The monthly cost of a website is the part nobody asks about during the sales process and everybody asks about around month 14, when a renewal invoice lands and bears no resemblance to the number in the original proposal. It is also the part where the same word covers wildly different amounts of actual work, which is why comparing two quotes is harder than it looks.
For most UK small businesses, a website costs £20 to £150 a month to run. Hosting alone can be as little as £3 to £15. A basic maintenance plan covering automated updates, backups and uptime monitoring runs £30 to £75. A properly managed plan with a human reviewing things and a small allowance of developer time runs £75 to £200. What separates those tiers is not features on a list, it is whether anybody is actually looking at your site.
Quick links
- How much does a website cost per month?
- What you get at each price point
- Do you need a maintenance plan at all?
- What actually breaks when nobody is looking
- Maintenance is not marketing
- Questions worth asking before you sign
How much does a website cost per month?
Between £20 and £150 a month for most UK small businesses, once hosting and maintenance are both counted.
| What you are paying for | Typical UK monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Hosting and domain only | £5 to £20 |
| Basic maintenance plan | £30 to £75 |
| Managed plan with human review | £75 to £200 |
| Premium plan with strategy and dev time | £200 to £500+ |
| Full marketing retainer | £500 upwards |
Current UK market data puts fully managed small business plans between £29 and £100 a month, with the standard managed tier at £75 to £200 and premium plans running £200 to £500 or more. Other UK guides land in the same place, putting real rates at £20 to £150 a month. The commonly cited sweet spot for a small business sits around £50 to £80.
Our own retainers start at £500 a month, which puts us above the maintenance bracket entirely. That is deliberate: what we sell at that price is content, search and AI visibility work rather than patching, and plenty of clients are better off with a £60 maintenance plan and no retainer. We would rather say that than sell the wrong thing.
What you get at each price point
The word “maintenance” covers wildly different work. Roughly:
£30 to £75 a month. Automated plugin and theme updates, scheduled backups, uptime monitoring, basic security scanning. Little or no human review. This is automation with an invoice attached, and for a simple site that is genuinely fine.
£75 to £200 a month. Manual review of updates before they go live, performance monitoring, monthly reporting, broken link checks, SSL management, and a small allowance of developer time for minor fixes. The important difference is the human: someone checks that an update has not broken your booking form before you find out from a customer.
£200 to £500 and above. Dedicated account management, more developer time, priority support, periodic strategy reviews. Worth it when the site is genuinely business-critical and downtime costs real money.
The jump that matters is the first one. Automated updates are the leading cause of a site quietly breaking, because a plugin update at 3am does not know your checkout depends on it. Paying for someone to look is the difference between maintenance and a subscription.
Do you need a maintenance plan at all?
It depends almost entirely on what your site is built on.
A WordPress site genuinely needs maintaining. Core, themes and plugins all ship security patches, and an unpatched WordPress install is one of the more reliably exploited things on the internet. Skipping maintenance there is not a saving, it is an accepted risk with a delayed invoice.
A static or headless site has far less to maintain. There is no plugin ecosystem, no database exposed to the internet, and no admin login to brute force. It still needs hosting, backups and the occasional dependency update, but the ongoing burden is genuinely lower. That difference compounds over a five-year life and is one of the reasons we build the way we do.
The honest test is what happens if you do nothing for six months. On a headless site, very little. On a plugin-heavy WordPress site, you are accumulating a problem.
What actually breaks when nobody is looking
Neglect rarely announces itself. It shows up as a series of small failures that nobody notices until one of them costs money.
Forms stop sending. The single most common one. A plugin update, an expired API key or a mail provider change breaks the contact form, and because nothing visibly changes on the page, the first sign is a quiet quarter.
Certificates expire. Modern hosting mostly auto-renews SSL, but when it fails browsers show a full-page security warning. Most visitors do not read it, they leave.
Plugins drift out of compatibility. Each one is fine alone. Together, after eight months of independent updates, something conflicts and a page starts rendering wrong on mobile only.
Backups quietly stop running. Discovered exclusively at the worst possible moment.
None of these need a premium plan. They need somebody looking occasionally, which is the entire argument for paying anything at all.
Maintenance is not marketing
Keeping a site working and making it earn money are different jobs at different prices, and blurring them is how people end up disappointed.
Maintenance means the site stays up, stays fast and stays patched. It does not mean the site gets better. A perfectly maintained site can sit there for two years generating nothing at all, which is the most common version of a website problem we see.
Marketing work means content, search visibility, conversion improvements, and increasingly whether AI assistants can read and cite you when someone asks about your market. That is a different budget and a different conversation. We cover what that costs in GEO pricing.
If a quote runs the two together, ask for the split. You want to know what you are paying to keep the lights on and what you are paying to grow, because the first has a ceiling and the second does not.
Questions worth asking before you sign
- How much human time is included? In hours, not adjectives. “Ongoing support” is not a quantity.
- What happens out of hours? If the site goes down on a Saturday, who looks, and how quickly?
- Who owns the hosting account? If it is in the agency’s name, moving away later is harder than it should be. Ask for it in yours.
- Are backups tested? Everyone takes backups. Considerably fewer have ever restored one.
- What is not covered? Content changes, new pages and design work are usually extra. Find the line before you need it.
- Can I leave? Notice period, and whether you get a clean export of the site and the database.
If the answers are clear and the price is at the higher end, that is usually money well spent. If the answers are vague and the price is low, you are buying an invoice rather than a service.
Find out what your site actually needs
Before committing to a monthly plan, it is worth knowing what condition the site is in. Our free website audit grades speed, Core Web Vitals, technical SEO and whether AI assistants can read your pages. It will tell you whether you need maintenance, a rebuild, or nothing at all right now.
- An honest read on whether a plan is worth paying for at all
- Ranked by impact, so you know what to fix before you budget for it
- Free, with no obligation either way