Website management services for UK charities cost anywhere from £30 to £500 a month, and the price alone tells you almost nothing. Two providers can charge £100 and deliver completely different things. This article sets out what management actually involves, what the market charges, and the questions that separate a fair price from an expensive one.
We publish our own care plan prices at the end, so you can judge whether we follow our own advice.
What website management actually covers
A managed website needs six things done continuously. When you compare quotes, check each one is named:
- Software updates. On WordPress: core, theme, and plugin updates, applied promptly and tested. Out-of-date software is how charity websites get hacked.
- Security monitoring. A firewall or equivalent, login protection, and someone who is alerted when a file changes that should not have.
- Backups. Daily, stored somewhere other than the hosting itself, and tested. An untested backup is a hope, not a backup.
- Uptime and performance. Someone finds out the site is down before your supporters tell you.
- Content changes. A defined number of hours each month for the edits your team cannot or does not want to make.
- A named human. When something breaks the week of your grant deadline, you need a person who knows your site, not a ticket queue.
What the market charges
UK website maintenance cost falls into rough bands:
- £30 to £75 a month typically buys automated updates and backups with no content hours and no named contact. Fine for a site that rarely changes, as long as you know that is what you are buying.
- £75 to £200 a month is where genuine management starts: monitoring, prompt updates, an hour or two of changes, and someone who answers.
- £200 to £500 a month adds meaningful content hours, integration monitoring (donations, CRM, newsletter), and priority response. Justified when the website does daily work: donations, referrals, bookings.
- Above £500 a month is retainer territory for large organisations, usually including development time and strategy. Most charities under £1m income do not need this.
Hourly rates for out-of-plan work run £60 to £120 for freelancers and £90 to £150 for agencies. What matters more than the rate is whether work is confirmed in writing before it starts.
Five red flags in a management quote
- You do not own the site. Some pay-monthly website deals mean the provider owns everything and cancelling deletes your site. Ask directly: if we cancel, what do we keep?
- Hosting is bundled and unexplained. Reselling hosting at a markup is normal; refusing to say where the site is hosted or to hand over access is not.
- No definition of included hours. "Content updates included" without a number becomes a disagreement later.
- No mention of backups being tested. Everyone claims backups. Ask when one was last restored.
- You cannot leave cleanly. A good provider can tell you, unprompted, what handover looks like: access transferred, credentials rotated, documentation handed across. If leaving sounds painful, so is staying.
When you do not need a plan at all
Honesty requires this section. A small brochure site on a platform like Squarespace, updated by one confident person, does not need a management contract; the subscription does most of the work. What it still needs is clear ownership of the accounts it runs on, which costs nothing to fix. Our 20-minute website ownership audit covers that.
A WordPress site with nobody looking after it is a different matter. That is not a site without a management cost; it is a site whose management cost arrives all at once, later, with interest.
What we charge, for comparison
Goodside's care plans are £99 a month (updates, security, backups, monitoring, and small changes), £150 a month (more content hours and quarterly reviews), and £350 a month (three hours of changes, priority response, integration monitoring, and a quarterly accessibility check). Out-of-scope work is £90 an hour in 30-minute increments, confirmed in writing before it starts. There is no VAT on any of it, because we are not VAT registered, which for most charities makes the like-for-like comparison about 20 per cent kinder than it looks.
We list those numbers so you can hold them against the bands above, and against any quote in front of you. If a provider charges half as much, check what is missing. If they charge twice as much, check what you are getting.
If you have a quote you would like a second opinion on, book a free 20-minute call. We will tell you if it is fair, even when the fair answer is that you should take it.
