Done-for-you website service UK: what is actually included

“Done-for-you” is one of the most over-used phrases in the UK website market. Search the term and you will find £25-a-month landing pages, £3,000 agency proposals, and “lifetime hosting” deals from people who will be gone in eighteen months, all using the same three words. Half of them mean we built your site once and now you have our mobile number. That is not done-for-you. That is done-with-you-and-then-forgotten.

The honest answer: a real done-for-you website service is an operational service, not a build. It runs ten distinct things on your behalf, every month, in the background, without you having to know what any of them are. If a provider cannot show you the list, or cannot tell you which items are in scope and which are extras, they are selling a build with a maintenance retainer bolted on, and calling it a managed service.

Here is the checklist I would run against any provider before signing anything. It is the same list UK Web Marketing operates internally, so the bias is declared up front; it is also the list I would ask another agency about if I were the buyer.

The 10-item checklist

1. Hosting + uptime monitoring

Hosting is the easy part: everyone has it. What separates a real done-for-you service is active uptime monitoring: a system that pings the site every minute or two, raises an alert the moment it stops responding, and starts the fix before you have noticed. UK Web Marketing sites run on Vercel’s London (lhr1) edge with sub-second LCP and a 99.99% historical uptime; monitoring is via Vercel observability plus a secondary Plausible heartbeat. Most £25/mo bargain providers host on shared servers in Frankfurt or Virginia with no monitoring, and the first you know about an outage is when a customer calls.

What to ask: “If my site goes down at 11pm on a Saturday, when do you find out, and what is the typical time-to-restore?”

2. Daily backups (verified restore tested quarterly)

A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a backup. The standard most providers will not meet: daily snapshots, off-site, with a quarterly restore drill so the recovery path is known to work. The 2023 GoDaddy “backup not available” incidents were all sites that had a backup line on the invoice and no test restore on the calendar.

What to ask: “When was the last time you did a test restore from backup, and how long did it take?”

3. SSL certificate (auto-renewal, no manual handling)

Every site needs HTTPS now: Chrome marks HTTP as “Not Secure”, and Google Search punishes unencrypted sites in rankings. The right answer is automatic Let’s Encrypt renewal handled at the platform layer: you never see it, it never expires, the green padlock is permanent. The wrong answer is a £79/year EV cert that has to be manually rotated; if your provider charges separately for SSL in 2026 they have not updated their stack in five years.

What to ask: “Is SSL auto-renewing at the platform, or is there a manual step on a calendar somewhere?”

4. Domain pointing + DNS management

Your domain (yourbusiness.co.uk) needs DNS records to send visitors to the right server, route email to the right mailbox, and prove ownership for things like Google Search Console. Most owners do not want to log into a Cloudflare or 123-Reg dashboard ever again. A done-for-you service manages DNS on your behalf, including A records, CNAMEs, MX records for email, SPF/DKIM/DMARC for deliverability, and the periodic gymnastics when you change email providers. UK Web Marketing keeps domains in your name (you stay the registrant) but operates the DNS via Cloudflare EU.

What to ask: “Who owns the domain registration, me or you? And who edits DNS records when I add a new mailbox?”

5. Monthly content updates (in scope, what counts?)

This is where most retainers quietly collapse. “Content updates included” sounds generous until you ask what counts. Two pages of copy a month? Five? A new team-member bio? A new service page with three images and a custom layout? Get the unit defined in writing. A UK Web Marketing retainer defines the content unit up front in your quote, typically a substantive content piece each month plus a couple of hours of small text and image edits across existing pages, with heavier article cadences scoped for businesses that want them. If a competitor says “unlimited updates” for £25/mo, ask them what counts as one update.

What to ask: “What is the unit, pages, words, hours? And what tips it into a chargeable extra?”

6. Performance monitoring (Core Web Vitals dashboard access)

Site speed is now a ranking signal and a conversion lever. Google’s 2017 Think with Google study (Daniel An, Feb 2017) put the figure at +106% bounce rate when load time goes from 1 second to 6. A real done-for-you service monitors Core Web Vitals continuously (LCP, CLS, INP) and gives you a dashboard or monthly report showing the numbers. UKWM sites typically run sub-second LCP on Vercel London (lhr1); we share a Plausible + Vercel speed view per client.

What to ask: “Can you show me my site’s current Core Web Vitals scores in a dashboard I can access?”

7. Security patching (CMS, dependencies, server)

Every line of code on your site is a potential vulnerability. WordPress sites compound this: core + theme + 15-30 plugins, each releasing patches monthly, any of which can break the site on update. A done-for-you service patches everything on a tested schedule, never on a Friday afternoon, never without a backup snapshot first. Hand-coded Astro sites (the UKWM stack) have a dramatically smaller dependency surface than WordPress, but the discipline is the same: patches go out weekly, tested in preview before production.

What to ask: “What is your patching cadence, and have any of my pages broken from a patch in the last 12 months?”

8. Email integration (mailbox or transactional)

The website is half the system; email is the other half. A done-for-you service handles either a forwarding setup (you@yourbusiness.co.uk to your existing Gmail/Outlook) or a transactional sending integration for contact-form replies, booking confirmations, and newsletters. UKWM uses Resend EU for transactional email and routes mailbox traffic through whichever provider the client has chosen (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Fastmail). If your provider says “email is not included” that is fine, but they should tell you the path, not leave you with a contact form that posts into the void.

What to ask: “When a customer fills in my contact form, where does the email actually land?”

9. Analytics setup + access (Plausible / GA4)

You cannot improve what you cannot see. A real done-for-you service installs analytics, configures the goals that matter for your business, and gives you read-access. UKWM defaults to Plausible (EU-hosted, GDPR-friendly, no cookie banner needed); GA4 on request. The setup matters more than the tool: a Plausible dashboard with three configured goals beats GA4 with default settings every time.

What to ask: “What goals are configured, and can I log in and see them myself?”

10. Direct response support (who replies, owner or rotating helpdesk?)

When you email “the website is down” or “can we change the prices on the services page”, who replies? At UK Web Marketing it is me (Jordan), every time, usually within hours, often within minutes during working hours. At larger agencies it is a rotating helpdesk where the person picking up has never seen your site before. Neither is automatically wrong, but the response shape is different and you should know which you are paying for.

What to ask: “Who is the named human who will reply to my emails, and what is their typical response time?”

What is typically NOT done-for-you (and should be priced separately)

The checklist above is the operational baseline. Several things sit outside it, and any honest provider will price them separately rather than claim they are “included”:

• Bespoke design refreshes. A new visual identity, new colour system, new typography choices: that is a build project, not a monthly maintenance item. Scoped and quoted to your brief at UKWM rather than sold at a fixed price.
• Advanced integrations. A new third-party booking system, CRM pipeline rebuild, payment-gateway swap, or HubSpot connector: scoped per job.
• Custom code modules. A bespoke calculator, a multi-step quote form with conditional logic, a members-only area: these get quoted, not absorbed.
• E-commerce platform changes. Adding Shopify or WooCommerce to a brochure site is a platform shift, not a content update.
• Multi-domain consolidation. Merging three legacy domains into one canonical site (with redirects) is a migration project. UKWM does these, but they are scoped separately.

If a provider tells you all of the above is included for £25/month, they are either (a) lying, (b) about to renegotiate within six months, or (c) running unsustainably and about to disappear.

A genuinely operated service is defined by what it covers, not by charging a premium. At UK Web Marketing a bespoke build plus website management starts from £49/month, quoted to your business, with named-operator accountability on all ten items rather than the four to six the bottom of the market covers. There is no lock-in, you can cancel any time, and services may vary.

Pricing reality check

Run the 10-item checklist against the three price bands you will actually see in the UK market and the picture becomes uncomfortable:

• Bottom-of-market £15-£25/mo done-for-you (typically Wix Business plans bundled with a freelancer retainer): covers hosting, SSL, maybe daily backups. Items 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 are usually missing or “best effort”. 4-6 items out of 10.
• Named-operator service (where UK Web Marketing sits): covers the operational baseline, monitoring, backups, SSL, DNS, patching, email, analytics and named support, with the content scope defined in your quote. A bespoke build plus website management starts from £49/month, quoted to your business, and once all 10 items are in scope you get a substantive content piece every month plus a couple of hours of small edits. The difference from the bottom band is coverage and accountability, all ten items with one named operator, not a higher price. There is no lock-in, you can cancel any time, and services may vary.
• Acquisition-led services and up (the growth-engine model): covers all 10 items, plus broader content scope and active marketing on top of the baseline. At the heavier end a retainer can add Capsule CRM, a Resend EU newsletter, a regular article cadence, a CRO experiment, and multi-area SEO for businesses that want to own a region. This is scoped to your brief rather than sold as a fixed package price.

The £25/mo end of the market is not dishonest as long as the provider tells you which items they are not covering. The dishonesty is when “done-for-you” gets stretched to mean “we built it and we are still answering the phone”.

How UK Web Marketing maps to the checklist

All ten items are included in a full bespoke build plus website management from £49/month, quoted to your business, with no lock-in, cancel any time, and services may vary:

1. Hosting + uptime monitoring: Vercel London (lhr1), 99.99% historical uptime
2. Daily backups: Vercel platform + Git history + quarterly verified restore
3. SSL: Let’s Encrypt, auto-renewing at the platform
4. DNS management: Cloudflare EU, you stay the domain registrant
5. Monthly content updates: one substantive content piece a month plus around two hours of small text and image edits
6. Performance monitoring: sub-second LCP, Plausible + Vercel dashboards
7. Security patching: weekly cadence, preview-tested before production
8. Email: forwarding or transactional via Resend EU
9. Analytics: Plausible EU by default, GA4 on request
10. Direct response support: me (Jordan), typically within hours

The full inclusion list lives on /managed-website-service, with the comparator numbers (how a predictable monthly service compares with a typical UK agency rebuild) on /managed-website-service#compare. The way in is the £300 Marketing and Automation Deep-Dive: a consultation, a written audit, and a fixed quote for the exact build and management you need, with the £300 credited against any build you go on to commission. Website management starts from £49/month and scales with scope, so a lighter operational baseline on an existing site sits at the floor, while heavier packages layer on Capsule CRM, a newsletter, a regular article cadence, a CRO experiment, and multi-area SEO for businesses that want to own a region. Everything is quoted to your business rather than sold as a fixed package price, and services may vary.

Run the checklist on your current site

The most useful thing you can do with this list is print it, hand it to your current website provider, and ask them to tick the ten boxes in writing. If they cannot, you know what you are paying for. If they can, you have a clean comparison to make.

If you would rather we did it for you, we run the free audit against the same 10-item checklist, scored item-by-item with screenshots and a recommendation. No obligation; we will send you the PDF whether you switch or not. If you want the full picture, the £300 Marketing and Automation Deep-Dive adds a consultation, a written audit, and a fixed quote for the build and retainer you need, and the £300 is credited against any build you commission.

Further reading:

• Managed website service: the UK complete guide for 2026, the pillar piece this post sits under
• What a small-business website actually costs you over 3 years, the Three-Year Cost Curve framework
• Why I moved UK Web Marketing to a monthly subscription, why the monthly subscription shape exists at all
• Website management vs maintenance, how a done-for-you operational service differs from a patch-only maintenance plan
• /managed-website-service, full inclusion list, FAQ, comparators
• /marketing-automation-audit, the £300 Marketing and Automation Deep-Dive that turns the checklist into a fixed quote, credited against any build

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UK Web Marketing is operated by TicketWave HQ Ltd, company no. 17143167, registered in Pudsey, Leeds LS28 6LE. Hand-crafted, AI-leveraged Astro sites on Vercel London (lhr1), Cloudflare EU, Resend EU, Capsule UK, Stripe Ireland EU, Plausible EU. Cancellation: one-click from Stripe email, ends at end of paid month; 14-day full statutory refund under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. Last updated 29 June 2026.