Website Maintenance Cost

What does website maintenance include?

Maintenance is the routine work that keeps a live site working, safe and findable. The list below shows what a proper plan covers and how often. Anything marked "you" is realistic for an owner with an hour a month.

On backups, WordPress Learn describes backing up files and database, advises a backup before updating core, themes or plugins, and recommends a copy separate from your web server. For speed, web.dev sets the "good" targets at the 75th percentile of visits: largest content in 2.5 seconds or less, interaction response of 200 milliseconds or less, layout shift of 0.1 or less.

What does maintenance cost on each type of site?

It costs a plan fee on a hosted builder and paid hours on a self-hosted site. The hours below are our planning assumptions, priced at EUR 30 to 90 an hour, a band explained in our guide to the cost of building a website.

The builder prices are the entry and middle plans shown by Squarespace (annual billing, shown with estimated VAT) and Wix (yearly billing, USD, varying by location) in November 2026, multiplied by 12. Hours on a builder are yours, because the vendor runs the platform and you maintain your content.

What are the hard costs besides time?

Three items recur on a self-hosted site, and all vary.

• Hosting. WooCommerce's pricing page puts hosting for most stores at USD 25 to 350 a month, rising with traffic and performance needs. WordPress.com's managed plans, which include hosting, ranged from USD 8 a month (Premium) to USD 25 a month (Business) on annual billing in November 2026, which gives a reference of USD 96 to 300 a year for a small site.
• Paid extensions. WooCommerce lists USD 29 to 299 a year per extension. A store with three to six paid extensions therefore carries USD 87 to 1,794 a year.
• Domain. The domain renews yearly at your registrar's price. Some plans include a free domain for the first year only, so the renewal can be a surprise.

Worked example: a WordPress brochure site (illustrative)

This example is illustrative and uses the assumptions above. A 10-page brochure site on managed WordPress hosting with a monthly care plan of 1 to 2 hours:

Treating a dollar as roughly a euro, that is about EUR 450 in the lowest case and more than EUR 2,400 in the highest. The high case describes a specialist rate and twice the hours. Most owners can reduce the bill by doing the "you" tasks in the table above and buying specialist time only for updates, backups and speed.

What can you safely do yourself?

Do the content edits, the monthly form test, the renewal calendar and the Search Console check. Pay for updates, restoring a backup, security response and speed work on any site where an outage costs you money. A useful rule is to ask what a failed update would cost you in a day. If the answer is a day of lost orders, pay someone, or use a hosted platform. Our comparison of Shopify and WooCommerce shows how that choice changes the upkeep.

What should a maintenance plan say?

Ask for these in writing:

1. Hours included each month, and what an extra hour costs.
2. Which tasks are covered and which are excluded.
3. Backup frequency, where copies are kept and how long.
4. Whether a restore is tested.
5. Response time if the site goes down.
6. A short monthly report.
7. That you hold the logins to hosting, domain and the site's admin.
8. Notice period if you cancel.

Is maintenance a capital cost?

Generally not. Under the IFRS interpretation SIC-32, as summarized by RSM, operating-stage costs after the site is live are expensed as incurred, while some development-stage costs may be capitalized. This is general information, not accounting advice, so ask your accountant how your framework treats it.

If you are comparing platforms for upkeep, read Wix against a custom build. For a written quote that includes care after launch, see our web design service. We quote in writing and do not publish a price list. For the search side of upkeep, our technical SEO checklist lists what to monitor.