How much does website maintenance cost?

Typical maintenance costs by type of site

What you pay depends mostly on the platform and how much the site does. These are typical 2026 ranges for small businesses.

Care plans often bundle hosting. On top of any plan, budget $10–$25 a year for the domain name. For build costs, see how much a website costs on Long Island.

What’s the difference between hosting and maintenance?

Hosting is the server space your site lives on, typically $5–$50 a month on its own. It keeps the site online, but a hosting company generally won’t update your plugins, fix a broken layout or change your hours. Maintenance is the work: updates, backups, security, testing and edits. A care plan bundles the two, which is why a plan costs more than hosting alone. When you compare prices, check whether a cheap “maintenance” offer is really just hosting with automatic backups, and whether an expensive one includes hours of content or SEO work you may not need.

What should a website care plan include?

Use this as a checklist when comparing plans. If a plan is vague about any of these, ask.

• Hosting, with a named provider and a clear answer on who fixes downtime
• Core, theme and plugin updates, tested so an update doesn’t break a page
• Automatic backups stored off the server, and a restore that has actually been tested
• Security monitoring and malware scanning
• Uptime monitoring, so someone knows the site is down before a customer does
• SSL certificate renewal and domain renewal tracking
• Server software upgrades, such as moving to a supported PHP version
• Contact form and booking tests, so leads really reach your inbox
• Speed and broken-link checks
• A stated amount of small content edits each month
• A short monthly report of what was done

Should you maintain your website yourself?

It depends on the platform more than your skills. On Squarespace or Wix, the platform handles hosting, security and updates, so DIY maintenance just means keeping your content current. That is very doable. On WordPress, DIY means running updates, watching for conflicts and keeping backups. It’s learnable, but it has to happen every month, not when you remember. Our WordPress vs. Squarespace comparison covers this trade-off in more detail.

If you maintain a WordPress site yourself, do this at minimum:

1. Take a full backup before every round of updates, and keep copies off the server.
2. Check for updates at least weekly, and apply security fixes the same day.
3. Delete plugins and themes you don’t use. Unused code is one more thing that needs patching.
4. Test your contact form after every update. A silent form costs you leads for weeks before anyone notices.
5. Check your hosting’s PHP version once or twice a year and upgrade before it goes out of support.

Paying someone makes sense when your time is worth more than the plan, the site takes online payments or bookings, or nobody on your team will reliably do the steps above.

What happens if a website isn’t maintained?

Nothing, for a while. Then several things tend to go wrong at once.

• Security holes stay open. Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, up 42% from 2024. 91% were in plugins. Patchstack puts the weighted median time to first exploit at five hours, and 46% of vulnerabilities were not fixed in time for public disclosure.
• Plugins break. Skipped updates pile up until a forced update, often from the host, changes several things at once and something stops working.
• Server software ages out. PHP 8.1 and older no longer get security fixes, and PHP 8.2’s security support ends December 31, 2026. Hosts eventually drop old versions, and outdated themes and plugins can fail after the upgrade.
• SSL certificates expire. An expired certificate puts a browser security warning in front of your site. Certificates also have to be renewed more often now: under a CA/Browser Forum ballot passed in 2025, the maximum certificate lifetime fell to 200 days in March 2026 and will reach 47 days by March 2029. Renewal has to be automated and monitored.
• The domain lapses. Miss a renewal and your website and email can stop working together.
• Content goes stale. Old prices, discontinued services and last year’s hours cost you trust, and give search engines and AI assistants wrong facts about your business.

What does East End Web charge for maintenance?

Our managed hosting is $50 a month: hosting, backups, security and uptime monitoring, so you don’t have to think about any of it. Content changes and new features are quoted separately, so you only pay for work you ask for. If your site is due for more than upkeep, read what a redesign costs first. See how we build and look after websites.