and where your site is hosted. While there are plenty of cheap hosting options available, it’s important to understand that these often involve sharing server resources, such as disk space and processing power, with thousands of other websites. This shared setup can significantly impact your site’s performance.
Think of it like choosing a car. A budget option, like a Ford Fiesta, will get you from A to B, but it’s not built for speed or comfort of those long journeys. Now compare that to a BMW or Audi, both designed for superior performance and a smoother ride. The difference is clear. Similarly, with hosting, you get what you pay for. Investing in quality hosting ensures your website is faster, more reliable, and better equipped to handle traffic, just as a premium car delivers a better overall driving experience.
But the more traffic a website attracts, the more robust and powerful your web server needs to be. The costs can reach hundreds or thousands of pounds each month, depending on the complexity of the website and the amount of traffic it must cope with.
Recovery (backups)
One of the most overlooked aspects of website maintenance is recovery. When a website crashes or becomes corrupted—due to issues like software conflicts, hacking attempts, or server failures—the ability to restore your website quickly is critical to minimise downtime and disruption.
In cases of severe corruption, the site may need to be fully restored from a backup. This makes having a reliable and up-to-date backup system essential for recovery. Without it, you risk losing valuable data and functionality, potentially leading to prolonged outages.
Think of recovery as your website’s insurance policy: it’s rarely needed, but when it is, it’s absolutely vital. A swift recovery process ensures your site can be brought back online efficiently, protecting your business operations and reputation.
How recovery contributes to cost
Regularly testing your site’s recoverability is essential to ensure it can be restored quickly when needed. As the saying goes, “If you don’t test your backup, you don’t really have a backup.” Without this critical step, you risk facing prolonged downtime during emergencies potentially waiting days instead of hours to get your website back online. At We Host we back up our customers websites weekly.
While recovery is hopefully a rare necessity, when the need arises, speed is crucial. The frequency of backups depends on your website’s specific requirements. For some, a daily backup might suffice, while others, particularly ecommerce websites, may require continuous backups to capture real-time data for example new customers. This is vital for businesses where orders and customer interactions occur throughout the day, as losing this information can severely impact operations.
By implementing and testing a robust recovery plan, you ensure your website’s resilience and minimise disruptions when the unexpected happens.
Support
The most important part of the service is the ability to be able to call a web professional when you’ve made a mistake editing your webpage?
Perhaps you prefer to outsource the entire management of your website to an agency?
Whatever level of support you need, it’s a key driving factor in the cost of website maintenance because the service will usually bundle in a number of hours per month or year reserved for supporting you and your website.
The cost of this support will vary depending on how it’s delivered (by phone, email or Zoho Meeting/Zoom/Teams/Google Meet etc.) and just how many hours are required.
Ensure the agency you choose has a dedicated team of professionals. Relying on a one-person operation can introduce significant risks, such as limited availability and expertise. A robust team ensures consistent, reliable website support and long-term peace of mind.
Average cost of monthly/yearly website maintenance in the UK
So, this brings us full circle in answering what is the cost of website maintenance?
Each of the seven pillars above are important in making your decision. Your website maintenance company will take into account all of the above factors when pricing up your maintenance package, or at least they should do!
They will look at: the amount of traffic your site receives and therefore where best to host it, they will look at how large the footprint of the website is, including the database size. The power required to keep your site running quickly, the risks and harm caused by outages and slow running, and the appropriate amount of backup and recovery points, frequency and complexity of updates, amount of support you need.
Monthly website maintenance packages in 2025 will vary in price from £100 per to over £1500.
We’ve been working on our customers websites since 2003 when we first started our agency and we always address our prices based on the competition to stay competitive!
The graph below shows the average monthly costs for website maintenance packages across the three tiers (Basic, Mid-Range, and High-End) from 2018 to 2024.
Basic Website Maintenance Package
A basic package typically includes essential updates like software/plugin updates, security monitoring, and basic backups, usually for platforms like WordPress or Shopify. It’s ideal for small businesses with straightforward websites requiring minimal upkeep.
Mid-Range Website Maintenance Package
Mid-range packages expand on the basics with features from the seven pillars (but not all) like enhanced security, performance optimisation, and monthly content updates. They cater to growing businesses using platforms like Shopify Plus or custom themes on WordPress.
High-End Website Maintenance Package
High-end packages are tailored for complex needs, covering all seven pillars typically for platforms like Magento and bespoke PHP or Laravel-built websites. They include advanced features like custom development, full-stack technical support, and detailed analytics reporting.
Website maintenance costs have been steadily rising year-on-year, keeping pace with inflation.
The chart above compares website maintenance costs across three tier, Low-End, Mid-Range, and High-End for 2023 and 2024. It highlights the rising costs, with notable growth in competitive low-end services and premium high-end offerings. We project average monthly costs to reach up to £50 for Low-End services, up to £100 for Mid-Range agencies, and up to £1,600 for High-End providers in 2025.
Find out more about our professional website maintenance service.
A tailored, scalable website maintenance package that ensures optimal performance security, and continuous improvement.