Who can update my website for me? Options and prices

Website updates cost £50-£80 an hour from a freelancer, are usually included in a £49-£199 monthly managed plan, or are free if you can edit the site yourself. Most people asking this question could do it themselves and do not know it, because nobody ever gave them the login.

Start there, because it is free.

You can probably already do this

The majority of small business websites are built on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify or something similar. All of them are designed so a non-technical owner can change text and swap images.

If you have never been given a login, ask whoever built the site for one. You are entitled to admin access to your own website and any reasonable developer will hand it over without argument. If they resist, that is worth noting.

What you can safely do yourself once you are in: change text, update prices, swap photos, add a team member, update opening hours, add a new service page. That covers most of what people pay for.

The four routes

Why hourly billing quietly kills websites

This is the part worth understanding, because it explains why so many small business sites are three years out of date.

A freelancer charges £60 an hour with a half-hour minimum. You want a price changed on one page, which takes them four minutes. You are billed £30, and you had to email, wait for a reply, approve, and wait again.

Nothing about that is unfair. The friction is the problem, not the price. After it happens twice, most owners stop asking. The seasonal offer never goes up. The new service never gets added. The site freezes at whatever it was on launch day.

When each option makes sense

Do it yourself if your site is on a CMS, you have the login, and the changes are text and images. This is the right answer for a lot of people and it costs nothing. The only requirement is that you will actually do it.

A managed plan makes sense if you want changes to happen without thinking about cost each time, and if you also want the marketing side handled: Google profile, reviews, local SEO. At £49-£199 a month you are paying for changes to be frictionless as much as for the changes themselves.

A freelancer hourly works if your site genuinely changes once or twice a year. Below that frequency a monthly plan is poor value, and you should just pay the £60 when it happens.

The original developer is convenient and it is worth having a second option, because sole developers get busy, ill, or move on. Make sure you have your own logins regardless.

What to do if nobody is answering

If the person who built your site has stopped responding, the priority is not the updates. It is checking who controls your domain name.

Run a free WHOIS lookup on your web address. If the domain is registered to you or your company, you are in a strong position: any developer can take over the site, or build a new one and point the domain at it.

If it is registered to the developer, sort that out first, because everything else depends on it. My web guy disappeared walks through the recovery in order.

What actually needs updating, and how often

Worth knowing so you can judge whether you need a monthly arrangement at all:

• Prices. Whenever they change, which for most businesses is once or twice a year.
• Opening hours. Every time they change, including bank holidays, on the site and on your Google profile.
• Team. When people join or leave.
• Services. When you add or drop something.
• Photos. Ideally a few times a year, particularly for trades and anything visual.
• New pages. A few a year if you want to grow visibility, none if you do not.

If that list is genuinely two or three events a year for you, pay hourly. If it is monthly, a plan is cheaper and considerably less annoying.

More on the cadence in how often should a website be updated.

What we do

Our plans include changes rather than billing them: £49, £99 and £199 a month, no contract, and you own the domain and content. You email what you want changed and it happens, with no quote and no minimum charge.

Whether that is worth it depends entirely on how often you would actually ask. If the honest answer is twice a year, we would tell you to pay a freelancer hourly instead. The pricing page sets out each tier, or tell us how your site was built and how often it changes and we will give you a straight answer.