What website maintenance really costs per month, and what it must include

A company website runs on software that other people keep changing: the content management system, its plugins and themes, the programming language on the server, the server’s operating system, and the browsers of your visitors. Each of these receives updates, and some of those updates close security holes that are being exploited the same week.

At the same time the business around the site changes. Prices move, people join and leave, a product is discontinued, a new law asks for a line on the imprint. A site nobody touches drifts away from reality and from the search results it used to appear in.

Maintenance is the work that keeps both in step: the technical base current and safe, and the content true. The monthly fee is the price of someone being responsible for that, every month, whether or not anything visible happens.

Offers use the same word for very different things. One supplier means “we host it”, another means “we answer the phone”, a third means a full care contract. Before comparing prices, compare what is covered. A complete package has eight parts.

Two of these deserve a closer look because they are the ones most often missing in cheap offers.

Testing of updates. Clicking “update all” takes a minute. Checking afterwards that the contact form still sends, the shop still takes orders and the pages still look right takes longer, and that is the part you are paying for. Ask whether updates are tested, and where: on a copy of the site or on the live site.

Restore tests. A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a backup. A good contract names how often a restore is tried and how long a full restore takes. The details of what to look for are in our page on security and backups.

Nothing happens for a while, which is exactly why maintenance is the first thing cut. The costs arrive later and all at once.

The pattern is the same in every row: the saving is small and steady, the cost is large and sudden. Rebuilding a compromised site, cleaning it from blocklists and explaining to customers why your domain sent them spam costs more than several years of care, and that is before lost enquiries are counted.

The figures below are an example, not a price list. They describe a company website of about thirty pages with a contact form, no shop, in a care package with two hours of content changes a month. The total of 300 is a round number chosen to make the shares easy to read; your own figure depends on the size of the site, the number of integrations and the response time you need. The point of the example is the proportions.

Three observations from the example. Hosting is a quarter of the fee at most; a package that is almost all hosting is a hosting plan with a different name. Updates with testing cost as much as hosting, because they are human time, not server time. And content changes are the one part that scales with how much you send in: if you never send anything, ask for a package without hours rather than paying for them. Our own plans are built on these parts, so the comparison works there too.

A shop or a site with several languages moves the proportions: payment and shipping integrations need their own tests after every update, and a multilingual site has more pages to check. The parts stay the same.

Put the two offers side by side and answer the same questions for each. An offer that cannot answer a question is cheaper for a reason.

The last two points are easy to skip and matter most. A monthly summary (updates applied, backups taken, uptime, hours used) is the only way to know you are paying for work rather than a promise. And the exit terms decide whether you can leave: with your domain, your files, your database and your logins, as described in our overview of website care.

There are three common ways to pay, and each suits a different kind of site.

1. Fixed monthly fee. A defined package of hosting, updates, backups, monitoring and a block of hours. Predictable, and the supplier has an interest in preventing problems rather than billing for them. Best for most company sites.
2. Hourly, on call. No fixed fee; you pay when you ask. Cheap in a quiet year, expensive in a bad one, and nobody is watching between calls. Only sensible for a site that can be offline for days without harm.
3. Fixed base plus hourly extras. The technical base is covered by a fee, larger content or development work is quoted separately. The usual choice for shops and sites that change often.

Whichever model you choose, keep one rule: the technical base (updates, backups, security, monitoring) is never “on request”. Those are the parts that protect you precisely when nobody is thinking about the website.