What Website Maintenance Actually Costs (And Why You Need It)

Most quotes cover building the site. Fewer explain what happens after. Then a year later the site is down, the SSL expired, and the plugin that handled payments hasn't been updated since launch.

What you're actually paying for

• Hosting and domain renewal — the unavoidable base cost
• Security updates for the framework and libraries
• Backups you can actually restore from
• Monitoring, so you learn the site is down before a customer tells you
• Small content and fix requests through the year

The cost of skipping it

An unpatched site gets compromised, and cleaning a hacked site plus recovering search rankings costs several times what a year of maintenance would have. We've done that recovery work; nobody enjoys paying for it.

Keep it proportionate

A brochure site needs little more than hosting, backups and occasional updates. An e-commerce site taking payments daily needs real monitoring and a faster response time. Pay for the level your business actually runs at, not the biggest package on offer.