What does website maintenance cost, and do you need it at all?
Looking after a small business website costs less than most owners fear, and the part you cannot skip costs very little. Hosting runs from £5 a month and a domain from £10 a year. Those two keep the site online, and you pay them whoever built it. Anything above that pays for someone's time: backups, updates, small edits and somebody noticing when the site goes down. Our care plans for that start at £40 a month.
A website is not finished on launch day. The software it runs on keeps being updated by the people who make it, often to close security holes, and a site with a year of skipped updates tends to break in small ways first: a contact form that stops sending, a booking page that loads blank. Most owners find out from a customer, sometimes weeks later. The enquiries that went missing in between never show up anywhere.
You only need to pay someone if nobody in the business will do the work. A simple site with few moving parts can go months with very little attention. If you, or someone on your team, will log in once a month, apply the updates, change the opening hours and make sure a recent backup exists, you may not need a plan at all. Our own FAQ says the same: the plan is optional, and without one the site still belongs to you.
Doing it yourself goes wrong in a predictable way. The jobs are small, so they slide. A price rise waits for a free evening. Everyone assumes there are backups because the host mentioned them once. Nobody looks at the site on a Saturday. None of that costs anything until the day it does, and then the bill is rebuilding something you had already paid for.
Our three plans split the work by how much of it you want off your desk. Basic, from £40 a month, looks after the hosting, takes a daily backup, applies updates and security patches, and monitors the site so we hear about an outage before your customers do. Plus, from £85, adds the changes that take minutes, such as new prices, a photo or holiday hours, with a priority reply. Pro, from £195, also keeps your Google Business Profile and local visibility current, with a monthly report. Bigger work, such as a new page or a new section, gets a fixed quote first on any plan. These prices are before VAT.
Which one fits depends on how often something on your site changes. A plumber whose prices and services stay the same for a year needs the site kept safe and online, and that is Basic. A café or salon that changes the menu, the hours or the offers every few weeks is the business Plus was made for. Pro makes sense when Google is where customers find you and nobody in the business has time to keep the profile up to date.
Whatever you choose, read the terms before you sign with anyone. Ours bill monthly and cancel with 30 days' notice, with no exit fee, and the domain, the content and the code stay yours if you leave. A maintenance contract that ties you in for a year, or a developer who registered the domain in their own name, will cost you more than the monthly fee on the day you want to move.
If you already have a site and are not sure what it runs on or when it was last updated, send us the address. We will tell you what it needs, and whether that is a plan from us or an hour of your own time once a month.
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