How much does website maintenance cost in the UK?
Short answer
In the UK, basic website maintenance is typically £30 to £80 a month for updates, backups and uptime monitoring. Managed support with an allowance of developer hours usually runs £150 to £500 a month. Above that, plans start including measured performance work. Ad-hoc support is commonly £50 to £95 an hour.
The three bands
| Band | Typical UK price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Basic upkeep | £30–£80 / month | Updates, backups, uptime monitoring, security patching |
| Managed support | £150–£500 / month | The above plus an allowance of developer hours for changes |
| Performance-managed | £500+ / month | The above plus measured work on search, speed and conversion |
| Ad-hoc | £50–£95 / hour | Fix-on-request, no retainer, no continuity |
Ranges reflect commonly advertised UK rates and vary by platform and complexity.
Why hourly is usually the expensive option
Paying by the hour sounds cheaper because the number is smaller. In practice it quietly punishes you for getting in touch: every message costs money, so small problems get left until they are big ones. It also means nobody is looking at your site between the phone calls — and the things that slowly damage your position in Google are quiet, invisible and expensive by the time anyone notices.
What actually justifies a higher price
Not more hours. The only good reason to pay more is that somebody is actually measuring whether your money produced a result, and can show you that next to a group of pages they deliberately left alone. Ask anyone you are considering one question: how will we know, three months from now, whether this worked? If the answer is a graph of visitor numbers with nothing to compare it against, you are buying activity, not results.
Last reviewed 5 September 2026