8 Popular Website Maintenance Costs You Should Know

The global pandemic has taught us the importance of online presence. Businesses that remained in touch with people during the crisis are the ones who won customers’ trust. And by an online presence, we primarily mean a well-built and well-maintained website.

Entrepreneurs and business owners often underestimate the effort required to maintain a website properly. So they try to DIY and end up messing with the whole thing! However, researches show that hiring an expert team is way less expensive than leaving the website unmaintained.

94% of visitors are impressed with the design and look of your website. [Source: https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/what-is-website-maintenance/] Monthly website maintenance packages offer you different services that keep your website lucrative, contemporary, and relevant.

Also, repairing a messed-up website requires numerous technical support that is highly expensive. Therefore, it’s wiser to assign experts to take care of your face in the business. I’ll break down the website maintenance costs here to make you comfortable with the decision.

Maintenance Costs Based on the Type of Website

Whether you’re working through WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or any other services, your website requires data backups, software updates, emergency issues solutions, updating contents, and many other services.

Website Type	Average Website Maintenance Cost (Per Month)
Blogs (Personal or Professional)	$10 – $50
Business Websites	$200-$300
E-commerce of Different Sizes	$200 – $1000
Customized Websites	Up to $2000
SME Business Website	$35–$500
Corporate Website	$200–$4,500
Multimedia Entertainment Website	$300–$2,500
Personal Website	$5–$25

The amount and extent of tasks vary from a personal website to a business website. Hence, the costs for website maintenance services vary as well. Let’s look at the breakdowns –

Blogs

Personal or professional blogs, at least, require domain and hosting management. A monthly budget of $10 – $50 is enough for them. Your maintenance partner has to look after the loading speed, broken links, regular content updates, and website design.

Some websites publish real-time content and new content almost every day. As a result, these websites need better maintenance and may cost higher. Also, some websites allow confidential and valuable information exchange via their website. Yet, solid maintenance won’t cross $100 per month.

Business Websites

These websites contain contract papers, different schemes, remarketing materials, and other features that complicate the maintenance process. Also, the loading speed, data security, etc., are more sensitive issues here for the same reasons.

A medium or large business website can be maintained at $200 monthly. But if you upload content daily and need to update data every day, the cost can rise to $300 per month.

E-commerce of Different Sizes

It depends on what type of services you provide. For example, a store, membership platform, or multilingual site requires a monthly cost of $200 – $1000. Speed, time, and dynamic contents are the major factors in these websites.

Customized Websites

As these platforms are maintained manually for customization, they need more care and hence cost more. A maximum of $2000 is required for this website maintenance.

SME Business Website

An SME business website needs a maintenance cost of $35 to $500 per month. It can cost more than $500 as the cost depends on the quality of the domain, hosting, graphics, technical maintenance, and email marketing. In an SME website, these portions take a large portion of the cost. But in general, the cost roams in between the price range of $30 to $500 per month.

Corporate Website

Corporate websites are one of the largest and most critical to maintain. A corporate website has advanced security, multiple domains, extended storage, and unlimited resources. A corporate website built with high technology and upgraded elements and their maintenance price is high as well. A corporate website can be maintained by spending $200 to $4500 per month, the cost depends on the quality of the website.

Multimedia Entertainment Website

Multimedia entertainment websites like popular digital magazines, Netflix, Amazon prime, etc. will need a maintenance fee of $300–$2,500 per month. A large website like Netflix can cost more than $2500.

Personal Website

Personal websites like portfolios, hobby websites, etc. won’t cost that much. A bill of $5-$25 per month can do the job quite easily. The pricing is less here because it doesn’t need to maintain in a traditional way. For a personal website, the domain and hosting will take a large amount of the payment.

Alternatives

There are some other platforms that build and maintain websites for you. However, their customization and other offer varieties are limited. For the same reason, they charge less. Let’s look at some of the most widely used content management systems (CMS) and platforms –

• Squarespace: Best suited for creative entrepreneurs, this platform offers basic tracking and reporting, SSL certificate, and domain management. They charge $12 for personal blogs and $40 for advanced commerce.
• Wix: An all-around business website builder, Wix charges $14 – $49 monthly. The charge depends on whether it’s a personal blog or a business website.
• Weebly: It’s best for total beginners. You’ll receive an SSL certificate and standard hosting services from them. However, for SEO features, the cost gets higher. Costs vary from $6 – $26 per month.
• WordPress: The most popular open-source CMS platform, WordPress offers free SSL certificates and domain registration for the first year. WordPress maintenance plans include different hosting solutions and security features.

What Else Is There to WordPress Website Maintenance?

WordPress updates every two months on average. New features are added to keep it fast, secure, and trendy.

One of the major maintenance tasks is theme updates. The theme determines how your website looks. One can use third-party plugins to create forms, add visuals, and much more to the previously brought theme.

These are usually created and updated by individual authors. Nevertheless, they should also be installed on your website to unlock maximum potential.

Another essential maintenance task is keeping off-site backups. If your website somehow gets hacked, you can get back your data from the backups kept in some remote server.

Google and other search engines keep malware-affected websites on their block list. Therefore, these websites are mostly invisible to visitors. A malware-affected website can violate the user’s security and other websites as well.

A 404 error discourages almost 77% of the visitors to your website. The WordPress maintenance team inspects your site regularly to check for any broken links or errors. They also remove unused plugins from the website.

Things an Average Website Maintenance Cost Covers

You may find the website’s monthly maintenance fee a bit expensive. Yet once you understand where the money goes, you’ll be more interested in spending on the website maintenance costs! Let’s break down the costs of monthly website maintenance packages –

Domain Fees

Domain name charges vary depending on the name. For example, .com is the lowest expensive domain and can charge up to $13.99 per year. But then, .net can cost up to $18.99 per year, and .org can cost up to $17.99 yearly. These are the most common domain names.

Hosting

Depending on what type of hosting service you’re getting, the costs may differ from $38.88 – $119.88 per year. Personal blogs can be hosted with the bare minimum of $3 per month, or sometimes free!

However, you’ll have to spend a few hundred dollars per year if you’re operating a bigger website and want a good speed with a dedicated server.

Plugins and Tools

A premium WordPress plugin subscription may cost around $20 per month. But if you take extra plugin services, the cost may rise up to $100. An ordinary website can run with 2 or 3 premium plugins, and therefore it’s not as costly as you think.

SSL Costs

Security Sockets Layer or SSL license offers better protection and identity for your website. A small website may cost $8 per year for an SSL certificate, but a bigger website with better security may cost up to $1000 per year.

Many businesses ignore the license, but they help increase your SEO ranking and build audience trust. Thus, the cost is completely worth it.

Website Outlook Updates

Businesses spend hundreds of dollars each year to make their website appealing. You shouldn’t change your website theme frequently. However, try to keep the visuals fresh, the colors eye-catchy and the alignment, and everything relevant to your brand.

You can hire a graphic designer or a freelancer to do the job. An hourly rate of $50 – $100 may cost, but some businesses prefer an in-house team for lower expenses and better outputs.

Technical Assistance

Updates, security checks, any urgent malfunction fixing, etc., are included in this service. It requires specialists to solve these issues. A WordPress website maintenance technical assistance may cost $59 – $149 per month.

Content Updates

The most important element of your website is the content. They include write-ups, images, call-to-actions, links, etc. They inform your audience about your business. And therefore, it’s important to hire experienced, creative, and dedicated professionals as your content creator.

A content creator may charge $20 – as much as possible for the content.

SEO Costs

Your website maintenance team is dedicated to ensuring everything you include in your website counts for your SEO ranking. These tasks include –

• Website analysis and evaluation
• HTML site mapping
• Keyword search and targeting
• Off-page link building
• Coding and optimization
• Site Analytics
• Competitor analysis

The cost may vary from $200 – $800 per month.

How to Decide if You Should Pay for Website Maintenance?

You might be thinking you can now manage a website on your own as you’ve come to know all the necessary aspects of website maintenance from this article. However, let’s answer a few questions that will help you determine if you’re prepared and equipped to maintain your website –

How Quickly Your Business is Growing?

A quickly growing business indicates your website is running well. At the same time, it should keep getting updated so that your brand image sustains. People are curious about growing businesses, and your website is their major source of information on you.

Also, a quickly growing business means a busy owner. You can assign someone to take care of your website so that you can focus on bigger functional things.

Contrarily, a slow-paced business indicates there are numerous faults, and a poorly developed and maintained website is one of them. In both cases, you’ll need expert hands to take care of things.

Your Experience Level with Website Maintenance

Designing some content and videos and uploading them is easier, and most entrepreneurs can do it. But website maintenance isn’t only about that. The malware removal, backup set, security checkups, coding, and software updates need expert attention.

These tasks take less time when experts take care of them. You might end up creating a different level of trouble in an effort to fix it! Sometimes the damage is so high that your website may not be recovered. Isn’t it better to seek help from experts?

Is Your Website Currently Out-of-Date?

If you’re too interested in cutting down costs and maintaining your website on your own, a currently running website can be an option. However, if you haven’t updated your website for the past few months, a year or more, it’s time to knock the experts.

The whole world and the market have changed since you last updated your site. People will find outdated content and information and feel insecure. 75% of respondents in one survey said they would abandon an online transaction if they felt the website was not trustworthy.

Also, there will be lots of software updates required. An expert team will bring the experience together to create updated content for you, upload them, check the data security, backup everything, analyze competitors and website traffic, etc. and revamp the whole website.

How Much Time Do You Have to Dedicate to Website Maintenance?

You’ve taken care of business negotiations, supply chain, human resource management (if you’re not a sole business proprietor), and many other fields apart from marketing. Spending time on maintaining your website may cause you to lose rather than profit.

Imagine if you spend 20% of your work time every day on website maintenance which leads to ⅕ of your daily work time. You could have brought a new client on board at this time. A team dedicated to maintenance may cost high but not higher than your profits.

Can You Handle Site Bugs?

Bugs ruin your website’s functionality and audience trust. To fix them, you’ve to go through a number of processes. For example, mobile-ready tests, cross-browser testing, accessibility testing, HTML and CSS testing, and many more.

Do you have the expertise to conduct them? Also, can you identify if there’s any bug? An expert can.

Can You DIY Your Website Maintenance?

If you think you can save website maintenance costs by doing it yourself, consider some factors. The difference between the time and money you’ve to spend if you DIY and the time and money you’ve to spend if you hire an expert team is a decider here. For example –

Security

WordPress plugins can help you identify failed log-in attempts, database changes, etc. you can get help from different malware scanners to scan malware, but you’ve to buy these services. It means you’ve to spend money and time simultaneously.

Uptime Monitoring

Again, you can buy free tools to check uptime, but they offer limited services and just for one website. An upgraded service requires buying them. Paid tools will offer uptime monitoring and notifications as well.

Security Cleanup

It includes tasks like spam cleaning, password changing in case of invasion, generating new security keys, removing users who aren’t involved in the operational process, letting customers know if any data was hacked, etc.

The time, effort, and expertise required for this task will deprive you of other business activities.

Backup Setting

WordPress offers a free backup plugin for the first time. Unless you’ve changed the configurations on the website, you won’t have to bother about it for a long time. This one field is risk-free in terms of money and time.

Auditing

There are plugins in different website builders, including WordPress, that allow you to monitor performance and speed up if needed. But they’re effective only if you use them manually. With time, you’ll have more data that will slow down your website speed.

You need to be an expert to solve these issues. Therefore, it’s better left to the professionals.

Software Updates

Software updates are really complicated. They go through different levels and phases. One mistake can ruin the whole process. You may have to start from the beginning, or in worse cases, the software won’t update at all.

Let’s Wrap Up

Websites are built to create a pleasant customer experience. 89% of consumers said they would switch the competitors if they have a poor experience. Businesses build websites to offer a pleasant experience.

Interestingly, website maintenance costs are just 15% – 20% of the website development cost per year. Still, many companies consider it expensive and try to avoid it.

If you don’t maintain your website for a long time, there will be so many problems that you may have to restart the whole project from the beginning.

The lost data, the previous configuration, and the lost customer trust are way more expensive than keeping them maintained. An expert team will offer you unlimited updates, troubleshooting at any time, performance and competitor analysis, and new strategies to grow your business.

The costs surely vary based on business size, type, and the level of maintenance required. However, it’s always a good investment.