I need someone to manage my website monthly: what it costs

Someone to manage your website monthly costs £15-£50 for maintenance only, £49-£199 for a full managed service, or £300 and up from an agency. The word “manage” covers both ends of that range, which is exactly why quotes are so hard to compare.

One question sorts it. Do you want the website kept alive, or kept working? Those are different products at different prices, and most people asking this question want the second while being quoted for the first.

Alive versus working

Maintenance is genuinely necessary. An unpatched site gets hacked, an unbacked-up site gets lost, and both are expensive. It just has no effect whatsoever on whether anyone finds you.

If your website is a brochure that exists so referrals can check you are real, maintenance is all you need and £25 a month is a sensible spend. Nothing wrong with that answer.

If you expect the website to bring in work, maintenance will not do it, and paying for maintenance while expecting marketing is the single most common disappointment in this industry.

What full management actually involves each month

To be concrete, because “we manage your website” is doing a lot of work in most sales pages:

• Hosting, security patches, backups. The maintenance layer, still needed.
• Content changes. New prices, new staff, new services, seasonal offers, without a quote every time.
• Google Business Profile. Posts, photos, hours, services, answering questions, watching for unauthorised edits.
• Reviews. Requests going out, replies to the ones that arrive.
• Local SEO. Pages for the areas and services you want work from, on-page work, keeping the site fast.
• Checking it works. Testing the contact form actually delivers, which fails silently more often than anyone expects.

That is roughly four to eight hours a month for a typical small business, which is why the honest price sits where it does. Anyone offering all of that for £19 a month is not doing it.

Why ad hoc rarely works

The obvious alternative is paying someone only when you need something. In theory that is efficient.

In practice each change means finding the email, describing what you want, getting a quote, approving it, and waiting. That friction is small, and it is enough that most owners simply do not bother. The price change waits. The new service never gets added. Two years pass.

I have taken over plenty of sites where the last edit was the launch. Not because the owner did not care, but because every change had a transaction attached to it.

What to ask a prospective provider

Six questions, and the answers tell you almost everything:

1. What exactly happens each month? Actions, not a report.
2. Are content changes included, and is there a limit?
3. Is local SEO included, or sold separately?
4. Who owns the domain, the site and the content?
5. What is the notice period?
6. What can you not promise?

That last one is the most revealing. A provider who says “we cannot promise rankings or a set number of leads, here is what we will actually do” is being straight with you. One who guarantees results is telling you what they think will close the sale.

Which tier suits which business

£15-£50 maintenance suits a business whose work comes entirely from referrals and repeat customers, where the website exists to confirm you are real.

£49-£99 management suits most single-location small businesses that want the phone to ring more: the site kept current, the Google profile active, reviews coming in, a few local pages a year.

£99-£199 suits businesses in competitive areas, or those also running ads and email marketing, or with more services and locations to cover.

£300+ agency suits businesses with genuine complexity: multiple locations, large ad budgets, brand and design work, or a marketing function that needs coordinating.

Most people asking this question sit in the second band and are being quoted from the fourth.

What we charge

Our plans are £49 Essentials, £99 Complete and £199 Premier, monthly, no contract, and you own your domain and content throughout. The pricing page sets out exactly what falls into each, and if the honest answer for you is the cheapest tier, we will say so.

If you would rather skip the comparison, tell us what your business does and what you want from the site and we will tell you which tier fits, or that you do not need us at all.

Related reading: who manages your website after it is built and what is included in a website care plan.