Ongoing costs, explained
How much does website maintenance cost in the UK?
Maintenance itself is usually a modest, predictable monthly cost — our own Managed Hosting & Care is £49/month. Domain, hosting, development and SEO are separate costs that often get lumped in with 'maintenance' by mistake, so here's each one broken out honestly.
Why the confusion
"Maintenance" often gets used to mean five different things.
Domain renewal, hosting, technical upkeep, new feature development and SEO are all genuinely different costs, provided by different means, for different reasons — but they routinely get bundled into a single "how much for maintenance" question.
Separating them out matters because it stops you paying twice for the same thing, or being surprised when an SEO retainer doesn't include the technical care you assumed it did.
Here's each category, in plain terms.
Five categories
What each cost actually covers.
Domain
A separate annual cost, renewed yearly, that varies depending on your registrar and the type of domain (a standard .co.uk is typically cheap; some newer or premium extensions cost more). This is independent of hosting and maintenance.
Hosting
Ranges widely depending on the platform, expected traffic, and how much management and support is included. A basic shared hosting account and a fully managed, monitored server are both 'hosting' but very different products.
Maintenance / care
Software and plugin updates, technical health checks, backups, security monitoring, minor content amendments and someone to contact when something breaks. This is the ongoing 'someone is looking after it' cost.
Ongoing development
New pages, new features, redesigned sections — building things that didn't exist before. This is separate from routine maintenance, even though the two get bundled together in conversation.
SEO
A distinct discipline covering keyword research, content, technical optimisation and reporting, aimed at improving search visibility over time. It is not a maintenance fee, even where the same provider offers both.
Our own figures, transparently
What we charge, and what it is not.
| Service | Monthly cost | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Managed Hosting & Care | £49 | Maintenance — hosting, updates, backups, security, minor amendments |
| Growth SEO | £395 | SEO — not a maintenance fee |
| Scale SEO | £695 | SEO — not a maintenance fee |
Full detail on what Managed Hosting & Care includes is on our pricing page. Growth and Scale SEO are quoted and delivered as SEO services, separately from site upkeep, and shouldn't be read as the cost of keeping a website running.
Sometimes it's simple
A low-traffic brochure site may not need much at all.
If you're running a simple site on a builder subscription — Wix, Squarespace or similar — with modest traffic and no custom functionality, the subscription itself often covers hosting, basic security and updates. Beyond that and the domain renewal, there may be little else you genuinely need to pay for.
What changes that picture is the factors below — and once several of them apply, paying someone to look after the site properly usually works out cheaper than the risk of not doing so.
What pushes cost up
The factors that genuinely raise maintenance needs.
Traffic and complexity
Higher traffic, more integrations or custom functionality generally need a higher level of hosting and closer monitoring.
Frequency of changes
A site that needs weekly content updates costs more to maintain than one that's updated a few times a year.
Security requirements
E-commerce, login areas or stored customer data raise the bar for what 'properly maintained' needs to mean.
Response expectations
Needing fast turnaround when something breaks costs more than being happy to wait a few days.
For what a full build costs alongside this, see how much a business website costs, or explore our approach on the web design page.
Before you ask
Maintenance cost questions, answered plainly.
Full detail on what's included is on our pricing page.
Next step
Want to know exactly what you'd be paying for?
No bundled surprises.
Tell us about your current site and we'll tell you plainly what maintenance, hosting and SEO would actually cost — as separate, honest figures.