Website care plans — what you are actually paying for every month

Cost & buying7 September 202613 min read

Short answer: a monthly website fee should be doing three separable jobs — keeping the site alive, keeping it safe and current, and keeping somebody available to change it. Only the first is unavoidable, and it is cheap. The problem in this market is not the price of care plans. It is that marketing gets bundled into them under a maintenance heading, so you cannot see what either one costs and you cannot stop one without losing the other.

The three jobs, and which of them you can refuse

Every monthly website fee ever charged is some mixture of three things. Getting a supplier to say which mixture is the whole exercise.

• Keeping it alive. The domain registration, renewed once a year, and hosting, so that a server answers when someone types your address. This part is genuinely unavoidable and genuinely inexpensive for an ordinary trade website.
• Keeping it safe and current. A TLS certificate so the address is https rather than a browser warning. Backups you could actually restore from — which is a different claim from backups existing. Security updates, if the site runs on a content system with plugins. Uptime monitoring, so somebody notices the site is down before your customers do.
• Keeping somebody available. Time. A person who answers when you ring, changes the phone number when it changes, adds the new service, swaps the photographs after a good job. This is the part that varies most between suppliers and is worth the most when you need it.

You can decline the second and third. You cannot decline the first without the site going dark. That distinction matters, because a monthly presented as a single indivisible number quietly implies you cannot decline any of it.

What actually breaks on a website nobody is looking after

“Maintenance” sounds like a precaution against nothing in particular. It is not. There is a short, specific list of things that go wrong on a neglected site, and they go wrong on roughly predictable timescales. Knowing them is what lets you judge whether a plan is worth its price.

• The certificate expires — weeks, not years. The padlock in the address bar comes from a TLS certificate with a fixed lifetime. Certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt, which is what a very large share of small sites use, are valid for 90 days by default, and renewal is meant to be automatic. When the automation quietly stops, nothing warns you — the site simply starts greeting visitors with a full-page browser warning telling them the connection is not private. Most owners find out from a customer.
• Unpatched software — months. If the site runs a content system with plugins, those plugins publish security fixes, and the gap between a fix being published and an unpatched site being found by an automated scan is not long. This is the single strongest argument for a care plan on a WordPress site, and the single weakest on a site that has no content system at all — which is worth knowing before you pay for one.
• The contact form stops delivering — instantly and invisibly. A mail provider changes an authentication requirement, or the forwarding address is retired, and enquiries stop arriving. The website looks perfect. Nothing errors. This is the most expensive failure on this list because it costs you work while telling you nothing, and it is one of the causes worth ruling out in why an old website stops bringing in work.
• An integration is deprecated — a year or two. Anything talking to somebody else’s system — a booking widget, a review feed, a map, a payment form — eventually breaks because that system changed, not because your site did.
• Nothing at all. Worth saying plainly: a simple site with no content system, no plugins and no integrations, on decent hosting, can sit there for years doing its job with nobody touching it. Suppliers rarely volunteer this.

A backup is worth exactly what a restore is worth

Every plan says backups. Almost none say restores, and they are not the same claim. A backup is a copy; a restore is the ability to get the site back from that copy, which depends on the copy being complete, recent, kept somewhere the site itself is not, and having been tried at least once by somebody.

The NCSC’s small business guidance on backing up your data makes the same point about business data generally, and it applies exactly here: a backup you have never tested is a plan, not a safeguard. So the question to ask a supplier is not “do you take backups”. It is: how often, kept where, how far back can you go, and when did you last actually restore one? A good answer is specific and slightly bored. A vague one tells you the backups exist and nobody has ever needed them.

What is not maintenance, however it is labelled

Maintenance is keeping a thing in the condition it was in. Marketing is trying to make more people arrive. They are both legitimate services and they are not the same service, and a great many monthly fees contain both without saying so.

These belong in the marketing column, not the maintenance one:

• Search optimisation work of any kind, including “ongoing SEO”.
• Managing Google Ads or Facebook Ads. The ad spend itself is separate again.
• Writing new pages or blog posts as a content programme.
• Social media posting.
• Monthly reports. A report is a description of work, not the work. Being sent a traffic graph is not a service you are receiving.

None of that is wrong to buy. What is wrong is buying it without knowing you have. The specific harm is a lock-in you did not agree to: if the marketing sits inside the hosting fee, stopping the marketing means stopping the hosting, which means the website goes off. That is not a maintenance plan. That is leverage.

The arithmetic nobody does at the time

Trades negotiate the build fee because it is a single visible number, and accept the monthly because it is small. Over any realistic life of a website the monthly is usually the larger figure.

£65 a month is £780 a year, and £3,900 over five years. £145 is £8,700 over five years. £295 is £17,700. At £500 a month — which people do pay, usually for something described as maintenance and SEO — five years is £30,000. Set that against a build fee you argued about for a fortnight and the proportions become obvious.

This is not an argument that a high monthly is wrong. Somebody paying £500 a month for real marketing that genuinely works is doing better business than somebody paying £65 for a site nobody visits. It is an argument that the monthly deserves at least as much scrutiny as the build fee, and it usually gets almost none. The build-fee side of the same question is set out in what a tradesman’s website should cost.

Four questions that force an itemisation

You do not need to become technical. You need four answers, in writing, and the reluctance to give them is itself the answer.

1. Which parts of this fee would I still be paying if I stopped all marketing?

This is the single most useful question in this article. It separates the two columns without accusing anybody of anything. A supplier with a clean plan will answer it in one sentence.

2. Is the domain registration inside this fee, and whose name is it in?

A monthly that pays your domain renewal is normal and fine. A monthly that pays a domain renewal on a domain registered in the supplier’s name is a different arrangement entirely, and it is the one that turns a billing dispute into losing your address. That is the subject of who actually owns your website, and it is worth ten minutes before you sign anything.

3. What happens to the site if I stop paying tomorrow?

There are only three honest answers: it goes off; it stays on and I stop getting service; or it goes off and the domain lapses too. Each is a legitimate business model. Only one of them is a surprise, and only when nobody told you.

4. How many changes are included, and what counts as a change?

“Small changes included” is not a specification. Is swapping ten photographs one change or ten? Is a new service page a change or a new page? The answer does not need to be generous. It needs to exist.

The honest floor — what the parts cost on their own

You cannot judge a monthly fee without knowing what the irreducible part of it is. Nobody publishes that, so here it is in shape rather than in exact pounds, because the exact pounds move.

A .co.uk domain is a once-a-year cost in the region of a takeaway. Hosting a small brochure site — a handful of pages, no shop, modest traffic — is a few pounds a month on ordinary shared hosting, and can be nothing at all on the static hosting tiers several providers offer free. A TLS certificate is free. Between them, keeping an ordinary trade website switched on and reachable is a small enough number that it should never be the headline of a monthly fee.

Which means: on a £65 monthly, the great majority is not infrastructure. It is somebody’s time and somebody’s availability. On a £300 monthly, either it is a great deal more time, or there is marketing in there. Neither is wrong. But once you know the floor, you can ask the right question, which is not “why is this so much” but “what am I getting above the floor”.

How to test the word “support” before you buy it

Support is the part of a care plan you cannot inspect and the part you will judge the supplier on. Three questions make it concrete, and all three can be answered in an email before you sign anything.

• What is your response time, and is that a promise or an aspiration? “We usually get back same day” is an aspiration. “Within one working day” is a commitment. Either is fine; knowing which is not optional.
• What happens at four o’clock on a Friday? The most useful question on the list, because it establishes whether there is any out-of-hours arrangement at all. For most trade websites the honest answer is “it waits until Monday”, and that is genuinely fine — as long as you know it now rather than during it.
• Who actually does the work? If the person selling you the plan is the person who will do the changes, response time tends to be real. If it goes into a queue, ask how long the queue is.

What a fair care plan looks like

There is no single right number, but there is a shape that holds up. A plan is fair when the hosting and the domain are named, the security and backup position is stated rather than implied, the support included is described in a way you could hold somebody to, the marketing is either absent or priced separately, and stopping the marketing does not switch the website off.

Notice that none of those is about the price. A £150 plan meeting all five is better value than a £40 plan meeting none, because the £40 one will cost you either a bill you did not expect or a week of your own evenings.

The case against a care plan, put fairly

The honest counter-argument is real and worth stating. A simple site that does not run a content system does not need much doing to it. If you are technically confident, you can register the domain yourself, buy hosting for a few pounds a month, and pay a developer by the hour on the rare occasions you want something changed. Over five years that is meaningfully cheaper than any managed plan, and you own every part of it.

What you are taking on in exchange is the remembering. Renewal dates. Whether the certificate expired. Whether the backup actually restores. Whether the contact form still delivers, which is the failure that costs the most and announces itself least — it is one of the causes worth checking in why an old website stops bringing in work. For plenty of people that trade is worth it. For a lot of trades, the monthly is cheaper than the Saturday.

Where we stand on this

Our monthly covers hosting, keeping the site up to date and secure, and being available to change it — and nothing else. It is £65 a month on the sole trader tier, £145 on small firm, £295 on established, all excluding VAT, all published on the pricing section alongside the £700, £1,500 and £3,000 build fees rather than quoted on request. There is no marketing hidden in it, which is also why we cannot claim it will bring you work.

The domain is registered in your name. If you stop paying us, you keep your address and you can take the site elsewhere. That is deliberate: a monthly fee that doubles as a lock is a fee we would rather not be able to charge. If you would rather work out what is worth fixing before spending anything at all, the Growth Diagnostic asks five questions and answers that instead.

What we cannot tell you is that any monthly fee, ours included, will pay for itself. Nobody can promise that, and the ones who do are describing the marketing they have hidden inside it.

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