How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost Per Month in 2026?

Website maintenance cost per month is one of those questions where you'll get ten different answers from ten different people. Some say £20. Some say £500. Both can be right, depending on what you actually get for the money.

I look after websites for small businesses, and the most common thing I hear is "I didn't know I'd have to pay for anything after launch." So let's clear it up properly.

The short answer: most small business websites cost between £30 and £150 a month to maintain properly, including hosting. A simple brochure site sits at the lower end. An online store or a site with bookings, memberships or lots of plugins sits at the higher end, and big ecommerce sites can go well past £300.

Here's where that money goes.

What website maintenance actually includes

Before comparing prices, it helps to know what you're paying for. A proper maintenance plan usually covers:

• Software updates for WordPress (or your platform), the theme and plugins
• Backups that run on their own and are stored somewhere other than your server
• Security monitoring and malware scans
• Uptime monitoring, so someone knows when your site goes down before your customers do
• Speed checks to catch slowdowns early
• Small content changes, like swapping an image or updating opening hours
• Support when something breaks

If a plan is suspiciously cheap, one or more of these is usually missing. Most often it's the backups or the support.

Website maintenance cost per month, broken down

These are typical UK prices I see in 2026. US prices are similar in dollars.

Hosting: £5 to £60 a month

Cheap shared hosting starts around £5. It's fine for a small brochure site with low traffic. For a business site that matters to you, £15 to £30 gets you much better speed and support. Online stores and busy sites usually need £30 to £60 or more for managed or cloud hosting.

Domain name: £1 to £2 a month

Usually paid yearly, around £10 to £25 for a .co.uk or .com.

SSL certificate: often free

Most good hosts include a free certificate through Let's Encrypt. If your host is charging you £50 a year for a basic SSL, that's worth questioning.

Premium plugins and theme licences: £0 to £30 a month

A lot of sites run on paid plugins, like a page builder pro licence, a forms plugin, a backup tool or WooCommerce extensions. These are usually billed yearly, and they add up quietly. Spread across the year, £5 to £30 a month is normal.

Maintenance and support: £25 to £250 a month

This is the biggest variable, and it depends on who does it:

• Doing it yourself: free in money, but it costs your time, and mistakes can be expensive
• A freelancer: usually £25 to £150 a month for small business sites
• An agency: usually £100 to £500+ a month, often with more formal support hours

Typical monthly totals by type of site

To make it easier, here's what I'd expect for common types of sites, including hosting:

• Simple brochure site (5 to 10 pages): £30 to £80 a month
• Business site with a blog and forms: £50 to £120 a month
• WooCommerce or Shopify store: £80 to £250 a month
• Large store or membership site: £250 a month and up

Shopify is a bit different. Hosting, security and core updates are included in your Shopify plan, so you mostly pay for apps, theme changes and support. WordPress and WooCommerce give you more control, but someone has to look after updates.

Why cheap maintenance plans often cost more

I get why a £15 a month plan looks good. But here's what usually happens on the cheapest plans:

• Updates run automatically with nobody checking if anything broke
• Backups are stored on the same server as the website, so if the server fails, the backups go with it
• "Support" means a ticket that gets answered in three days
• Nobody notices the site has slowed down or that a form stopped sending emails

The real cost shows up later. A hacked site, a broken checkout during a sale, or a contact form that silently stopped working for two months. One of those can cost far more than a year of proper maintenance.

What happens if you skip maintenance completely

Some business owners launch a site and never touch it again. It works fine for a while. Then, usually a year or two later, a few things start to go wrong:

• Security holes: outdated plugins are one of the most common ways WordPress sites get hacked
• Broken features: a plugin update or a PHP upgrade on the host breaks a form or the checkout
• Slower pages: the site gets heavier over time, and Google and visitors both notice
• Lost rankings: speed and security problems quietly hurt your SEO. (I covered more of these in 7 WordPress SEO mistakes.)

By then, fixing it often costs more than a year of maintenance would have.

Can you maintain a website yourself?

Yes, if you're comfortable with it. For a small WordPress site, a basic monthly routine looks like this:

1. Take a full backup and store it off the server
2. Update plugins, the theme and WordPress (the official guide to updating WordPress is worth a read)
3. Check your key pages and forms still work
4. Run a test in PageSpeed Insights and compare with last month
5. Delete plugins you no longer use

This takes an hour or two a month once you know what you're doing. The risk is the day an update breaks something and you're not sure how to roll it back. That's usually when people decide to hand it over.

How to choose the right maintenance plan

When you're comparing plans, ask these questions:

• How often are updates done, and are they tested before going live?
• Where are backups stored, and how long are they kept?
• How fast do you respond if the site goes down?
• Are small content changes included, and how many?
• What happens if the site gets hacked? Is the cleanup included?

Clear answers to those questions tell you more than the price does.

If you want someone to handle all of this for you, my website maintenance plans cover updates, off-site backups, monitoring and support, and you can see rough numbers on my pricing page. For sites that have already slowed down, performance optimization is the better first step, and if you're still planning a new build, my guide to what it costs to hire a web developer in the UK covers the upfront side.