A client emailed me in June asking why website maintenance runs $200 a month when her nephew offered to do it for free.
Good question. Nobody ever answers it with a number.
So here are the numbers, what moves them, and where the free option gets expensive.
The short answer
Most small business websites run $50 to $600 a month.
| Site type | Monthly range | What drives the price |
|---|---|---|
| Five page brochure site | $50 to $150 | Updates, backups, security scanning, uptime monitoring |
| Ten to fifteen page business site | $150 to $500 | Everything above, plus content edits and speed work |
| WooCommerce store | $300 to $600 | Payment and shipping plugins, checkout testing, more moving parts and more to lose when one breaks |
| Membership or booking site | $500 and up | Custom code, third party integrations, and a login wall standing between your customers and the thing they paid for |
What you are paying for
Five things happen on a maintained site every month.
WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates, run on a duplicate of the site first so a broken update never reaches your visitors.
Regular backups, run on a schedule and kept with your host, so a bad update or a broken plugin gets rolled back instead of rebuilt from scratch.
Security scanning and malware monitoring.
Uptime monitoring, so an outage gets logged at 2am whether or not anyone is awake.
A monthly report telling you what got done.
Running an update takes a minute. Knowing whether it broke anything is the work, and it is the reason a plan costs what it costs.
Four things move your number
How many plugins you run
Six to ten plugins is a normal site. Fifteen or more plugins is a site where something breaks every month, and every update pass takes longer because more things depend on each other.
Whether anyone edits your content
A site nobody touches costs less to maintain than one with a new blog post every week and seasonal promos on the homepage. Content edits are labor, and labor is the biggest line in any quote.
What an outage costs you
A restaurant menu page going down on a Friday night is a different problem from a portfolio site going down on a Tuesday. Same day response costs more than same week. You are paying for someone to hold room in the schedule for you, and held time is expensive whether or not you use it.
Who answers when you email
A $49 plan routes you to whoever is free that day, and you explain your site from scratch every time. Paying more gets you the same person every month, one who already knows how yours is put together.
What free costs you
Doing it yourself takes about two hours a month once you have a routine. Updates, backup verification, a look at the error log.
Two hours is fine if you have the time. Most owners do not, so the real pattern looks like this. Updates get ignored for eight months. A plugin finally auto updates itself, a page stops working, and now it is an emergency repair instead of a routine one.
Emergency work runs $150 to $200 an hour, and a hacked site cleanup starts around $500. One incident wipes out three years of savings from skipping a $99 plan.
The nephew is not the problem. The nephew getting busy in month four is the issue.
What I charge
Three plans, $99, $249, and $499 a month, and the full breakdown lives on the care plans page.
All three include the same base level items. The difference is how much work sits on top: content edits, performance tuning, and how fast you hear back.
Month to month. No contract, no setup fee.
What a plan does not fix
Worth saying before you shop.
Maintenance does not rescue bad hosting. If your site sits on oversold shared hosting, monthly care gives you a well maintained slow site. Any honest quote tells you this before you sign, not after.
Maintenance does not improve your rankings on its own. A fast, secure, updated site removes reasons Google has to rank you lower. It does not add reasons to rank you higher. That work is separate and it costs separately.
And a site built on an abandoned theme sometimes needs a rebuild instead of a plan. Paying $99 a month to maintain something with no upgrade path ahead of it is money spent to delay a decision.
Common questions
Is website maintenance worth it for a small site?
If your site brings you leads or sales, yes. If it is a placeholder nobody visits, put the money somewhere else and revisit when the site has a job.
What is the difference between hosting and maintenance?
Hosting is the server your site sits on. Maintenance is the work done to the site itself. Some hosts advertise managed WordPress and mean automatic updates with nobody checking the result.
How often should a WordPress site get updated?
Monthly at minimum. Security patches for a known vulnerability get applied within a day or two of release, since attackers scan for unpatched sites the same week the patch goes public.
Send me your URL
You get a short video back in a day or two walking through what I found on your site. Free, no sales call attached, and most people fix a thing or two themselves from it.