The verdict in three sentences
For an SME whose website has been dormant for two years, a mid-tier retainer at 200 to 500 EUR per month (250 to 700 GBP in London) covers updates, monitoring and 2 hours of improvements, which is enough in most cases. The entry tier at 60 to 150 EUR protects against the worst but does not move the site forward. Before signing, ask for a takeover audit (300 to 800 EUR) and a written SLA with response times in business hours.
What each tier really includes
The word "maintenance" covers very different realities. Some agencies charge 90 EUR per month for automatic plugin updates, others include real monitoring, tested backups and improvements. Here is a realistic 2026 grid for a corporate website of 10 to 50 pages, with French-speaking agency pricing in EUR and London agency pricing in GBP.
| Service | Essential | Pro | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price, French-speaking agency | 60 to 150 EUR | 200 to 500 EUR | 600 to 1,500 EUR |
| Monthly price, London agency | 250 to 400 GBP | 500 to 1,000 GBP | 1,200 to 2,000 GBP |
| CMS, theme, plugin updates | Monthly | Weekly | Weekly + urgent patches within 24 h |
| Backups | Weekly | Daily, 30 days | Daily, 90 days, tested restore |
| Uptime monitoring | No | Every 5 min, alerts | Every minute, on-call |
| Improvement hours included | 0 | 2 h per month | 6 to 12 h per month |
| Response time (SLA) | Best effort | 1 business day | 4 business hours |
If your site generates quote requests every week, Pro is the right balance. Premium is justified when the site carries a client portal, an order funnel or an intranet.
The real cost of no maintenance
A WordPress site not updated for 24 months accumulates on average dozens of known vulnerabilities in its plugins. Automated attacks exploit them without targeting your company specifically: spam page injection, redirects to fraudulent sites, theft of form data.
| Incident | Likelihood on an unmaintained site | Recovery cost 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Hack with spam pages | High | 1,500 to 4,000 EUR |
| Site blacklisted by Google | Medium | 2,000 to 5,000 EUR + 2 to 6 weeks of lost traffic |
| Form data theft | Medium | 3,000 to 10,000 EUR + ICO notification within 72 h |
| Outage after host PHP upgrade | High | 800 to 2,500 EUR |
| Total loss with no usable backup | Low | 5,000 to 15,000 EUR (forced rebuild) |
| Expired SSL certificate | Medium | Low in cash, high loss of trust |
A single average incident (3,000 to 10,000 EUR) costs the equivalent of 1 to 4 years of the Pro tier.
How to choose a provider
Ask for three written items before signing: the exact list of monthly tasks, the SLA by severity level, and exit terms (handover of access, code and backups within 5 business days). Be wary of 36-month commitments with no termination clause. A renewable 12-month term is the market norm in 2026. Unused hours are rarely carried over beyond one quarter: negotiate this if your needs are irregular.
The 250 to 2,000 GBP London price range pushes some UK subsidiaries of French and Belgian groups to hand maintenance to French-speaking agencies, with the same SLA and invoicing in EUR.
Mini case study
Need a professional website?
Kolonell builds websites that attract clients, optimized for the Sénégalese market. Free quote in 2 minutes.
Sophie, head of communications at a 45-employee agricultural equipment SME, manages a WordPress site delivered in 2024 and never updated. Takeover audit: 600 EUR, finding 23 plugins, 7 of them vulnerable. She picks the Pro tier at 320 EUR per month, i.e. 3,840 EUR per year plus the audit (a London agency quoted 650 GBP per month for the same scope). The 2 monthly hours go into publishing new references and a trade show page. The site generates 6 quote requests per month, with a 15% close rate and an average deal of 18,000 EUR: 0.9 deals per month, about 16,000 EUR of monthly revenue flowing through the site. Maintenance represents 2% of that flow.
FAQ
Can maintenance be done in-house?
Yes for simple updates, provided you dedicate 2 to 4 hours per month and have a test environment. Without staging, a failed update can break the site for several hours.
Does maintenance include hosting?
Rarely in the Essential tier. Budget 10 to 60 EUR per month for hosting on top, unless a bundle is explicitly priced.
What happens if improvement hours run out?
Extra hours are billed at the contract rate, usually 65 to 95 EUR per hour with a French-speaking agency and 90 to 150 GBP in London in 2026. Require a prior quote beyond 2 hours.
Is a retainer needed for a Next.js or static site?
Yes, but it costs less: 40 to 250 EUR per month, because the attack surface is smaller. npm dependencies and hosting still need to be tracked.
How long does it take to take over a site from another provider?
Allow 1 to 2 weeks for the audit, access recovery and backup setup, for a budget of 300 to 800 EUR.
Let's scope your project. We audit your existing site and propose a priced maintenance tier, from 60 to 1,500 EUR per month depending on the SLA you need, live within 1 to 2 weeks. Detailed quote within 48 h. WhatsApp +221 77 596 93 33.
Mohamed Bah
Fondateur, Kolonell
Passionate about digital and entrepreneurship in Africa, Mohamed has been helping Sénégalese businesses with their digital transformation since 2020. Founder of Kolonell, he believes every SME deserves a professional and accessible online présence.
