On first inspection, the subject of website maintenance costs in the UK in 2025 could seem simply to be a question of amount. However, like many things in the technology space, there is more depth after initial consideration. Let’s examine the essential factors that affect the pricing of website maintenance.
Before we disccuss about the cost, let’s first talk about what website maintenance is.
Website maintenance is the continual process of keeping a website running properly and securely. It is almost like an insurance policy for your website. Website maintenance is to make sure your website is current, functional, and easy to use, for a better user experience. Website maintenance has six components:
- Updates
- Uptime
- Errors
- Speed
- Recovery
- Support
In addition to these elements, customers also want and expect rapid response times to questions and issues along with swift solutions and expert assistance in optimizing the performance of their website.
Now let’s work through each component and how they factor into website maintenance costs.
Tell Us What You Need – Start Your Journey Today!
Share your project requirements, and we’ll guide you through a seamless development journey to bring your ideas to life.
The Need for Continuous Maintenance
Websites are living, breathing organisms that require our attention at every turn. The need for updating will depend mainly on the type of website and its objective.
For specific informational websites, updating content could happen as infrequently as once a month. However, in the case of fast-moving platforms, such as blogs for news outlets or e-commerce websites, updating content and information can happen daily or hourly.
The service interval for updates will vary. However, modern Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Wix allow non-technical users an ease of updating via CMS with little training. Additionally, these platforms help aid in manageable content decisions and regular updates for broader audiences.
However, there are sometimes when perhaps outsourced updates may be for the best. If you are considering retaining the services of a dedicated website management service provider, then they will consistently provide updates and keep your website updated.
The service numbers over time, including the intervals and depth, will play a major role in the cost of your website management services. A good website management package should help support your requirements, whether they relate to regular updating practicalities, updates of a technical nature, or even major updates.
How Updates Influence Maintenance Costs
Websites rely on various software systems, from the server hosting your site to the database storing your content. With so many moving parts, even a small issue can cause downtime or functionality problems. Over time, bugs or glitches may arise, impacting performance and stability. This is where website development services come in, ensuring your site is built and maintained to prevent these issues and keep everything running smoothly.
To avoid breakage and downtime, regularly updating your website’s software and software infrastructure is crucial. Updating your website’s software systems will ensure your site works even better, and be less susceptible to security issues, while minimizing the probability of a software bug bringing your site down. Keeping your website updated will be an important part of your website’s success, so software maintenance down the road will be an important consideration in maintaining a website.
Uptime and Its Impact on Website Performance
Uptime is the duration during which your website is running and/or accessible in a period (monthly). It is reported as a percentage; the greater the percentage, the higher the uptime.
In other words, if a website runs without fault for an entire month, it achieves a 100% uptime rate. If that website has 30 minutes of downtime a month, the uptime rate will be about 99.93. This may sound good, but this downtime may mean significant lost sales for certain websites, most notably busy e-commerce sites.
In the hosting world, achieving 99.93% uptime is normally not too difficult. But I can tell you that it’s impossible to guarantee 100% uptime, and it can often be costly to achieve it.
How Uptime Affects Website Costs
There are only two main factors affecting the cost of maintaining uptime: how reliable your web servers are, and how reliable your CMS is.
How reliable and strong your servers are relates directly to the volume of traffic your site usually sees. However, these servers must be able to handle more than normal traffic volumes; they must be able to handle a surge of traffic when needed because traffic can sometimes be unpredictable.
Several issues can cause website downtime, including:
Hardware Failures: All sites are hosted on servers, even cloud sites, and their data is stored on hard drives. When hardware fails, it may cause your site to go down.
DNS Issues: The Domain Name Server (DNS) keeps track of visitors, who they are, and where they are going. If there is an issue with DNS, it can cause your site to go down, which happens to many. It’s best to pay for better DNS with an established provider, even though it is frequently priced higher than what bigger hosting companies offer.
Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: DDoS attacks are when a bad actor sends multiple requests to a website to slow it down and cause issues in an attempt to crash the site. DDoS attacks occur more with high-profile websites as they have the resources scammers want. Any official website can face this kind of attack, even though they may not be on the same scale. Remedying risk from an oversight perspective, and at least limiting DDoS attacks, can be accomplished by protecting your site with a web firewall, even though hosting and upkeep costs will increase.
Hacking and Security Risks: No one is immune to hacking attempts, yet some sites are more vulnerable to attacks than others. Furthermore, as technology gets better, hacking may get easier for some criminals with improvements to electronics and apps. Software criminals or malicious sites will always outpace protection systems for websites. Keep your website current by updating your site keep consistently updating it with the continually evolving environment, and keeping your software current, will make website hacks for harm to be less of an issue, with a reduced number of websites to hack. One reason is that there are continually breaches in security, and some sites have minimal precautions applied, even if they do have some. When performed regularly, maintenance services protect your website.
Investing in reliable hosting solutions, robust security measures, and ongoing maintenance is important to maintain a high level of uptime and minimize potential disruptions.
Errors
Errors are problems that hamper a website’s proper function, rendering it incapable of functioning in a designated manner. While some errors may be minor in nature, reducing the user experience to a certain extent, it can still be frustrating to deal with minor errors when using a website, including broken links, missing images, typographical errors, and outdated content.
Some errors, however, are critical errors, meaning errors that can break the site’s core function. For example, suppose an e-commerce website experiences a failure in the payment gateway. In that case, this failure is considered a ‘mission-critical’ error, as it prevents customers from completing the purchase transactional phase of the site.
Dealing with errors can be considerably easier if they are considered in terms of priority: low, medium, and high. While the ultimate goal is to eliminate errors entirely, the best approach is to concentrate on the ‘high priority’, mission-critical errors as a starting point.
Website maintenance companies deal with emergencies differently from updates or minor fixes. Who you choose to handle your site in terms of emergencies is important, and a provider should follow emergency protocols to effectively deal with critical errors when they arise.
How Error Fixing Impacts Costs
The pace of software updates is a key driver of website maintenance costs. Any major errors, particularly those that impact mission-critical or important functionality, need to be fixed in a timely manner. Fixing a problem requires time and skills, which can drive some of the costs up.
Speed
Nothing is more frustrating than trying to breeze through painfully slow websites. Research indicates that page load time alone which increases by 1 second, decreased e-commerce sales by 10%. In addition, 47% of website visitors expect the page to load in 2 seconds, and conversion rates (conversions can be purchases or sign-ups) decreased significantly after 3.3 seconds.
The internet is all about speed, which is why speed is a key component of website maintenance. Several tools can help measure speed, including Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and GTmetrix. These tools allow you to monitor important metrics related to website performance, including Core Web Vitals.
How Speed Affects Costs
Most website maintenance programs include regular speed assessments, most likely monthly. If the speed isn’t acceptable, actions must be taken to fix the problem because slow load times may hurt your business’s bottom line and user experience.
In most cases, your site’s speed is dictated by how and where it is hosted. Cheap hosting sounds great, but it often has restrictions and limitations that could hurt performance. High-traffic sites need strong and reliable hosting to ensure speed and consistency. Depending on the site’s complexity and traffic, hosting costs can vary from pennies per month to hundreds or thousands of pounds.
Many maintenance packages include web hosting, but you need to be careful about this. Make sure your website is not hosted on a cheap or overcrowded server, as this will negatively affect its performance.
Recovery
Restoring a website is probably one of the most important yet commonly forgotten features of website maintenance. There are several reasons a website can crash or become corrupt, and when it does, it’s important to be able to restore it quickly.
If the site is badly damaged, a backup could be the only option for restoration. So, it is essential to have a solid backup strategy in place, with one of the considerations of a reliable, current backup. A proper recovery plan is your “insurance policy.” It will probably be of no use and that’s perfectly fine but when an event occurs that you need to refer it, you will be glad to have it.
How Recovery Affects Costs
The speed for re-establishing your site’s online presence is entirely dependent on how well you manage your backup systems. It’s absolutely critical that you test your backups regularly to make sure you can restore the site effectively if you’re in a pinch… “If you don’t test your backup, you don’t have a backup.”
If you do not have a tested-backup plan, the time taken to restore an online presence could be exponentially longer. Something that could took hours to resolve could easily take days – which could mean lost revenue, lost customers’ trust, and numerous variables.
The number of backups will vary based on the kind of website that you have – for example, an ecommerce site would usually require daily backups or even continuous backups (due to the number of orders and customer data coming in).
Support for Website Management
One of the most important items we will cover in this section is the easy option of being able to talk to a web professional about your website and have someone address your website needs. Whether you want to manage your website operations yourself on a day-to-day basis and only need professional assistance from time to time, or you want someone to take care of all the management of your site, there are support services for you, and these services are important.
Most businesses find themselves somewhere in the middle ground with “do-it-yourself” management and enlisting professional assistance for support. The support aspect is important in determining website maintenance costs because support generally includes a set number of hours per month of professional help with your website’s requirements.
Support costs are different depending on its delivery method: telephone/email or a virtual meeting with Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet; what will your time commitment be? Support time can be one hour a month to nearly a full time commitment with professional help and hourly costs typically between £50 and £100.
You May Also Like: Custom Development Services for Better Websites
Average Monthly Website Maintenance Costs in the UK (2025)
The cost of maintaining a website depends on many different criteria, such as traffic volumes, hosting requirements, the significance of required speed, the possibility of downtime, etc. The web maintenance provider will take into account those factors to derive the price of your maintenance package. They will also consider the frequency and complexity of any required updates, recovery, and backup procedures, the need for support, etc.
As of 2025, monthly maintenance costs in the UK can vary widely, whether the cost is £100 or £1,500+ per month. The cost is based on the level of service required and can be adapted based on your needs. Maintenance companies take into account the following when establishing their maintenance packages:
- The amount of website traffic and hosting requirements
- The necessary resources to ensure the site operates efficiently
- The risk of downtime and slow website performance
- The frequency and complexity of updates
- Backup and recovery requirements
- The amount of support necessary
As we have monitored average website maintenance costs over the years to price our services competitively, we have researched at least 50 different companies in the UK offering maintenance services, allowing us to observe how pricing is evolving. We categorize our services into basic, mid-range, and high-end, but not all companies have services at all price points. Some companies offer a lot more options than others.
Here’s a breakdown of the average monthly website maintenance costs based on our research:
|
Year |
Basic | Mid-range |
High-end |
|
2018 |
£69.83 | £167.43 | £404.20 |
| 2019 | £71.26 | £171.35 |
£413.67 |
|
2020 |
£71.91 | £172.91 | £417.43 |
| 2021 | £73.37 | £176.44 |
£425.95 |
|
2022 |
£75.56 | £181.71 | £438.67 |
| 2023 | £85.02 | £204.39 |
£493.44 |
|
2024 |
£88.54 | £212.91 | £514.00 |
| 2025 | £102.00 | £232.00 |
£550.00 |
As recommended, the cost of keeping a website active has increased each year, generally in line with inflation. The most marked changes have taken place at the bottom end of the costs, where there has been tangible competition from firms looking for more accuracy towards being attracted to attract businesses. At the top end, an executive level of service could cost the business £1,500 a month or more and will provide a service close to employment without the employee hassle of just managing a part-time webmaster.
Tell Us What You Need – Start Your Journey Today!
Share your project requirements, and we’ll guide you through a seamless development journey to bring your ideas to life.
Conclusion
Website maintenance costs in the UK continue to rise each year, primarily driven by inflation and expectations of greater service coverage. Whether it’s a basic maintenance plan or an executive-level service, suitable plans are available for any organisation. It is important to assess your needs and then choose a web maintenance plan suitable for the level of support you need to keep your website working.
If you want to know more about professional website maintenance services, and how they can help your business, share your thoughts in the comments or reach out for personalized advice on getting started!
We design websites and mobile apps to help businesses grow. Take a look at our portfolio to see how we can help you.
