How much does website maintenance cost?

What “website maintenance” actually covers

Before comparing prices, agree on what’s being paid for. Maintenance is everything after launch that keeps the site working, accurate and safe. It usually splits into three kinds of cost:

• Fixed running costs: domain renewal, hosting, email, and any paid software the site relies on.
• Routine care: checking the site works, updating software, testing forms, keeping copies of the files, reviewing who has access.
• Changes: new text, new photos, new pages, seasonal updates, small fixes.

Many “how much does it cost” questions go wrong because one quote includes changes and another doesn’t. When you compare, compare like with like. Our website maintenance checklist is a good list of what routine care should include.

The fixed running costs

Whoever does the work, these costs exist:

• Domain name: typically a modest yearly fee for common endings, more for some country or specialist endings.
• Hosting: anything from free (for simple static sites on some hosts) to a few pounds or dollars a month for shared hosting, to considerably more for managed hosting of a busy dynamic site.
• Email: often a per-person monthly fee if the business uses email on its own domain.
• Paid plugins, themes or software licences: common on platforms that rely on add-ons, often renewed yearly.
• Security certificate: usually included free by hosts now; occasionally a paid extra.

For a simple static site, these can come to very little each year. For a dynamic site with paid add-ons and managed hosting, they can add up to more than the maintenance labour itself. If you’re unsure which kind you have, see static vs dynamic websites.

Option 1: Doing it yourself

Typical cost: the running costs above, plus your time. For a small site, an hour or two a month is common once you have a routine.

Doing it yourself makes sense when:

• the site is small and mostly static,
• changes are occasional and simple, like text and photos,
• you, or someone in the business, is comfortable following a checklist.

The hidden costs are time and risk. An hour a month of a business owner’s time isn’t free, and the risk is that routine checks slip until something breaks. The fix is a calendar reminder and a written checklist.

Option 2: A freelancer retainer

Typical cost: for a small business site, retainers commonly range from a few dozen to a few hundred a month. Some freelancers prefer to charge by the hour as work comes up, at whatever their usual hourly rate is.

A retainer usually buys:

• routine checks and updates on a schedule,
• a set number of hours or small changes each month,
• a reasonable response time when something breaks,
• someone who already knows the site.

Retainers at the lower end tend to cover checks and updates only. Higher retainers include a block of hours for changes. Ask what happens to unused hours (most don’t roll over) and how extra work is charged.

Option 3: An agency care plan

Typical cost: agency plans often start around a hundred a month for a simple site and can run into many hundreds for larger or busier sites, sometimes more where the site is critical to sales.

Agencies charge more mainly because they include more: a team rather than one person, guaranteed response times, reporting, and often design and content help. Care plans are usually sold in tiers, with the cheapest covering updates and checks, and higher tiers adding hours, priority support and regular reviews.

An agency plan makes sense when the site matters a lot to revenue, when you need cover during holidays and sickness, or when changes are frequent enough to keep a team busy.

What drives the cost up or down

Within each option, the same factors move the price.

1. How the site is built. A static site with no plugins needs far less routine care than a dynamic site with a database, a theme and a dozen add-ons that all need updating.
2. Size. Five pages and five hundred pages are different jobs, especially for content reviews and broken-link checks.
3. How often it changes. A site that changes once a quarter is cheap to look after. One that changes daily needs a lot of hours, or a way for the business to make changes itself.
4. What it has to do. Bookings, payments, member areas and integrations all add things that can break and need testing.
5. Response time. “Within a week” is cheaper than “within an hour”.
6. Who holds the accounts. If the person doing maintenance has to chase logins every month, that time gets billed one way or another.
7. Where you are. Rates for the same work vary widely between countries and between cities.

How to keep maintenance costs down

You can lower the bill without cutting corners.

• Simplify the build. Fewer plugins and moving parts means fewer updates and fewer things to break.
• Batch small changes. Ten small edits sent together cost less than ten separate requests.
• Let the business make simple edits. Giving a client a safe way to update text and photos, with a check before it goes live, removes a lot of small paid jobs. See how to share a website with a client.
• Keep a staging step. Catching a mistake on a private preview is cheaper than fixing it on the live site.
• Keep everything in one place. For freelancers and agencies, the cost of maintaining twenty sites is often the overhead of remembering where each one lives. A single list with live status cuts that.

Questions to ask before you sign

• What exactly is included each month, and what counts as extra?
• How many hours of changes are included, and do unused hours roll over?
• How quickly will you respond if the site goes down, and how will I know?
• Who owns the domain, hosting and files, and how would I get them if we stopped working together?
• Do you keep copies of the site, and have you tested restoring one?
• How will I see what was done each month?

The ownership question matters most. Make sure the domain and hosting are in the business’s name, or that there’s a clear handover process. Our article on handing off a website without giving away your accounts covers how to set that up fairly for both sides.

Where Devdwell fits

If you look after sites for clients, Devdwell can make your own time cheaper rather than adding a new cost to the client. Every site sits on one screen with its live status, changes are made in plain words or by clicking the part of the page you mean, and publishing is one button with a private staging option. Clients can be invited to their own site with “Can edit” or “Can edit and publish”, so small edits don’t have to come through you. It doesn’t replace hosting, uptime monitoring or analytics; it keeps the editing, publishing and access part tidy. It’s in early access, which you can request here.

Questions