What a Website Care Plan Actually Covers (And What It Does Not)

Monthly website fees are one of the least transparent things in our industry.

Someone builds you a site, hands you an invoice for a few hundred pounds a month, and calls it "maintenance" or "hosting and support." A year later you genuinely could not say what you have been paying for. The site looks the same as it did on launch day. Nobody has emailed you. The only evidence the money is doing anything is that the website still loads.

That is not always a scam. Quite a lot of the work behind a good care plan is invisible by design, and the whole point of it is that nothing goes wrong. But you deserve to know what is actually in the box, because plenty of plans are genuinely just hosting with a markup.

Here is the honest breakdown.

The Part You Are Really Paying For: Nothing Breaking

The unglamorous core of any care plan is keeping a live thing alive.

Hosting and delivery. Your site has to be served to anyone who asks for it, quickly, from anywhere, without falling over when you get a busy week. We build on Next.js and host on Vercel, which means pages are delivered from servers close to the visitor rather than from one box in a data centre somewhere. That is a real cost and a real technical choice, not a line item.

Security and updates. Every website is built on layers of other people's code, and that code gets security patches. On WordPress this is the plugin update treadmill, and it is the single most common way small business sites get hacked: an out of date plugin nobody updated for eight months. On a modern stack it is dependency updates. Either way, somebody has to actually do it, check nothing broke, and roll it back if it did.

SSL and certificates. The padlock in the browser bar expires. It needs renewing. When it lapses, browsers put a full page warning in front of your website telling visitors it is unsafe. This happens to more businesses than you would think.

Uptime monitoring. Someone should know your site is down before your customer rings to tell you. This is the difference between "we fixed it at 6am" and "we lost a day of enquiries and nobody noticed until Thursday."

Backups and a restore plan. Backups are not the hard part. Having actually tested that you can restore from them is. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a plan.

A human to talk to. Something will confuse you eventually. A form stops sending, an email bounces, Google says something alarming in Search Console. Being able to message a person who knows your site and get a straight answer is a large part of what you are buying.

Our Basic plan is exactly this list, at £150 a month, plus business email addresses on your own domain. That is the floor. If you are paying for a care plan, everything above should be in it.

The Part That Actually Grows the Business

Keeping the lights on is necessary and it is not enough. A website that never changes slowly stops working, because your business changes and the site does not.

This is where the middle tier of most plans lives, and where the value gets much easier to see.

Small content changes. New photos of a job you are proud of. A testimonial that came in by text. Updating your prices. Swapping a service you no longer offer. These are ten minute jobs individually, and they are exactly the ten minute jobs that never get done when they sit on your own to do list for eleven months.

Blog and content publishing. Not because blogging is magic, but because a site that has been updated recently is a site Google keeps crawling, and because those pages are what answer the questions your customers are actually typing. We have written about how we build sites AI can find, and none of it works on a site frozen since launch.

Analytics that someone reads. Having Google Analytics installed is not analytics. Somebody looking at it and telling you "your quote page gets plenty of visits but almost nobody submits, let us look at the form" is analytics.

That is our Standard plan at £300 a month. The step up from Basic is not more server, it is human hours on your site every month.

What Should Never Be Hidden In a Care Plan

Some things get quietly bundled into monthly fees when they should not be. Watch for these.

• Your domain name held hostage. Your domain should be registered to you, in your name, and you should be able to take it with you. If your provider owns your domain, you do not own your web address, and leaving becomes a negotiation.
• Ransom hosting. Some providers build on a proprietary platform you cannot export from, so the monthly fee is not for care, it is for continued access to your own website. Ask directly: if I leave, what do I take with me?
• "Unlimited changes." Nobody offers unlimited work for a fixed fee and means it. What actually happens is that requests get slow, or "unlimited" quietly means "unlimited small text edits." Clear boundaries are more honest than a generous sounding promise.
• SEO as a vague inclusion. "SEO included" with no deliverable, no reporting, and no named activity usually means nothing is happening. Either it is a defined piece of work or it is filler.

What Genuinely Should Cost Extra

Being fair about this cuts both ways. A care plan is not a blank cheque for development work, and a provider who lets it become one will either burn out or start avoiding your emails.

New pages, a new booking system, a redesign, an integration with your CRM, a whole new section of the site: these are projects. They should be scoped and quoted separately, and you should get a number before work starts. That is not a provider being difficult, it is the thing that keeps the monthly fee predictable and stops "can you just add" turning into an argument.

The test of a good plan is not whether extras exist. It is whether the line between included and extra was explained to you clearly, up front, before you needed to know.

How to Tell If Yours Is Worth It

Four questions. Ask your current provider, and see how comfortable the answers are.

1. What have you done on my site in the last three months? A good answer is specific and slightly boring. Silence or vagueness tells you what you need to know.
2. When did you last restore a backup, and how long would it take? Tests whether the safety net is real.
3. If I left tomorrow, what would I walk away with? Domain, content, email, code. The answer should be "all of it."
4. What is included and what is extra? If nobody can tell you cleanly, that ambiguity will eventually cost you.

If the answers are good, your plan is probably fine even if it feels quiet. Quiet is what a working care plan feels like. If the answers are uncomfortable, you are paying rent on your own website.

Do You Even Need One?

Honestly, not everyone does. If you are technical, your site is simple and static, and you are happy owning the updates and the monitoring, you can run it yourself for very little. We would rather say that than sell you something you do not need. We took the same view on content management systems in do you really need a CMS, and the logic is the same: pay for the thing you will actually use.

Where a care plan earns its money is when you have a business to run and no interest in becoming your own web team. The value is that the site stays fast, stays safe, stays current, and someone who knows it is paying attention.

How We Can Help

Our website care plans start at £150 a month and every tier lists exactly what is in it, including the boundaries. If you already have a site with someone else and just want a second opinion on whether you are getting value, we are happy to give you an honest read.

Have a look at our recent work, get a ballpark from the quote generator, or get in touch and tell us what you are currently paying for.