Website maintenance and management for UK businesses.

What website maintenance actually covers

A website is not a finished object. Someone has to renew the SSL certificate, pay the domain, keep the platform patched, check the contact form still sends, and change the copy when the business changes. Maintenance is the name for that work. Management is the same work plus someone deciding what should change next.

Split it into five jobs, and every honest plan in the UK is some combination of them:

• Keeping it online. Hosting, DNS, SSL renewal, domain renewal, uptime monitoring.
• Keeping it safe. Security patches for the platform, plugins and dependencies. Backups that someone has actually test-restored.
• Keeping it current. Content edits: prices, opening hours, staff, photographs, service pages.
• Keeping it findable. Titles, descriptions, schema, internal links, Google Business Profile.
• Keeping it working. Broken links, forms that stopped sending, images that stopped loading, page speed that drifted.

Two quotes at £80 a month can cover wildly different amounts of that list. Compare the list before you compare the number.

The four things most plans quietly exclude

Check for these four by name. They are the ones that turn a £60 a month plan into a £60 a month plan plus invoices.

1. Content edits with a unit attached. "Minor updates included" is not a quantity. Ask how many a month, and how long one is allowed to take.
2. Google Business Profile. For a local business this often produces more enquiries in year one than the website does, and it is rarely inside a maintenance plan.
3. Recovery after a hack or a failed update. Plenty of contracts include backups and then bill the restoration at an hourly rate.
4. Control of the domain and DNS. If the domain is registered in the provider's name, you are not a client, you are a tenant.

Typical UK price bands and what each one buys

Price tracks how much human work sits behind the fee. The bands below are what we see quoted in the UK market in 2026.

What is included at Essentials, Growth and Pro

£49 a month Essentials. £79 a month Growth. £200 a month Pro. £0 setup on all three, 10 per cent off if you pay the year up front, 30-day money-back guarantee. There is no second invoice and no per-edit charge. Full pricing detail.

Every tier includes the site itself, hosting on Cloudflare, the domain, SSL, email forwarding, uptime monitoring, backups, Google Business Profile upkeep and on-page SEO. The tiers differ on two things only: how many content edits a month, and how fast they land.

• Essentials, £49. Two edits a month, outside edge two working days. Health check every quarter.
• Growth, £79. Four edits, next working day. We also write, so the site gains an article each month and town pages as you earn work in new places. Review call every quarter.
• Pro, £200. Eight edits, same working day. Weekly writing, a monthly report, and the enquiry route itself maintained rather than left to rot.

That is the maintenance framing. The same three tiers seen as a purchase, with the annual discount and the five-year arithmetic, are on the pricing page. We run it all from East Dulwich for clients UK-wide, and the areas we cover in person are on our London and Surrey pages.

What counts as one content edit

This is where the industry hides. "Unlimited minor updates" means the provider expects you to ask for almost nothing, and will redefine "minor" the first time you take them at their word. So here is our unit, in public.

One edit is one request that takes us up to about 30 minutes. For example:

• Change your opening hours everywhere they appear, including the Google Business Profile.
• Swap a photograph, or replace a gallery of images you have supplied.
• Update a price list, a menu or a service description of up to about a page.
• Add or remove a team member, with a photo and a short biography.
• Change a phone number, an email address or an address across the site.
• Publish a post or a case study you have written, formatted and linked properly.
• Add a new FAQ, a new testimonial, or a seasonal notice on the homepage.

These are bigger than one edit, and we tell you before we start, not after:

• A brand-new page written from scratch. On Growth and Pro that comes out of the monthly writing allowance instead.
• Rewriting a whole service page, or restructuring the navigation.
• A design change that touches every template.
• A new form, a new booking flow, or an integration with another system.

Unused edits do not roll into next month. We also do not send a surprise invoice because you asked for a third small thing on Essentials. If you consistently need more than the tier covers, we will say so and suggest moving up, which is a conversation, not a charge. Four things stay outside every tier: e-commerce checkouts, paid advertising, logo design and social-media management. What the service includes in full.

Response times, and what "next working day" really means

A response time is only useful if you can put a stopwatch on it. Ours: working days are Monday to Friday, UK time, excluding England and Wales bank holidays. The clock starts when your email arrives, not when it is triaged.

Next working day means an edit that arrives on Tuesday is live on Wednesday. An edit that arrives at 6pm on Friday is live on Monday. Same working day, on Pro, applies to requests that arrive before midday; anything later is first thing the following morning. Two working days, on Essentials, is the outside edge rather than the target, and most Essentials edits go live the next day anyway.

What we do not claim is a 24/7 emergency line, because we are not staffed for one, and a provider at this price who advertises one is describing a rota that does not exist. A site that is down is not an edit and does not queue behind edits: uptime monitoring alerts us, and we start on it as soon as we see the alert, on every tier. Static hosting on Cloudflare means the failure modes are usually DNS or domain renewal, both of which we hold and watch.

Security, backups, uptime and updates

The maintenance work on a static site looks different from the work on a WordPress site, and it is fair to ask why the price can be flat.

• No database, no plugins. The site is pre-built HTML served from Cloudflare's edge. There is no admin login to brute-force, no plugin with a known exploit, no nightly cron to babysit. Most of the WordPress attack surface simply is not there.
• Backups are the build history. Every change is a versioned commit, so any earlier version of the site can be rebuilt and republished. That is a restore path we use, not a folder of zip files nobody has ever opened.
• Dependency updates. The build toolchain is updated on our side and re-deployed. You never see it and it never breaks a live page, because a broken build does not replace the live one.
• SSL and domain. Certificates renew automatically. Domain renewal is inside the fee and diarised, which is the single most common way a small business site disappears for a week.
• Uptime monitoring. We are told when the site stops answering, and that someone is not you.
• Quarterly health check. Page speed, accessibility, broken links, forms tested end to end. Monthly on Pro, with the report attached.

Maintenance is not hosting

These get quoted as one number often enough that it is worth separating them. Hosting is rented space: a commodity, £5 to £30 a month for a small business site, less on a static host. Maintenance is labour: the updates, the monitoring, the edits, the search upkeep. A domain is £10 to £20 a year. An SSL certificate is free on any modern host. Those are the figures the five-year tables on the pay monthly page are built from, so the arithmetic on both pages agrees.

So when a provider quotes "£95 a month, hosting and maintenance", the useful question is what the split is. If £70 of it is hosting, you are paying agency rates for a commodity. If £70 of it is labour, ask what the labour buys, in units. Our fee is one number because the hosting genuinely costs us very little; the money is in the work.

Red flags in a website maintenance contract

Five clauses that should slow you down before you sign:

• A 12-month term with a 90-day postal notice period. The exit window is narrow on purpose. Monthly rolling, or an annual term with a written 30-day exit, is the fair version.
• "From £" pricing. The headline is the floor. The bill is the floor plus the SSL line item plus the security plugin licence plus the per-update fee.
• "Unlimited" anything. Unlimited updates, unlimited support, unlimited revisions. A named quantity tells you what to expect; unlimited tells you the provider has not done the arithmetic.
• No named human. The contract says "the Provider" and the address is support@. You find out who does the work at the moment it goes wrong.
• They hold the domain, the hosting account or the content. Cancelling then means starting again, which is the point of the clause.

The long version, with the contract language to look for and a nine-question checklist to send any provider, is in seven red flags in a website maintenance contract.

How to switch provider without losing anything

You do not need your current provider's goodwill to leave. You need six things, in this order, before you cancel anything.

1. The domain. Confirm it is registered in your business name and that you can log into the registrar. For a .uk domain, the losing registrar changes the IPS tag to your new one. For .com and most others you need the authorisation code, sometimes called the EPP code. Both are a written request, not a favour.
2. DNS access. Take a screenshot of every existing record before anything moves. Moving nameservers without copying the MX records across is how a business loses its email for a day.
3. A copy of the site. The source files, or at minimum a full crawl of every live page, so nothing is lost in translation when it is rebuilt.
4. The content, in a portable format. Text, images at full resolution, PDFs, the logo files. Markdown, CSV or JSON exports rather than screenshots.
5. Analytics and Search Console. Check your own Google account is an owner, not a delegated user on the agency's account. Historic data does not follow you if it never belonged to you.
6. Then cancel, in writing, observing the notice period, keeping the old site live until the new one is answering on the domain.

If the provider has stopped replying and you are locked out, work through the recovery checklist for when a web designer goes quiet. When we take a client on, steps one to five are our job, not yours, and there is no charge for the migration. A worked example of the whole switch is in the Sameday Jetwash case study, a pressure-washing business we run ourselves.