What actually drives the monthly price
There's no one-size price because sites vary enormously. A small brochure site with occasional edits sits at one end; a busy ecommerce store with integrations and daily changes sits at the other. The cost tracks the real work involved.
Rather than invent a figure, it's more useful to understand the levers. When you know what pushes the price up or down, the quote you eventually get makes sense — and you can decide which coverage is worth it for you.
- Platform and complexity — a static site costs less to maintain than WordPress or a custom app
- Site size — more pages, plugins, and integrations mean more to keep healthy
- Ecommerce and transactions raise the stakes and the required care
- Traffic level, which affects performance work and monitoring needs
- How much edit and support time is included each month
- Response-time expectations — priority support costs more than best-effort
How maintenance is usually priced
Maintenance is almost always sold as a recurring monthly plan rather than a one-time fee, because the work itself is recurring — updates, backups, and monitoring happen every month whether or not anything visibly changes.
Most agencies, us included, offer tiered plans: a basic tier that keeps the site secure and running, and fuller tiers that add more support time and faster response. We'll recommend the tier that matches how much your site actually changes, not the biggest one.
- Priced as a monthly plan, billed per month — the pricing unit is the plan, not the task
- Tiered options from basic upkeep to full-service support
- Higher tiers add included edit hours and priority response
- One-off big projects are quoted separately from the recurring plan
- The honest number comes from scoping your specific site — book a free consultation for it
More on website care & maintenance
Frequently asked questions
Why is maintenance monthly instead of a one-time cost?
Because the work is ongoing. Updates, backups, security monitoring, and small fixes recur every month, and threats don't take a break after a single payment. A monthly plan spreads that continuous work into a predictable cost, which is far cheaper than paying to recover from a hack or a broken update after the fact.
What's the cheapest option if my budget is tight?
A basic plan focused on the essentials — security updates, backups, and monitoring — is the entry point, and it's the coverage we'd never recommend skipping. We can build a lean plan around what your site truly needs. Tell us your situation in a free consultation and we'll give you a real, honest figure rather than a padded one.
What if I barely ever change my website?
You still need the security and update side even if you never touch the content, because the software underneath keeps changing and staying unpatched is how sites get compromised. A lighter plan without much included edit time usually fits — you pay for the protection, not for edit hours you won't use.