What website maintenance actually costs per month
Hosting, SSL, backups, plugins, security, retainers. Most owners underestimate their website's monthly cost by three times. Here are the real numbers.
01 / The hidden monthly total
You are probably spending more than you think
Ask a small business owner what their website costs to run each month and the answer is usually 'about a tenner for hosting'. Then you start listing: hosting, domain, SSL, backups, plugin licences, security monitoring, freelancer retainers for changes, and the occasional emergency fix when something breaks. The real total lands somewhere between £60 and £180 a month for a typical UK small business WordPress site.
This isn't a scare tactic, it's arithmetic. Bluehost at £8/mo, UpdraftPlus Premium at £6/mo, Wordfence Premium at £8/mo, Elementor Pro at £5/mo, WP Rocket at £4/mo, a £60/mo freelancer retainer. Add it up: £91 a month, £1,092 a year. And that assumes nothing breaks.
Below is the honest line-item breakdown. Real prices, real ranges, and real numbers for 2026.
02 / The line items
Every recurring cost on a typical UK small business site
Eight lines. Most owners see two or three. The rest hide in different inboxes and quietly drain the float.
Hosting - £5 to £30 a month
Shared hosting with Bluehost or SiteGround runs £5-£15 a month. Managed WordPress hosting on WP Engine or Kinsta starts at £25 and climbs to £75+ as traffic grows. Squarespace bundles hosting into their plan (£16-£36/mo). Wix does the same (£12-£36/mo).
Domain - £10 to £15 a year
A .co.uk domain is £8-£12 a year at registrars like 123 Reg or Namecheap. A .com runs £10-£15. Premium domains can cost hundreds or thousands up front. This one line is rarely the problem. People forget it exists until the renewal email lands in spam and the site vanishes.
SSL certificate - £0 to £120 a year
Let's Encrypt SSL is free and every decent host installs it automatically. Some budget hosts still sell SSL as a £40-£120/year add-on, which is 2026 nonsense. If your host charges for basic SSL, move host.
Backups - £5 to £15 a month
A plugin like UpdraftPlus Premium is £60-£150 a year. Managed hosts include daily backups on plans from £25/mo. Without a backup, a single bad plugin update can wipe a week of work. This is the line item most small businesses skip and regret.
Plugin and theme licences - £10 to £60 a month
WordPress sites usually run 15-25 plugins. The commercial ones (Elementor Pro, WP Rocket, Yoast Premium, Gravity Forms) stack up to £200-£700 a year. Annualised, that is £20-£60 a month before anyone has touched the site. This is the hidden cost WordPress reviews rarely mention.
Security and updates - £10 to £40 a month
Wordfence Premium is £100 a year. Sucuri is £200+. Patching plugins and core when vulnerabilities ship is either a freelancer's hourly job or a managed service. If you skip it, you get hacked eventually. Not a matter of if.
Freelancer retainer for changes - £40 to £250 a month
Most websites need a tweak a month. A new team member's bio, a price update, a photo swap, a new service page. Freelancers typically bill at £40-£80 an hour with a minimum charge, or bundle changes into a £60-£250/mo retainer. Agencies charge more.
Your own time
Not a cash line, but real. Owners who 'save money' by maintaining their own WordPress site typically sink 4-8 hours a month into it. At your own hourly value, that's the biggest cost on the list, and the one that makes subscription models cheaper than they look.
03 / The subscription alternative
One fee, one invoice, one email thread
The pain of website maintenance is not the money. It's the eight separate invoices from eight separate providers, the renewal emails in a forgotten inbox, the two different freelancers who both think the other is handling it.
A subscription plan like ctrl.alt.elite Standard at £79/mo bundles hosting, SSL, backups, security, monitoring, and ongoing changes into a single line on your card statement. Starter at £39/mo does the same for smaller sites. Studio projects are quoted, then move onto £79/mo once live.
The number can come out lower than the WordPress total above. It is always simpler.
FAQ
Common questions
What does website maintenance actually cost per month?
A realistic total for a small business WordPress site is £60-£180 a month once you add up hosting, backups, plugin licences, security, and a freelancer retainer for changes. Squarespace or Wix cuts some lines but adds others through their own app store and premium features. Subscription plans like ctrl.alt.elite at £39-£79/mo bundle everything into one fee so the total is fixed.
Can I skip maintenance to save money?
You can skip it for six to twelve months and get away with it. Past that the site starts to decay. SSL certificates expire, plugins go out of date and become attack vectors, contact forms silently stop sending, and Google starts demoting the site for being slow. The saving is real in the short term and painful in the long term.
Is managed WordPress hosting worth the extra?
Usually yes. A £25-£40/mo managed host (WP Engine, Kinsta, Cloudways) includes daily backups, security patches, a staging site and proper caching. Skipping that line means buying each of those as separate plugins or services, which often costs more overall and definitely costs more in faff.
Why is Wix or Squarespace maintenance cheaper?
Because the platform absorbs it. No plugin updates, no security patches, no SSL to manage. The trade-off is platform fees on transactions, template limits that often force you up a tier, and the fact that migrating off later is painful and sometimes impossible without a full rebuild.
How does subscription web design compare on monthly maintenance?
At £39/mo Starter or £79/mo Standard, hosting, SSL, backups, security, and ongoing changes are all included. There is no separate retainer for the tweaks, no plugin licence to renew, no hosting invoice in a different inbox. The maintenance total is the subscription total.
Should I pay for monitoring and uptime alerts?
Yes, and the good news is it is nearly free. UptimeRobot has a usable free tier. Most decent hosts include uptime monitoring. Every subscription plan we run includes it so you get a text if the site goes down before a customer notices. Unmonitored sites fail in silence.
Swap eight invoices for one
Plans from £39/mo. Hosting, SSL, backups, security and changes, all included.