How much should you pay for website management?

You should pay £15-£50 a month for maintenance only, £49-£199 for a managed service that includes marketing, and £300-£1,500 for a genuine agency retainer. Which one you need is decided by hours, not by ambition. A typical single-location small business needs four to eight hours of work a month.

Two quotes landed on a bookkeeper’s desk last spring. One said £45 a month. One said £280. Both used the phrase “website management”. Neither explained what happened after the first month, and that was the only thing worth knowing.

What the money actually buys

Those bands are not arbitrary. They fall out of hours multiplied by the going rate.

Competent UK web and marketing labour costs £40-£80 an hour, whether it comes from a freelancer, a small studio or an agency floor. Maintenance takes one to three hours a month. A managed service takes four to eight. A real agency retainer takes twelve to twenty.

Do the multiplication and you get the bands. A managed service sits below the raw sum because the work is standardised across many clients, which is a legitimate efficiency rather than a trick.

Which tier do you actually need?

Most people overshoot or undershoot, and both cost money.

A landscaper whose diary is full from word of mouth does not need a marketing plan. He needs the site not to break and someone to change the phone number when it changes. That is a £25 job, and anyone selling him £400 of strategy is selling him something he cannot use.

The reverse happens more often. A business pays £20 a month, wonders why it never appears on Google, and blames the website. Nobody was doing any marketing. Nobody was ever paid to.

The question that makes any quote comparable

Ask every provider the same thing: “What will you change on my site in month three?”

Month one is always busy. Setup, migration, a fresh look at the pages. Month three is the truth.

Answers that are fine at the right price:

• “Nothing unless you send us something.” Honest. Correct for £25 a month.
• “A new service page, three Google profile posts, two review requests, and we will look at what people searched for.” That is four to eight hours. Fair at £99-£199.
• “Ongoing strategic optimisation of your digital presence.” That is not an answer. Ask again.

Then ask the follow-up: how many hours does that represent? Providers doing real work answer easily. Providers who are not go vague, and the vagueness is your finding.

Where higher prices are genuinely justified

Plenty of agencies earn £800 a month and more. Be fair about when.

Serious ad spend. Once £3,000 a month is going to Google, someone watching it daily pays for themselves several times over.

Design and brand work. Rebrands, photography, video. No monthly plan covers this properly.

Multiple locations. The coordination alone is a job.

Regulated sectors where compliance knowledge stops expensive mistakes.

If none of those describe you, a four-figure retainer for one site in one town is hard to defend. That is the argument set out in full in is your agency overcharging.

What nobody can sell you at any price

Rankings. Lead numbers. A guaranteed position on Google.

Anyone quoting you a monthly fee attached to a promised result is either guessing or misleading you, and the two are hard to tell apart from the outside. What a provider can commit to is the work: the pages written, the profile kept current, the reviews requested, the site kept fast and safe. Results follow work, but no honest person puts a number on them in advance.

Price the work. Judge the work. Ignore the promises.

A sensible way to decide

Take your average customer value. A dog groomer at £45 a visit needs more volume than a kitchen fitter at £6,000 a job, and the right spend follows that, not the other way round.

Then set a ceiling you can pay for twelve months without flinching, because three months of marketing tells you almost nothing. If that ceiling is £50, take a maintenance plan and do your own Google profile. If it is £150, a managed service is the better use of the money. Our note on setting a marketing budget works through the numbers properly.

Our plans are £49, £99 and £199 a month with no contract, and the pricing page lists what happens at each tier so you can apply the hours test to us the same way. If you would rather just describe your situation and be told which band you belong in, including if the answer is “stay where you are”, tell us what you pay now.