How Much Does It Cost to Maintain a Website?

Building a website is only the start. Like a car, it needs regular care to keep running smoothly, stay secure and perform well on Google. Yet the ongoing costs are often the part of the budget business owners forget.

In this guide I'll break down exactly how much it costs to maintain a website in the UK, what you're paying for, how costs differ by platform, and what happens if you don't maintain your site at all. If you're still at the planning stage, read our guide to how much a website costs to build first.

The Short Answer

For a typical UK small business website, ongoing costs usually fall somewhere between £150 and £1,500 a year, depending on your platform, your hosting and how much support you want. Ecommerce and larger websites typically cost more.

Rule of thumb: budget roughly 10–20% of your original website build cost each year for hosting, maintenance and small improvements.

What Is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance is the ongoing work that keeps your website secure, fast, working properly and up to date. It typically includes:

• Software updates to your platform, theme and plugins
• Security monitoring and malware protection
• Regular backups, so you can restore your site if something goes wrong
• Uptime monitoring, so problems are spotted quickly
• Speed checks and optimisation
• Fixing broken links, forms and errors
• Content updates, such as new services, prices, team members and photos

The Costs of Running a Website, Explained

Domain name

Your domain (for example yourbusiness.co.uk) typically costs £10–£20 a year. Always make sure the domain is registered in your name, not your designer's.

Hosting

Hosting is where your website lives. Cheap shared hosting can cost as little as £5 a month, but it's often slow. Good-quality managed hosting for a small business typically costs £15–£35 a month and makes a noticeable difference to speed, security and support. Speed matters for both visitors and Google.

Security

Security includes an SSL certificate (the padlock in the browser), a firewall, malware scanning and login protection. Many of these are included with good hosting or a maintenance plan.

Updates

Platforms like WordPress release regular updates, as do themes and plugins. Updates fix security holes and bugs, but they occasionally cause conflicts, which is why they're best handled by someone who knows what to check afterwards.

Backups

Regular, off-site backups are your insurance policy. If your site is hacked or an update breaks something, a backup can have you back online in minutes rather than days.

Website Maintenance Costs by Platform

WordPress

WordPress itself is free, but you'll pay for hosting, and possibly for premium themes and plugins. WordPress needs regular updates, so a maintenance plan is strongly recommended. Typical total: £300–£1,500 a year.

Shopify

Shopify includes hosting, security and updates in its monthly plan, which starts at roughly £20–£25 a month. Many stores also pay for apps, which can add up quickly. Typical total: £300–£1,500+ a year.

Website builders (Wix, Squarespace)

Hosting and updates are included in a monthly subscription, typically around £10–£40 a month. There's less to maintain, but you have less control over speed and SEO. See our comparison of website builders vs professional web design.

What Happens If You Don't Maintain Your Website?

Skipping maintenance can seem like an easy saving, until something goes wrong. The risks include:

• Security breaches. Outdated software is the most common way small business websites get hacked.
• Broken features. Contact forms stop sending, pages break and you miss enquiries without realising.
• Slower speeds that frustrate visitors and hurt rankings.
• Lost data if there's no recent backup.
• Falling Google rankings from errors, slow pages and outdated content.
• Expensive emergency fixes that cost far more than regular maintenance would have.

Hidden cost: a contact form that silently stops working can cost you weeks of enquiries before you notice. Regular checks catch this quickly.

DIY Maintenance vs a Maintenance Plan

Doing it yourself

If you're confident with technology, you can handle updates, backups and simple content changes yourself. The cost is your time, and the risk is what happens if an update breaks something and you don't know how to fix it.

A professional maintenance plan

A maintenance plan, typically £30–£150 a month for a small business, means someone else handles updates, backups, security and monitoring. Many plans also include a set amount of time for content changes. For most business owners, the peace of mind and time saved are well worth it.

How to Keep Website Running Costs Down

• Choose quality hosting. It prevents many problems and saves money in the long run.
• Avoid unnecessary plugins and apps. Each one adds cost, maintenance and potential conflicts.
• Build it properly first time. A well-built website needs far less fixing.
• Choose a platform you can edit yourself for simple content changes.
• Review app and plugin subscriptions once a year and cancel what you don't use.
• Keep backups so problems never become disasters.

How We Build Low-Maintenance Websites

At SERPentity, we build websites to be fast, secure and easy for you to update. That keeps ongoing costs down. Our client Simon Brooks came to us because updating his old site was slow and awkward. With his new website, changes that used to take ages can now be made in a fraction of the time.

We keep things lean, avoid unnecessary plugins and apps, and make sure you own everything. See our web design services for more.

Maintenance and SEO Go Hand in Hand

A well-maintained website is also better for SEO. Google favours sites that load quickly, work properly and stay up to date. Regularly adding and updating content, such as new service pages, project photos and blog posts, gives Google fresh reasons to rank you.

If you're investing in SEO, maintenance protects that investment. There's little point building rankings on a site that's slow, broken or insecure.

Website Maintenance Checklist

Whether you manage your website yourself or use a maintenance plan, this is what should happen regularly:

• Weekly: check forms and contact details work, review security alerts, confirm backups are running
• Monthly: update your platform, theme and plugins or apps; check site speed; fix broken links; review Google Search Console for errors
• Quarterly: refresh key content, add new photos, reviews and case studies, and review your analytics
• Annually: renew your domain and hosting, review subscriptions, check your privacy policy, and consider whether the site still reflects your business

Keeping on top of these small tasks prevents most of the expensive problems businesses run into.

Final Thoughts

Website maintenance isn't glamorous, but it protects one of your most important business assets. Budget for it from the start, choose quality hosting, and make sure someone is keeping your site secure, fast and up to date.

Want a website that's fast, secure and easy to look after? Get in touch and we'll show you how we build them.