Website maintenance: what it involves and what it costs

Website maintenance is the part of a website’s cost that arrives after the launch and never stops. What it should cost depends less on the size of the site than on what it is built on, because a page builder, a WordPress site and a hand-built site need very different amounts of looking after.

What does website maintenance actually involve?

Most quotes put it in one word. It is four separate jobs, and a plan can cover any mix of them.

• Patching

  Patching means applying updates to whatever the site runs on: the content management system, its plugins and theme, and the server language underneath. Updates fix security holes as well as bugs, so an unpatched site is not standing still, it is getting older in a way attackers can see.

• Watching

  Watching covers backups, a tested way to restore them, uptime monitoring, and somebody checking that the contact form still delivers. A form that stops sending fails silently: the site looks fine and the enquiries stop.

• Renewing

  Renewing is the domain on its registration term, often yearly, the security certificate more often than that, and any paid plugin or licence on its own cycle. Each one that lapses takes the site, or part of it, with it.

• Changing

  Changing is the content: a new price, a new service, a staff member leaving, holiday hours. It is the job owners most often forget is maintenance, and the one that decides whether the site is still telling the truth a year after launch.

How much does website maintenance cost in the UK?

There is no regulated or surveyed price, so the honest answer is a range from what providers publish. In October 2026, one UK WordPress support company, Website Helper, listed a care plan at £30 a month covering core, theme and plugin updates, backups and security monitoring, with content changes billed separately and other work at £30 an hour. Agencies’ own guides vary more than that: one 2026 guide puts basic maintenance for a small brochure site at £30 to £75 a month, and prices shops well above that. Check whether a figure includes VAT: a VAT-registered supplier adds the standard rate of 20%, which you cannot reclaim if you are not registered yourself.

Two cautions about those numbers. They come from businesses selling the higher tiers, so read them as what is charged rather than what is fair. And the monthly figure alone tells you little until you know which of the four jobs it covers. A £30 plan that patches and backs up but bills every content change by the hour can cost more in a busy year than a £60 plan that includes changes.

Does a Wix or Squarespace site need maintenance?

Less of it, and that is a large part of what the subscription buys. On a hosted builder, the platform patches its own software, runs the servers and renews the certificate (Wix and Squarespace both issue free certificates automatically), so the first and most of the second job are done for you. What stays yours:

For a builder site, then, the maintenance cost is mostly your own time, plus whatever you pay someone to make changes you cannot or will not make.

Why WordPress maintenance costs more

WordPress is free software that you, or someone you pay, run on a server. That is where its flexibility comes from, and where the work comes from too.

WordPress installs minor core updates and translations automatically by default, and since version 5.6 new installations also update to major releases by themselves. Plugins and themes are different: WordPress’s own documentation says they update automatically by default only in special cases, decided by WordPress.org. You can switch automatic updates on per plugin, and someone still has to check that an update did not break the layout or the form.

Underneath WordPress sits PHP, the language it runs on, and each PHP version has a fixed end of life. According to php.net, PHP 8.2 stops receiving security fixes on 31 December 2026, and PHP 8.3 on 31 December 2027. A site still on 8.2 in January keeps working, but from then on no further security fixes are released for the version it runs on. Moving up a version is usually a setting at the host, followed by checking that every plugin still works, which is exactly the kind of job a maintenance plan exists for.

What should be done every month, and every year?

A workable schedule for a small WordPress site, which also doubles as the list to hold a maintenance supplier to:

1. Weekly or automatic. Backups of files and database, kept somewhere other than the server they back up. Uptime monitoring that alerts a person.
2. Monthly. Plugin, theme and core updates, applied after a backup, followed by a look at the home page, a service page and a test enquiry through the form.
3. Quarterly. A restore test: take a backup and prove it opens. A backup nobody has restored is a hope rather than a backup. Remove plugins nobody uses, and the accounts of people who have left.
4. Yearly. Domain renewal, with the registrant name checked. The PHP version against php.net’s support dates. A read-through of every page for prices, names and services that are no longer true.

Certificates are worth a word because the rules are changing. Let’s Encrypt, the non-profit certificate authority behind the free certificates many hosts and builders install, has announced that its default certificates go from 90 days to 64 days on 10 February 2027 and to 45 days on 16 February 2028. On a host that renews automatically this changes nothing you will notice. On one where someone renews by hand, it means a renewal roughly every six weeks by 2028, which is a strong reason to move to automatic renewal now.

Should you maintain your website yourself?

It depends on the platform and on what an hour of your time is worth, and you can work it out rather than guess. A worked example for a small WordPress site, with assumptions you should replace with your own:

• Monthly updates and checks, about an hour each: 12 hours a year.
• Two content changes a month, about 20 minutes each: 8 hours a year.
• Two afternoons fixing something an update broke: 6 hours a year.

That is 26 hours. At £40 an hour, which is what that time might earn you on a job, that is £1,040 a year. A £50-a-month plan that includes the same work, content changes included, is £600. If your hours are worth less to you, or you enjoy the work, the sum goes the other way. What the sum does not show is the cost of the month the form stopped working and nobody noticed, which is the risk you are really paying someone to carry.

Questions to ask before you sign a maintenance plan

The last question matters more than it looks. If the answer to “whose account is it in” is the supplier’s, web designer disappeared? how to get your website back covers what that can cost later.

How we handle it

We are a pay-monthly studio, so maintenance is in the monthly fee rather than a separate line, and we are not neutral on whether that is a good arrangement. The sites we build are prebuilt pages with no database or plugins, so the patching job is smaller than on WordPress, while the watching, renewing and changing jobs are the same. What each plan includes is on pricing. For an example of content that has to change between lunch and dinner, the restaurant Harker’s Table is a demo we built around a menu that is dated and kept current on the page.

If you already have a WordPress site and it has fallen behind, we also do a one-off WordPress update: a backup, the updates, a security check and a written report, for a fixed price and nothing monthly.

For the whole cost of a site rather than the running part, see how much does a website cost in the UK, and for reading the maintenance line on a quote, how to read a website quote.

Official sources

The official pages behind the points above:

• Supported Versions - PHP
• Upgrading WordPress - WordPress Developer Resources
• 64-Day Certificate Lifetimes Coming Feb 2027 - Let’s Encrypt
• Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days - Let’s Encrypt
• VAT rates - GOV.UK
• About HTTPS and SSL - Wix Help Center
• Understanding SSL certificates - Squarespace Help Center
• WordPress maintenance and support - Website Helper