Most agencies treat website maintenance as an afterthought. The build is the exciting bit — the discovery calls, the designs, the launch day. Maintenance is the boring tail end: plugin updates, a broken contact form, a client emailing at 4:57pm on a Friday because a page “looks weird”.
So agencies either give it away for free, charge a token £30 a month to cover their inbox time, or hand the client a login and hope for the best.
That is a mistake. Not a small one either. Maintenance is usually the highest-margin, most predictable revenue line an agency can add — and it costs almost nothing to start selling. Here is why, and how to price it properly.
The maths agencies never do
A website build is lumpy revenue. You win a £6,000 project, you deliver it over six weeks, you invoice, and then you are back to zero. Next month you need another £6,000 project. Every month you start from a standing start.
Maintenance behaves in the opposite way. Assume a modest care plan at £95 a month and thirty websites on the books:
| Line | Figure |
| Monthly recurring revenue | £2,850 |
| Annual recurring revenue | £34,200 |
| Typical delivery cost (white-label) | £30–45 per site, per month |
| Gross margin | Roughly 55–65% |
| Sales effort per new client | Almost none — it is an add-on at proposal stage |
Thirty sites is not an ambitious number. Most agencies that have been building for three or four years have already built and launched that many — they simply do not have any of them on a plan.
The second effect matters even more than the revenue. Recurring income changes how an agency behaves. When £2,850 lands on the first of every month, you can afford to say no to the badly-fitting £2,000 project, hire before you are desperate, and quote at a rate that reflects your actual value instead of your cash-flow anxiety.
Why the margin is genuinely “hidden”
Three reasons agencies undervalue it.
1. They price the tasks, not the risk
Agencies look at what maintenance involves — updates, backups, uptime checks, a security scan — decide it takes “about twenty minutes a month”, and price accordingly. But the client is not buying twenty minutes. They are buying the certainty that their lead-generating website will not go down, get hacked, or quietly break its enquiry form for three weeks.
For a business doing £40,000 a month through its site, that certainty is worth far more than £30. Price the outcome, not the checklist.
2. The work is inherently repeatable
Every other service you sell is bespoke. Maintenance is the same process on every site, every month. Once you have a documented routine — or a partner running it for you — the marginal cost of the thirty-first site is close to the cost of the thirtieth. Very few agency services scale like that.
3. It quietly generates other work
A care plan means you are in the client’s site every month, and in front of the client every quarter with a report. That is where the extra work comes from: a new landing page, a booking system, “can we add a members’ area?”. Agencies with maintenance plans consistently report higher lifetime value per client, because they never disappear after launch.
What should actually be in a care plan
Keep it concrete and easy to say out loud on a sales call. A solid WordPress care plan covers:
Core, theme and plugin updates, applied on a staging copy first, not straight to live
Daily off-site backups with a tested restore, not just “backups enabled”
Uptime monitoring with alerts to you, so you find problems before the client does
Security hardening and malware scanning
Performance checks — page speed and Core Web Vitals, with a note when something slips
A monthly allowance of content changes — one hour is plenty for most clients
A short monthly or quarterly report in plain English
What should not be in it: unlimited work of any kind, new features, or redesigns. Vague scope is what turns a profitable plan into a resented one. Say what is included, cap the changes, and quote separately for anything beyond it.
A three-tier structure that works
Tiers do two useful things: they let the client self-select, and they make the middle option look sensible.
| Tier | Typical price | Fits |
| Essentials | £45–75/mo | Brochure sites, low-traffic, no urgent SLA |
| Standard | £95–150/mo | Most business sites; includes a content allowance |
| Priority / eCommerce | £200–400/mo | WooCommerce, higher traffic, faster response times |
Anchor on the middle tier. Most clients take it, and the top tier reframes £150 as modest rather than expensive.
How to sell it without a hard sell
The easiest moment to sell maintenance is before the site is even built.
Put the care plan in the original proposal as a line item, not as an upsell six weeks after launch. Frame it as part of owning a website rather than an optional extra — because it is. Wording that works: *”Websites are software. Software needs maintaining. Here is how we keep yours secure, fast and backed up so you never have to think about it.”*
For sites you have already launched, an audit is the way in. Run a quick check across your back catalogue: which sites are on outdated PHP, which have plugins two years behind, which have no backups at all. Then email each client with the specific findings for their site and the plan that fixes it. Specific beats generic every time — “your site is running WordPress 6.2 and nine plugins are out of date” gets a reply; “we now offer maintenance packages” does not.
Expect somewhere between a quarter and a half of your existing clients to say yes to that email. That alone is often four figures of new monthly revenue from an afternoon’s work.
The delivery problem — and the fix
The reason most agencies never launch a care plan is not pricing. It is delivery. Nobody
wants to own an out-of-hours pager, monitor thirty sites, or be the person testing a plugin update on a Sunday.
That is exactly the sort of work worth handing to a white-label partner. You keep the client relationship, the branding and the margin; the technical routine happens quietly in the background. Your client sees your monthly report, your logo and your invoice — and you spend your time selling and designing rather than patching.
The numbers still work comfortably. Pay £30–45 per site to have it properly maintained, charge £95–150, and you are keeping a healthy margin on revenue that arrives whether or not you won a project this month.
Start this week
You do not need a new website, a brochure or a sales funnel to begin. You need three things:
1. A defined scope for one plan — updates, backups, monitoring, one hour of changes
2. A price you are happy to say out loud
3. A list of every site you have ever built
Send the audit emails. Add the line item to your next proposal. In ninety days you will have a recurring revenue line that did not exist before, and you will wonder why you spent years giving it away.