What should website maintenance cost in 2026?
What should website maintenance cost in 2026? How to price a care plan from what the work really takes, what to include and what to bill as change requests.
Every year a client asks what they're paying for, and every year the agency answers with a number it chose three years ago. The care plan was priced once, against a guess, and it has been carried forward since.
This post is date-bound on purpose. Hosting prices move, platforms change what they include, and your own costs drift. We'll refresh it each year. Treat it as a method for working out your website maintenance cost, not as a price list.
One thing it won't do is print "market rate" ranges. Those numbers circulate without a source, and a care plan priced against someone else's guess inherits their mistakes. The only defensible price is one built from what the work takes you.
Start from cost, not from competitors
A care plan is a bundle of real work. List it before you price it. For most brochure and content sites the list looks like this.
Hosting and the domain. What you pay the provider, per site, per month. If you host several sites on one account, divide it honestly.
Updates. Platform, theme and plugin updates, plus the testing after each one. This is time, not just licence fees.
Backups and restore. Taking them is cheap. Proving you can restore one is the part people skip.
Monitoring. Uptime checks, certificate renewal, form delivery. Someone has to read the alerts.
The support allowance. The small requests, the "can you just", the questions about how to do something.
Overhead. Invoicing, the monthly report if you send one, the account conversation.
The arithmetic, illustrated
The figures below are illustrative. Replace every one with your own.
Say hosting costs you £15 a month for a site. Updates and the test afterwards take forty minutes a month. Monitoring and backups take another fifteen, and the support allowance averages forty-five. That's an hour and forty minutes of time.
At a £75 an hour blended rate, the time is worth £125. Add the £15 of hosting and you're at £140 a month before margin. Add 30% and the plan is around £180.
Now look at what you charge. If the answer is £60, the plan is losing money every month, and the loss is hidden inside "support" that nobody logs. The unbilled hours is about exactly that gap.
Run your own numbers. The point isn't our figure. It's that you can only defend a price you can explain line by line.
Three tiers that hold up
Most agencies end up with something like this, whatever they call it.
Keep-alive. Hosting, updates, backups, monitoring. No hours. The client is paying for the site to stay up and stay safe, and nothing else. It's the cheapest tier and the easiest to explain.
Keep-alive plus hours. The same, with a small fixed allowance for changes, say an hour a month. Unused hours don't roll over, or roll over once. Either rule is fine as long as it's written down.
Improvement block. A larger monthly block for clients who want the site to keep getting better: a new section, a landing page, a round of SEO fixes. This is planned work, scheduled like any other project, not an on-call service.
The tiers differ in what's included, not in how fast you answer. If response time is part of the price, say so explicitly and price it, because it's the most expensive thing on the list.
What not to include
Don't include unlimited small changes. It's the most common care-plan mistake, and it turns a fixed fee into an open-ended contract. The fee stays the same while the requests grow, and after a year you're doing six hours of work for a two-hour price.
Keep upkeep and change apart. Upkeep is obligatory and belongs in the plan. Changes are work and get a quote, or come out of the named allowance. We made the longer argument in should you charge a retainer for site maintenance, and it applies here directly.
A short line in the agreement saves the conversation later: "Changes beyond the allowance are quoted as a change request before we start."
How the platform changes the cost line
The biggest variable in a care plan is the platform underneath it. On a site with a dozen plugins, the update line is real work every month, and the security line carries risk you can't fully price. We covered that in the real cost of a WordPress website.
On Contentive there are no plugins to update, hosting is included per live site, and every site has staging next to the live one at no extra cost. The Agency plan is £39 a month including three live sites, then £10.99 a month for each additional live site, with unlimited seats so inviting the client costs nothing. Staging-only and archived workspaces don't count. That takes the update line close to zero and makes the hosting line a fixed, known number. It doesn't remove the support allowance or the theme work, and you should still charge for both.
What it costs to price honestly
Pricing from cost will sometimes give you a number higher than the client expects. Some clients will push back, and a few will leave for someone cheaper. That's the trade. A plan priced below cost keeps the client and loses money quietly, which is worse, because you don't notice until you add it up.
The other cost is the work of measuring. You can't price from cost without knowing your hours, and that means logging them for a while.
Price it against last quarter
Take your current plan. Pull the last three months of time logged against every site on it, including the fixes nobody billed. Divide by the fee. If the hourly rate that comes out is below what you charge for project work, your plan is underpriced, and you now know by how much.