Honest Pricing Guide
What should website maintenance actually cost in the UK — and what are you really getting?
Almost every guide to UK website maintenance costs is written by a company selling maintenance plans. We are an IT support firm, not a plan shop — so here are the verified 2026 market rates, what a legitimate plan must include, and a quick way to check whether your monthly fee still makes sense. Rated 4.9 on Google.
- ● Verified 2026 UK market rates
- ● No tiers to sell you — quote-based
- ● Family-run since 1995
The Short Answer
The short answer — and why the long answer matters
Here is the honest 2026 picture for a typical UK small-business website. Published guides from UK maintenance providers put most small-business WordPress maintenance at roughly £40–£120 a month (Gilmour Web Design), monthly retainers from established specialists at £75–£200, and a sensible annual budget at £1,000–£2,500 (ThriveWP). EJK Web Solutions breaks the market into budget national providers at £20–£40 a month, local specialists at £80–£200, and larger agencies at £200–£500 or more. We re-checked every one of those figures against the source guides in July 2026 before publishing this page. They are market context, not our prices — we quote per site.
Now the part those guides rarely dwell on: every one of them is written by a company that sells maintenance plans. That does not make the numbers wrong, but it does mean almost nobody ranking for this search has an incentive to tell you when a fee is too high — or when a site barely needs maintaining at all. We are a family-run IT support firm, trading since 1995, and we do not sell tiered maintenance packages. So this page can afford to be blunt in both directions: some people are underpaying for something that is not really maintenance, and some are overpaying for a site that hardly needs any.
What You Should Get
What legitimate website maintenance actually includes
Before you can judge a price, you need to know what the money is supposed to buy. A genuine maintenance service for a CMS site (WordPress, Joomla and similar) includes all of the following:
- Core, plugin and theme updates — applied and checked. Not just auto-updates switched on and left alone. Updates occasionally break things; someone should be looking at the site afterwards.
- Backups with a tested restore. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a backup. Ask when yours was last test-restored — it is the single most revealing question you can put to a provider.
- Security and uptime monitoring. Someone should know the site is down or compromised before your customers tell you.
- SSL certificate and domain renewals watched. An expired certificate or lapsed domain takes a site offline just as thoroughly as a hack does.
- A record of what was done. Dates, updates applied, issues found. If nothing is ever itemised, you cannot know whether anything happened.
Anything less than this is not maintenance — it is a standing order. Small content tweaks (changing opening hours, swapping a photo) are a common and reasonable extra, but they are a convenience on top, not a substitute for the list above.
Market Rates
What UK providers actually charge in 2026 — attributed and re-verified
These are the published figures from named UK providers’ own pricing guides, re-checked at the time of writing (July 2026). None of them are 365 Techies prices.
| Service level | Typical cost | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Budget / national providers | £20–£40 per month | EJK Web Solutions |
| Typical small-business WordPress site | £40–£120+ per month | Gilmour Web Design |
| Specialist monthly retainers | £75–£200 per month | ThriveWP |
| Local specialist firms | £80–£200 per month | EJK Web Solutions |
| Larger agencies | £200–£500+ per month | EJK Web Solutions |
| Ad-hoc freelance work | £40–£120 per hour | ThriveWP |
| Sensible annual budget, small business | £1,000–£2,500 per year | ThriveWP |
Remember the fixed costs that exist whatever you pay for maintenance: ThriveWP’s guide puts domain renewals at £10–£25 a year, shared hosting at £5–£15 a month and managed hosting at £20–£50 a month. If your single monthly fee quietly bundles hosting, domain and maintenance together, unpick it — that is often where confusion (and overcharging) hides.
Red Flags
When a maintenance fee deserves hard questions
Price alone does not tell you whether you are getting value. These patterns do:
- Rock-bottom plans that skip the essentials. Gilmour Web Design’s own guide warns that cheaper plans often miss key protections like restore support, monitoring and proper testing. A £25-a-month plan that is really just auto-updates left switched on is not a bargain — it is a tick-box.
- A retainer where nothing is ever itemised. If you have paid monthly for two years and never once seen a note of what was updated, checked or fixed, you are entitled to ask. A good provider will answer happily; evasion is your answer too.
- Maintenance fees on a simple static brochure site. A hand-built site with no CMS, no plugins and no database has very little to maintain. A full CMS-grade monthly fee on a site like that needs a very good explanation.
- Neglect dressed up as maintenance. The expensive scenario is paying monthly while the site quietly rots. EJK Web Solutions’ guide describes a neglected site running outdated PHP where the only sensible fix was a rebuild at around £850 — for a simple site. Neglect always costs more later than maintenance costs now.
- Vague descriptions. As the Gilmour guide puts it, some companies charge £50 a month, others £150 or more, and the descriptions can feel vague or overly technical. Vague wording usually means a vague service.
One honest note in the other direction: if your provider is doing the full list from the section above, documenting it, and charging within the market ranges — that is fair money for real work. Not every monthly fee is a rip-off, and good maintenance genuinely does prevent expensive emergencies.
Self-Audit
Am I paying too much? A five-minute self-audit
Work through these before you challenge (or cancel) anything:
- Write down exactly what you pay — and separate hosting, domain and maintenance if they are bundled.
- Ask for the last three months’ work log. What was updated, when, and what was checked afterwards?
- Ask when a backup restore was last tested. If the answer is a blank look, that tells you a lot.
- Run your site through our free website checker and the speed test in our free tools suite. Out-of-date software, missing security headers and a slow mobile score are exactly what paid maintenance is supposed to prevent — five minutes with free tools shows you what state the site is actually in.
- Compare your fee to the attributed ranges above, for the level of service you can actually evidence — not the level described in the sales page.
If the checks come back clean and the log is real, you are probably in decent hands. If you are paying £100 a month and the checker finds a slow, outdated site nobody has touched since 2024, you have your answer — and if your provider has stopped replying altogether, our guide to getting your website back when a web designer disappears walks through the recovery steps.
The Structural Point
The cheapest maintenance is a site that needs less of it
Here is the point almost no maintenance-plan seller will make: how much maintenance a site needs is a design decision. A WordPress site carries a CMS, a database, a theme and typically a dozen or more plugins — every one of them a moving part that needs patching, and every patch a small chance of something breaking. That is not a criticism of WordPress; it is simply the trade-off you accept for easy self-editing. But it means part of your monthly fee exists purely to service the platform’s own overhead.
We know because we lived both sides of it. Our own site ran on WordPress for years. In June 2026 we replaced it with a hand-built static site: no CMS, no plugins, no database — and therefore almost nothing to patch. Mobile performance went from roughly 65 to the high 80s in Lighthouse, by our own measurements. We have since done the same for a client site, measured the day before switchover — page requests fell from 111 to 15 and time to first byte from 1,320ms to 97ms; the before-and-after is written up in what a website rebuild actually changes. The full warts-and-all write-up is in how we rebuilt our own website. Static is not right for everyone — if you edit content weekly or run a shop, a CMS still earns its keep — but if your site is a brochure you touch twice a year, you may be paying every month to maintain machinery you never use.
Two related situations worth naming: if part of your fee seems to go on keeping a slow site limping along, read slow WordPress site: fix or rebuild before renewing anything. And if you are weighing up a fresh start entirely, our web design and hosting service covers what a low-maintenance build looks like from day one.
How We Work
What 365 Techies does instead of tiers
We deliberately do not publish maintenance packages, because in thirty years we have learned that a £79-a-month tier is the answer to almost nobody’s actual situation. Instead we look at your site and quote per site, itemised, so you can see exactly what you are paying for and why. Some sites need monthly attention; some need a once-a-year look-over; some need rebuilding once and very little after that. We will tell you which yours is, even when the honest answer earns us less.
What you get with us that a maintenance-only shop cannot offer: one family firm for the website, the hosting, the email, Microsoft 365 and the IT that sits behind it all — with your domain and hosting registered in your name, not ours. For businesses on our business IT support plans, every session ends with a written Service Report, so the “what did we actually get this month?” question this whole page is about simply never arises.
We are family-run since 1995, rated 4.9 on Google, and we work remotely first — with on-site visits across Bournemouth, Poole and the rest of Dorset, and by-appointment meetings at Kinson Community Centre. No call centre, no ticket black hole: the phone is answered Mon–Fri 9–5 on 01202 775566, or text us any time on 07520 615332.
// RELATED
Related guides & tools
- Free Website Checker — see what state your site is actually in before you judge the fee
- Free online tools — speed test, SSL check and more, no sign-up
- Slow WordPress site: fix or rebuild? — when maintenance money is keeping a slow thing slow
- Web designer disappeared? — the step-by-step UK recovery playbook
- How we rebuilt our own website — the low-maintenance build, with our own numbers
- Web design & hosting — what a low-maintenance site looks like from day one
FAMILY-RUN SINCE 1995 · ★ 4.9 ON GOOGLE · 200+ COMPUTERS UNDER OUR CARE · NO FIX, NO FEE · SAME-DAY REMOTE SUPPORT
// GOOD QUESTIONS
Frequently asked
How much does website maintenance cost in the UK in 2026?
Published guides from UK providers put typical small-business WordPress maintenance at around £40–£120 a month (Gilmour Web Design), specialist retainers at £75–£200 a month and a sensible annual budget at £1,000–£2,500 (ThriveWP), with larger agencies charging £200–£500+ a month (EJK Web Solutions). Those are attributed market figures, not our prices — 365 Techies quotes per site.
What should be included in a website maintenance plan?
At minimum: core, plugin and theme updates that are applied and then checked; backups with a periodically tested restore; security and uptime monitoring; SSL certificate and domain renewals managed; and an itemised record of the work done. Anything less is not really maintenance.
Is a £20–£40 per month maintenance plan any good?
Sometimes — but check what it actually covers. Budget national providers do operate in that range (per EJK Web Solutions), and Gilmour Web Design’s guide warns that cheaper plans often miss key protections like restore support, monitoring and proper testing. If it is just auto-updates switched on, you are paying for a tick-box.
Does a simple brochure website need monthly maintenance?
Far less than a CMS site does. A hand-built static site with no CMS, no plugins and no database has almost nothing to patch, so a full CMS-grade monthly fee on a simple brochure site deserves hard questions. It still needs its domain, SSL and hosting watched, and an occasional check — but that is a much smaller job.
My provider charges monthly but never shows me what they do. Is that normal?
It is common, but it is not acceptable. Ask for the last three months’ work log and when a backup restore was last tested. A good provider answers happily; if you get evasion, run the free checks on our website checker and free tools pages and judge the results for yourself.
What happens if I stop paying for maintenance?
On a CMS site, updates stop, security holes accumulate and backups quietly lapse — and neglect costs more later than maintenance costs now. EJK Web Solutions’ guide describes a neglected site on outdated PHP where the only sensible fix was a rebuild at around £850, for a simple site. If you want to stop paying, first confirm you hold your own domain, hosting and CMS logins.
Can I maintain a WordPress site myself?
Yes, if you are comfortable taking backups before updates, testing the site afterwards and keeping an eye on security — the tasks are not difficult, they are just relentless. Where DIY goes wrong is consistency: it gets skipped for six months and then an update breaks something with no recent backup. Be honest about whether you will actually keep it up.
I pay for maintenance but my WordPress site is still slow. Why?
Maintenance keeps a site patched and backed up — it does not make a heavy site fast. Slowness usually comes from hosting, plugin bloat and unoptimised images, and sometimes the honest answer is a rebuild rather than more fees. Our guide on whether to fix or rebuild a slow WordPress site walks through that decision.
My web designer has stopped responding and I still pay them monthly. What should I do?
First, document your attempts to reach them and gather your contracts, invoices and logins. Then check what you actually control — domain, hosting, CMS admin. Our step-by-step guide for when a web designer disappears covers the full UK recovery route, including domain transfers. Do not cancel payments until you know what the fee keeps alive, such as your hosting.
Does 365 Techies sell website maintenance packages?
No tiers — deliberately. We look at your site and quote per site, itemised, and we will say so plainly if your site barely needs maintaining. We are family-run since 1995, rated 4.9 on Google, and we cover the website, hosting, email and IT under one roof, with your domain and hosting in your own name. Call 01202 775566, Mon–Fri 9–5.
Not sure what your monthly fee is actually buying?
Send us what you pay and what you get. We will tell you plainly whether it looks fair, light or excessive — no plan to sell, no pressure, and a written quote only if you want one.
01202 775566 · help@365techies.co.uk · MON–FRI 9AM–5PM