How Much Does It Cost To Maintain a Website?
The cost ranges from next to nothing to thousands of dollars. Depending on what kind of website you’re dealing with, and who is providing that maintenance.
Let’s dig in to how this breaks down.
Does It Cost Money to Maintain a Website..?
Every website will cost ‘something’ to maintain. At the very least it’s going to require some kind of hosting plan, and a yearly domain name fee.
And every website will require updates or a complete rebuild at some point. It’s very obvious to customers when a website has been neglected for a long time – if it even functions anymore!
The amount of updating required will depend on how the website was built. Is it a static HTML site or more of a CMS like WordPress.
There’s also the ‘hidden cost’ to keep in mind. If you (or your staff) are handling maintenance those hours should be logged somewhere and factored in to the true cost.
What Does Website Maintenance Include?
Website maintenance can include a whole heap of different things. Such as:
- web hosting
- web server management and updates
- php updates
- database version upgrades
- CMS/WordPress updates
- plugin/theme updates
- database maintenance
- backups (local and offsite)
- site/uptime monitoring
- javascript library/framework upgrades
- regular content updates
- SEO or other online marketing services
- regular audits to identify problems and opportunities
- design changes to cater for new technologies
It’s a long list. But you won’t necessarily want or need all of those things for your website. The important thing is to understand what you have and what areas may be getting missed. You may need to talk to an expert to get a handle on everything this entails.
Average Cost to Maintain a Website
If we ignore the bigger marketing and content/design update related tasks, we can start to see what the average costs are for regular maintenance.
If you take a fairly typical WordPress based website, we provide monthly maintenance plans for between $75 and $250 per month. These provide fast hosting, all core WordPress updates, plugin and theme updates, backups and also some additional time for whatever tasks you need.
How Much Does It Cost to Maintain a Website Monthly?
The typical monthly cost to get someone else to manage this for you is going to be around $100 to $200. That’s for a fairly standard service based business website. More complex sites such as membership sites, learning management systems or ecommerce sites will cost more of course.
The cost to maintain a website per month is of course very small when compared to trying to recruit someone to handle this for you. Bringing that level of skill in-house (when it’s nothing to do with your core business) only really makes sense for businesses who already have an IT Department and/or turnovers of tens of millions of dollars.
Annual Website Maintenance Costs
Most website maintenance is relevant to a monthly schedule. Updates are typically done multiple times per week to keep things running smoothly and securely.
Annual maintenance costs in addition to regular monthly tasks may include more strategic tasks, like running a regular SEO Audit. Or refreshing the website design. Or applying more significant technology updates such as jumps in major database versions (non-essential but important in the long run to stay reasonably up to date and benefit from improved/enhanced features).
The overall cost to maintain a website per year can also be significantly cheaper if paid as an annual plan. If you have the resources to pay yearly in advance, then do ask for a price for a yearly plan. The savings in admin and billing should mean a nice discount.
How Long Does Website Maintenance Take?
Regular update tasks typically only take 10 or 15 minutes each time. But also need doing frequently to ensure things are kept secure and functioning well. They should also ideally be tested on a backup/test site first (sometimes called a staging server).
We recommend checking for WordPress updates for example at least twice a week. Preferably more often. Then only applying those updates as necessary. As new updates can themselves introduce bugs and problems!
So we plan our updates accordingly – security fixes may need applying urgently. Feature updates can be held back until they prove stable.
There’s a lot more to website maintenance than clicking buttons and hoping for the best. 🙂
Is It Hard to Maintain a Website?
It’s not particularly hard, but it does require a degree of knowledge and skill to do it well. It also requires a significant degree of skill to know what to do when things are broken or updates go wrong.
How Much Maintenance Does a Website Need?
Does a website need maintenance? Old fashioned HTML based websites required very little regular maintenance. But they still required some maintenance from time to time. They also required a skilled web designer to do anything web related.
More modern CMS (Content Management Systems) like WordPress allow for building a whole range of complex websites. With extremely advanced features. For a tiny fraction of what this used to cost.
The trade-off however is that these sites need a lot more maintenance. They have libraries of code that need to be kept up to date. The depend on underlying technologies that also require updating. There are a lot more moving parts and complexities.
Whatever type of site you have, we recommend having a weekly schedule of everything that needs doing or checking. Tick off those tasks as they’re completed. This stuff is important, but is easily forgotten. Especially as staff members leave and other staff are unaware of all of the functions they fulfilled.
Who Does Website Maintenance?
In a larger company this role falls on a specialist team within the IT Department.
For small businesses it’s a role often covered by one member of staff, who happens to be a bit more technical. Or just ‘the admin person’. On the whole this can work out OK, as long as you still have someone you can contact when things go wrong. Or that person leaves.
But with the low costs of handing maintenance over to an expert, I’d encourage you to at least explore this as a better way. It also opens the door to having some skilled technical assistance on hand for those other little website jobs or improvements that never quite get done.
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