Website maintenance: what it is and what it should cost

Short answer: expect $95–195 a month for a typical small business site if someone else handles it, $20–50 if you do it yourself and only pay for tools, and $300–800 for anything with a store, custom code or real traffic behind it. What you are buying is not "work on the site" — it is the absence of four specific failures. Here they are, and here is how to judge whether a plan covers them.

What a website actually needs after launch

A site is not a printed brochure. It sits on software that keeps changing underneath it, connected to services that change their rules, being visited by scripts looking for holes. Maintenance is the work that keeps those three facts from becoming your problem.

• Updates: platform, plugins, themes, and the server’s own language version. Most incidents start with a skipped one.
• Backups: automatic, stored somewhere other than the site’s own server, and restored at least once to prove they work.
• Monitoring: uptime, certificate expiry, forms still delivering, error rates.
• Small content changes: prices, hours, a new service, a photo swap.
• Performance and error checks: broken links after a redesign, images someone uploaded at 8 MB, a page that got slow.
• Security response: applying the urgent patch the day it appears, not at the next monthly window.

What it costs in 2026

• Do it yourself: $20–50 a month, and that is tools — hosting, backups, an uptime monitor. Your time is the real price, about an hour a month for a simple site.
• Freelancer, hours as needed: $50–150 a month typical, usually a fixed small allowance of changes plus updates.
• Managed small business plan: $95–195 a month. Updates, backups, monitoring, security, a support address, and a modest bucket of content edits.
• Store, custom code or heavy traffic: $300–800 a month and up, because a broken checkout is an emergency and emergencies are priced accordingly.

Compare that to the alternative honestly. Recovering a compromised small business site typically costs five figures in someone’s time and lost sales, and a site that quietly stopped delivering form submissions for six weeks costs whatever six weeks of enquiries are worth to you.

How much does a website cost, honestly

The four failures you are paying to avoid

Every maintenance plan on earth is justified by these, so it is worth naming them plainly.

• The site gets compromised through something you could have patched. The most common single cause, and the most expensive to undo.
• The site goes down and nobody notices for a day, because the notification went to an address the previous developer used.
• The contact form stops delivering. Everything looks perfect from the outside; enquiries simply stop, and nobody finds out until a customer calls to ask why you never replied.
• The backup does not exist, or does not restore. Discovered exclusively at the worst possible moment.

If you take only one thing from this article: send yourself a test enquiry through your own form once a month. It is thirty seconds and it catches the failure that hurts revenue most directly.

What a plan should say in writing

The word "maintenance" covers everything from an automated updater to a person who answers on Sunday. Ask for specifics before you compare prices.

1. What is updated, how often, and who tests that the site still works afterwards?
2. How often are backups taken, where are they stored, and how long are they kept?
3. What is the response time for a site that is down, versus a normal request?
4. How many content changes are included, and what counts as a change rather than a new project?
5. Do I get a report, or do I just get an invoice?
6. If I leave, do I keep hosting access, backups and the site files?

A plan that cannot answer the second and the last question is selling comfort, not maintenance.

Doing it yourself: the actual checklist

Perfectly reasonable for a brochure site you rarely change. Put it in a calendar, because the failure mode of self-maintenance is not incompetence — it is forgetting.

• Weekly: run updates, glance at the homepage on a phone, send yourself a test enquiry.
• Monthly: check that backups ran and open one to confirm it is not empty; review users with access; look at uptime and error notifications.
• Quarterly: restore a backup into a test copy; check page speed; fix broken links; confirm prices and hours on the site match reality.
• Yearly: verify domain renewal and who owns it, review plugins and delete what you stopped using, check that the certificate renews automatically, and re-read your privacy policy against the tools the site actually loads now.

Website security for people who are not security people

The legal pages a website needs, and the ones it does not

When you genuinely do not need a plan

A static site — plain HTML, no CMS, no plugins, a form that posts to a service — has almost no moving parts to maintain. Hosting, domain renewal and an occasional content edit is the entire job. The same is true of a site built on a hosted platform where the vendor handles updates: you are already paying for maintenance inside the subscription, and paying twice is a common and quiet mistake.

The moment that changes is when the site starts earning money in a way that breaks: bookings, payments, logins, inventory. Then downtime has a price per hour, and someone should be responsible for it by name.