Planning Your Website
What website maintenance costs, what it includes, and whether you need it. Plus how a care plan keeps your site fast, safe, and updated for a clear monthly price.
The build is the part people plan for. The bit that catches them out is the ongoing cost of keeping a website running well once it is live. It is usually small, but it is real, and it is worth understanding before you commit. This is a plain-English guide to what website maintenance costs, what it actually covers, and whether you need to pay for it at all.
Website maintenance is a much smaller ongoing cost than the one-off build. What you pay depends on what is included: software updates, security, backups, hosting, and support all factor in, and a busy online shop needs more looking after than a simple brochure site. We cover it with a care plan at one clear monthly price, agreed up front, so there are no surprises and a real person to call.
“Maintenance” is a catch-all, so it helps to see what sits inside it. A proper plan usually covers:
Two sites rarely cost the same to maintain. The main factors are the size and complexity of the site, whether it is a simple brochure site or an online shop that takes payments, and how often it changes. A site you update weekly needs more hands-on support than one that stays largely the same. The level of support you want also matters: some businesses just want the technical basics covered, others want changes made for them on request.
No. You can do it yourself, and some confident owners do. But it is worth being honest about what that involves: keeping software updated on a schedule, running backups, watching for security issues, and fixing things when they break, usually at the least convenient moment. For most business owners the sums are simple. The time and risk of doing it yourself outweigh a modest monthly cost, and it frees you to run your business instead of your website.
| What needs doing | Doing it yourself | On a care plan |
|---|---|---|
| Software updates | Your job, on a regular schedule | Handled for you |
| Backups | You set them up and check they restore | Handled for you |
| Security | You monitor and react | Monitored for you |
| When something breaks | You fix it, usually at the worst moment | We fix it |
| Small changes | Your time, or paid per job | Included |
| What it costs you | Your time, plus hosting | One clear monthly price |
A website is not “build it and forget it”. Left alone, software falls out of date and becomes a security risk. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre lists keeping software up to date as a core protection for exactly this reason. Neglected sites also slow down, break on new phones and browsers, and quietly drift out of date, and a tired, broken, or insecure site costs you trust and enquiries. Maintenance is cheaper than the clean-up.
It helps to separate the two. The build is a one-off cost to design and launch your site. Maintenance is the smaller ongoing cost of keeping it fast, safe, and current. If you are weighing up the whole picture, our guide to what a website costs in Kent covers the build side, and this covers the running side. Either way, you own your website and your domain.
We keep it simple. Our website care plan covers hosting, updates, backups, security, and small changes, for one clear monthly price agreed up front, with a real person to talk to rather than a ticket queue. You are never tied in, and you always own your site. It is there so you never have to think about the technical side, or wake up to a site that has gone down. If you would rather handle it yourself, that is fine too, and we will show you how.
We sell a care plan, so we are plainly not a neutral voice on whether you should buy one. That is exactly why the section above says you do not have to. What we have tried to give you is the real shape of the work rather than a sales case: the tasks listed are the ones we actually carry out on the sites we look after, and the comparison table is meant to let you price your own time against a monthly fee and reach your own answer. The security point is not ours, it comes from the National Cyber Security Centre, linked below so you can read it first hand.
Website maintenance is a small, predictable cost that protects a much bigger investment. Expect it to cover updates, security, backups, hosting, and support, and expect the price to reflect how big and busy your site is. You can do it yourself to save money, or hand it over for peace of mind. If you would like us to look after yours, or you are planning a new site and want to know the full picture, tell us about your business and we will give you a straight answer.
It is a much smaller ongoing cost than the build, and it depends on what is included and how big and busy your site is. A simple brochure site needs less looking after than an online shop. We cover it with a care plan at one clear monthly price, agreed up front, with no surprises and a real person to call.
Usually software and plugin updates, security monitoring and fixes, regular backups, hosting, and small content changes with support. Out-of-date software is the most common way sites get hacked or break, so updates and security are the core of it. A good plan also gives you a real person to ask when you need a change.
You can do it yourself. But it means keeping software updated on a schedule, running backups, watching for security issues, and fixing things when they break. For most owners the time and risk outweigh a modest monthly cost, and handing it over frees you to run your business instead of your website.
Software falls out of date and becomes a security risk, and neglected sites slow down, break on new phones and browsers, and drift out of date. A tired, broken, or insecure site costs you trust and enquiries, and the clean-up usually costs more than maintenance would have. It is not build-it-and-forget-it.
The build is a one-off cost, and maintenance is a separate ongoing one. You can look after the site yourself, or we can with a care plan that covers hosting, updates, backups, security, and changes. Either way you own your website and your domain, and you are never tied in.
They are two separate things. The build is the one-off cost to design and launch the site; maintenance is the smaller ongoing cost of keeping it running. Our guide to what a website costs in Kent covers the build, and this covers the running side.
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