What website maintenance costs right now
Market reference ranges, not an offer. Self-managed: you pay hosting and nothing else, $10–40 a month. A freelancer care plan for a small business site: $50–150 a month. A small agency: $150–500 a month. Full service with SEO, content and paid ads: $500–2,000 a month. Work outside the plan is billed hourly, roughly $75–150 in the US and £40–90 in the UK.
The number on its own tells you nothing. Two $99 plans can mean "I run the updates and keep a backup" or "I handle everything and you get four content edits a month with a 48-hour turnaround". What you compare is the scope and the turnaround, never the price alone.
And maintenance is the only part of a website budget you pay forever. A $3,000 site on a $200 a month plan is $7,800 after two years. That is where the real cost of being online gets decided — not in the build quote everyone haggles over.
The bills that arrive with no plan at all
Separate the running costs first, because they show up either way: the domain ($10–20 a year), shared hosting ($60–300 a year) and business email (about $6–7 per mailbox per month, so $72–84 a year each). The SSL certificate — the padlock — has been free for years and any decent host issues and renews it automatically.
That is roughly $150–400 a year just to keep the lights on, and none of it is maintenance. We broke the domain half of it down in how much a domain name costs per year.
This is exactly where the most common trick in the industry lives: a "$29 a month maintenance plan" that is hosting with a new label. One question settles it — how many hours of human work does this fee include each month? If the answer is none, it is not maintenance, it is rent.
What a real care plan actually does
Updates, and a check afterwards. Core, theme, plugins and the PHP version. Clicking "update all" is not the job; going back in to confirm the contact form still sends mail and the homepage has not shifted is. Most broken sites we are asked to rescue broke during an update nobody looked at.
Backups that have been restored. A backup that has never been restored is a file, not a backup. Ask how often they run, whether they are stored off the same server, and the date of the last successful restore test. No date, no backup.
Monitoring. An automatic alert when the site goes down, when the certificate is about to expire, or when a file appears that should not be there. Without it, the person who tells you the site is down is a customer, usually on Monday after a silent weekend.
Content edits and speed. How many edits are included, how fast they happen, and what happens on a Saturday. Plus a periodic performance review: a site slows down on its own, one uncompressed photo and one more plugin at a time. That is what the top tier of our digital growth plan is built around.
Why a WordPress site costs more to maintain
This is not an opinion about WordPress, it is arithmetic. A WordPress site is the core, a theme and somewhere between fifteen and thirty plugins, each with its own release schedule and its own developer. Every month something needs updating, and every update can break something else.
Underneath sits PHP, on its own clock: each version gets two years of active support and two more of security fixes only — that second window was extended in 2024 — and then stops receiving patches entirely. When that happens your host forces the upgrade, a theme bought in 2019 stops working, and an invoice nobody budgeted for lands on your desk.
The other risk is the abandoned plugin: still installed, no longer patched, and the single most common way into a small business site. Auditing once a year which plugins are still maintained and deleting the ones you never use is the best value maintenance task there is.
A static site — generated HTML, no database, no plugins — has none of that to patch. That is how this site is built, which is why its maintenance is content, measurement and monitoring instead of emergency patching. If you are still choosing how to build, we compared the options in creating a website with AI: what it does well and what it misses.
Five contract traps worth reading twice
1. The fee that includes no changes at all. Updates, backups and monitoring; editing a price on a page is billed separately at an hourly rate. Perfectly legitimate — as long as you know before you sign, not on the day you need two lines changed.
2. Hours that expire every month. Two hours a month that do not roll over are twenty-four a year that in practice become six or seven, because the quiet months are never banked. Ask in writing whether unused time carries forward.
3. The "maintenance" that is hosting. The most common of the five, and the one you discover the first time you ask for an edit.
4. The domain or the hosting account in your provider's name. This is the one that actually costs money: if you want to leave and the domain is not registered to you, you do not leave. Ask to see the domain inside an account that is yours, with your email as the registrant contact. The same goes for a site built on a proprietary platform you cannot export from.
5. Auto-renewal at a higher rate, or a mandatory redesign. Check the notice period for cancelling and whether the fee rises on renewal. Then keep the question that covers all five: can I take the site and the domain elsewhere tomorrow at no extra cost? A slow answer is the answer.
The legal upkeep nobody budgets for
Accessibility is now the biggest litigation risk for a small US business website. In 2025 plaintiffs filed 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits, 27 % more than the 2,452 filed in 2024, and more than 5,000 counting state courts. Website cases made up 36 % of all federal ADA Title III filings, and nearly half of the federal cases targeted companies that had already been sued once.
There is no federal technical standard for private sites, so WCAG 2.1 level AA is the benchmark that court settlements keep landing on. The part people miss is that accessibility is not a one-off fix: every new page, every image without alt text, every scanned PDF and every embedded video can undo it. It belongs on a monthly checklist, not in the build.
Privacy works the same way. California's CCPA/CPRA and more than a dozen other state laws require a privacy notice that matches what your site actually collects — and the day you add a chat widget, an ad pixel or an online booking tool, the notice you published is out of date. If you get visitors from the UK or the EU, UK GDPR and PECR require consent before non-essential cookies, with the ICO as the regulator.
None of this is a plugin. It is one yearly review by a human who reads the page, plus a five-minute check every time something new is added.
How many changes do you actually need?
The honest budget starts with counting. A restaurant changes the menu and its prices several times a year and swaps opening hours in summer: a plan with frequent edits pays for itself. A tutoring centre moves the timetable and fees every term, two or three batches a year. A dental practice updates its team page and hours every time somebody joins or leaves.
At the other end, a professional services site that publishes nothing can go a whole year with two edits. Paying $200 a month for that is $2,400 a year for two emails: what you need there is a small monitoring fee and a clear hourly rate, not a big plan.
The opposite mistake is just as common: buying the two-hour bundle and discovering in March that a full menu rewrite with new photography eats the year. Count the changes you actually requested over the last twelve months and buy for that, not for the business you wish you were running.
How we do it
Our plan is annual and comes in three tiers: Maintenance: Basic Plan, with monthly changes; Maintenance: Unlimited Changes Plan, with weekly changes; and the Growth Plan, which adds continuous server and Core Web Vitals work, Search Console and Analytics reviewed every month, ongoing SEO with content and links, and Google, Meta and TikTok campaigns proposed and run by us (the ad spend is the client's). The published prices are on the digital growth plan page.
It is signed either when you order the site or on the day you see it live, and it is paid at handover. Not later: maintenance that starts two years after the fact is an audit, and anywhere in the world it is priced like one.
And if you do not take it, nothing happens — which is the part rarely written down. The domain is registered in your name from day one, the credentials are yours, and nothing renews behind your back. If what you want first is the cost of the site itself, it is on the website packages page and in our guide to what is behind cheap website design.
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