Website maintenance cost: what you really pay per year

A website is not finished at launch. The software it depends on gets security updates, certificates expire, the domain must be renewed, and your business changes: new prices, new opening hours, a new service. Maintenance is everything that keeps the site online, safe and correct after the build.

The bill always splits into the same six parts. Compare quotes item by item, not by the headline price, because a cheap monthly fee often leaves half of them out.

• Hosting: the server or platform the site runs on, including the security certificate (SSL).
• Domain name: your address on the web, renewed every year.
• Business email: mailboxes on your own domain, usually billed per person.
• Licences: paid themes, plugins or tools the site needs to keep working.
• Care: software updates, backups, security monitoring and fixing what breaks.
• Changes: new text, images, pages or features after launch.

These are the ranges you will find in Dutch quotes for one small business website with one domain and three mailboxes. The low end is a simple site on basic plans; the high end a site with many plugins, a premium maintenance plan and regular changes.

The biggest swing is in care and changes, not in hosting. Two sites with the same hosting bill can differ by more than €2,000 a year, because one needs plugin updates every week and the other barely changes.

Most agencies and freelancers sell maintenance as a monthly plan in three tiers. The names differ, the contents are surprisingly alike.

Whatever the tier, a good plan does five things and puts each of them in writing:

1. 1

   Updates are tested before they go live

   An update that breaks your contact form is worse than no update. Ask whether updates are tried on a copy of the site first.

2. 2

   Backups are stored elsewhere and restored now and then

   A backup on the same server disappears with the server. Ask where backups live and when a restore was last tested.

3. 3

   A person watches the site

   Monitoring should alert someone who acts, not only send you an automated email.

4. 4

   Response times are stated

   "Fast support" means nothing. "A reply within one business day" does.

5. 5

   You can leave

   Monthly terms, and your site, domain and data handed over in working order when you go.

• You pay for hours you never use. A plan with three hours of changes a month that you use twice a year is a subscription to unused time.
• Nobody can tell you when the last update was. If updates are included, ask for the log.
• Your domain is registered in the agency's name. Then leaving means asking permission.
• You pay licence fees for plugins the site no longer uses. Older sites collect them.
• Hosting is cheap, but every change is a separate invoice. Add up a year of invoices before you compare.

None of these is a reason to panic. They are reasons to ask for an itemized overview per year and compare it with a second quote.

A maintenance fee pays for work you rarely see. This is what should happen in a year, whoever does it.

If your provider cannot show you a calendar like this, ask what they actually do each month.

The cheapest maintenance is the maintenance a site does not need. Every plugin, theme and integration is a part that must be updated and can break. A site with fewer moving parts costs less to run every month, for as long as it exists.

• Remove plugins and tools you no longer use, and cancel their licences.
• Bundle hosting, care and small changes with one provider, so you stop paying for the overlap between three.
• Register the domain in your own name and keep email separate from the website, so switching providers never puts your mailboxes at risk. That also keeps the door open to European alternatives to Microsoft 365 and Google.
• Ask for a fixed monthly price that includes small changes, instead of an hourly rate for every edit.
• Consider a rebuild when a site needs constant patching. A simpler site can cost less over three years than keeping the old one alive.

That last point is how we run managed hosting: we host sites without WordPress or plugins, so there is far less to update. Hosting, monitoring, updates and small changes cost from €25 per month per website. See all hosting prices.