Last year I got a call from a business owner in Bristol whose website had been down for nine days. Nine days. She'd only found out because a customer mentioned it in passing.
The site had been built four years earlier by someone who'd since moved on. The hosting was on an expired card. Nobody was monitoring anything. And the honest answer to "whose job was it to notice?" was: nobody's.
That's the thing nobody explains when you buy a website. The build is a project. Keeping it alive is a job.
The short answer
For a small business website in the UK, ongoing maintenance realistically costs somewhere between £15 and £300 a month, depending on how much is actually being done.
That's a wide range, and the reason is that "website maintenance" describes at least three completely different things. Let's separate them.
Level one: keeping it online (£15 to £50 a month)
The bare minimum. Hosting, a domain name, an SSL certificate, backups, and someone applying security updates when they're released.
This is not glamorous and it does not grow your business. What it does is stop your website from breaking, getting hacked, or quietly disappearing because a renewal failed. It's the equivalent of insuring a van; you resent paying for it right up until the day you don't have it.
If you're paying nothing at all for this, you're not saving money. You're carrying the risk yourself.
Level two: keeping it current (£50 to £150 a month)
Everything above, plus someone making changes.
New prices. Updated opening hours. A staff member who's left. Photos from the job you finished last week. The new service you started offering in March and still haven't put on the site in August.
This is where most small business websites fall down. Not through disaster, but through slow drift. The site says you close at 5pm when you now close at 6. It lists a service you've stopped doing. There's a photo of a team that's changed twice since. Individually these are trivial. Collectively they tell a visitor you're not paying attention.
At this level you should also expect some basic search work: making sure Google can read the site properly, keeping your Google Business Profile accurate, and fixing things when they break.
Level three: making it work harder (£150 to £300+ a month)
Everything above, plus genuine marketing effort.
Local SEO campaigns. Content written and published regularly. Keyword tracking so you know whether you're going up or down for "hairdresser Cardiff" or "electrician Bristol". Conversion tracking so you know how many enquiries the site is generating, not just how many visitors it's getting.
This tier only makes sense if your website is genuinely how customers find you. If you get all your work through word of mouth and a trade association listing, don't pay for it. If your website is your shopfront, it's probably the best value money you'll spend.
What should be included, whatever you pay
Wherever you land, these should be in the deal:
- Hosting, domain and SSL, not billed separately as a surprise in month eleven
- Backups you can actually restore from, taken daily and kept for at least 30 days
- Security updates applied promptly rather than annually
- Uptime monitoring, so someone knows the site is down before your customer tells you
- A named person who answers, rather than a ticket queue
If you can't get a straight answer about what happens when your site goes down at 4pm on a Friday, that tells you most of what you need to know.
The questions worth asking
Before you sign anything, ask these four. The answers are more revealing than the price.
"What do I get in writing each month?" If the work is invisible, you have no way to judge whether you're getting value. A monthly report doesn't need to be elaborate. It needs to exist.
"Am I tied in, and what happens if I leave?" A minimum term isn't automatically a red flag; there are legitimate reasons for one, particularly if your build cost was reduced in exchange. What matters is that it's explained clearly and that leaving is actually possible.
"Do I own my domain?" It should be registered in your name, with you having access. If your designer owns your domain, you don't own your business's address on the internet. This is the most common way small businesses get stuck.
"What isn't included?" Every plan has a boundary. A good one tells you where it is upfront.
The bit people get wrong
The most expensive maintenance arrangement isn't the £300/month one. It's the £25/month one where nothing meaningful happens and nobody notices for three years.
I've picked up sites where the owner had been paying a small monthly fee to a company that was, as far as I could tell, doing nothing beyond keeping the server switched on. No updates, no backups, no reporting. Cheap, technically. Terrible value.
Cost per month is the wrong measure. Cost per outcome is the right one, and the outcome you want is a website that's online, accurate, and gradually bringing you more work than it did last year.
So what should you do?
If your website is a digital business card and you're comfortable with the technical side, pay for good hosting and handle the rest yourself. That's a perfectly reasonable answer, and I tell people so regularly.
If your website matters to your business but you have no interest in maintaining it (which describes most business owners I meet), get someone to look after it properly. Somewhere between £50 and £150 a month covers most small businesses well.
And if your website is genuinely the main way customers find you, treat that budget as marketing spend rather than an IT cost. Compare it to what a month of local advertising costs you, not to what your broadband costs.
Wrapping up
Websites aren't ornaments. They're tools, and tools need maintaining. But you should know exactly what you're paying for and be able to see what's being done.
For my own clients, hosting is £20 a month on every site I build, which covers UK server space, the SSL certificate and the domain renewal. Care plans start at £49 a month with that hosting already included, going up to full local SEO with monthly reporting. There's a full FAQ if you want the detail, and I've also written about what a website itself should cost if you're at an earlier stage than this.
If you're not sure which level you need, get in touch and I'll give you an honest opinion, including "you don't need this" if that's the truth.