At first, maintaining a website may not seem like much work. However, you’ll soon notice how it sneakily shaves minutes or even hours off of your workday. On top of that, there’s the expense of various tools to consider when estimating your website maintenance costs.
Whether you’re maintaining your website or doing so on behalf of your clients, it’s essential to consider the price tag that comes with it. Can you afford to Do It Yourself (DIY) website maintenance, or does it make more sense to outsource it?
This post will explain what website maintenance is and the benefits of paying a professional to do it for you. Then we’ll explore how much website maintenance costs, considering various platforms, website types, and services to help you determine which option is best for you. Let’s go!
What Is Website Maintenance?
In a nutshell, website maintenance refers to the practice of keeping your site in proper working condition. It’s an integral part of keeping your site healthy and secure.
Website maintenance includes a wide range of processes such as checking for and installing updates, monitoring uptime and security and optimizing content for search engines. More specific tasks involved depend on the type of site you have. For example, e-commerce sites generally have more complex needs than personal blogs.
Do I Need Website Maintenance?
For some, choosing to forego regular maintenance and handle issues as they come might seem like the most cost-effective choice. After all, how much work could your website possibly need if you spent thousands of dollars to have it built in the first place?
However, you need website maintenance if you want to keep your website performing optimally and reduce long-term costs. It’s like buying a car. It may work great at first, but eventually, it’s going to need some tuning up if you want it to last.
Neglecting website maintenance can lead to massive disruptions and unnecessary expenses. For example:
- Emergencies may arise more frequently if the proper measures and monitoring aren’t implemented.
- The cost of repairing a website is unpredictable since there are so many ways it may become compromised.
- Missed WordPress updates could lead to compatibility issues, which in turn could lead to expensive redesigns or website reconfigurations.
- Every second of downtime costs your website money.
- Data breaches are also costly — not just in terms of money, but for your brand’s reputation, too.
- Even if impromptu issues that spring up aren’t as serious as errors such as the White Screen of Death, they still require an expenditure of your time to troubleshoot. Everything comes at a cost.
When we looked into whether a proactively secured website was more expensive to run than one that was unmaintained, we found a significant difference in cost. Plus, this only considers the expense of failing to secure a website.
Maintenance goes far beyond the matter of security, so you can expect costs to be much higher if you add performance, content, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) issues to the list of website repairs unmaintained sites need. Staying ahead of such problems is just an innovative business.
Why Pay for Website Maintenance?
Outsourcing WordPress maintenance to a third-party provider is one way to secure and enhance your website’s financial outcomes.
Put, there’s no getting around WordPress website maintenance costs. However, there are huge gains that come from keeping a website well-maintained, including:
- Fast response times on detected issues thanks to active security, uptime, and performance monitoring
- Superior User Experience (UX) and SEO due to security and performance optimizations
- The ability to focus on your other work and reduce stress when you schedule optimizations
- Fresh content and design, which keep Google and visitors happy
- Ongoing assistance from the core, plugin, and theme developers when you install regular updates
- Routine backups to protect your website investment
- An improved Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) strategy
Plus, if you get yourself and your clients into the mindset early on that maintenance comes with having a website, you can avoid questions about whether or not it’s needed. It’s simply a matter of who will carry it out.
How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
How much it costs to have a website depends on many factors. On average, this includes:
- Your hosting plan ($0 to $500 per month)
- Domain registration ($5 to $20 per year for a .com domain)
- Platform costs ($0 to $45 per month)
- Technical updates and security ($0 to $500 per month)
- We support and develop ($0 to $10,000 per month for outsourcing or hiring a developer)
The type of website you have influenced most of these factors. For example, the costs associated with minor business website maintenance will be less than those for a complex enterprise or e-commerce site. Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements.
Website Maintenance Costs by Type of Website
Whether you’re managing your complex website or handling multiple sites for clients, the following estimates are how much you should expect to pay a third party to handle your WordPress website maintenance.
Personal and Professional Blogs
Small blogs require the bare minimum in terms of domain and hosting. As such, you can expect this to cost no more than $10 to $50 per month to ensure there are no issues with downtime and your content remains secure.
A small business blog that publishes new content every day will require more rigorous coverage. That said, if sensitive transactions don’t take place on the site, it will be cheaper to maintain. Expect to pay up to $100 per month for basic but solid coverage. For example, our Maintain plan runs $67 per month and covers all updates and monitoring on WordPress sites.
Company Websites
Company or corporate websites with contact forms, remarketing, and other standard configurations (i.e., no sales) will need a website maintenance plan that prioritizes uptime, speed, and security. However, if the content isn’t updated regularly and most of the marketing is automated, you can find plans for around $200 per month that fit the bill.
E-Commerce and Other Complex Websites
Maintenance costs will be higher if you have a website with advanced functionality – such as an e-commerce store, a multilingual site, a membership platform, or a multisite network. Speeds have to be super-fast, and uptime is non-negotiable, so you’ll need a maintenance plan that checks in on your site more frequently. You can expect costs to run between $200 and $1,000 per month. Compare these costs and features to our Perform and Custom plans.
Custom-Built Websites
These are the most expensive websites to maintain because the maintenance company or professional needs to do more manual work to manage the site. When extra care is required, you can expect costs to increase exponentially based on the size of the site and the degree of customization. Some agencies will charge up to $2,000 per month for this.
Wrapping Up
Not maintaining your website is a costly risk. It can hurt your site’s performance, SEO, security, and so much more. Once you decide that website maintenance is necessary, the next step is to determine whether to handle it yourself or outsource it to a third party.
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