Website Maintenance: What It Includes and What It Costs a Year
Hosting, domain, SSL, updates, backups, small edits and monitoring. A realistic annual cost of ownership — and how to avoid paying twice for the same thing.
The site launched, the invoice closed, everybody moved on. A year later an email arrives: the domain expired and the site is down. Or nothing arrives at all — the site quietly drops out of search because the certificate lapsed three weeks ago and visitors now see a red browser warning. Maintenance is not a just-in-case retainer; it is a specific list of work with a specific price. Below are every line of the annual budget, real totals for four types of site, and the items you should never end up paying for twice.
5–15%
of build cost is the annual running budget
$160
realistic floor for a simple brochure site
$40
typical hourly rate for technical support
30 d
minimum retention period for backups
What the word "maintenance" actually covers
The trouble with the word is that every vendor fills it differently. For one it means "we will renew your hosting"; for another it means full technical stewardship with monitoring and a guaranteed response time. The price gap between those two readings is tenfold, so the first useful move is to break the service into six independent blocks.
- Infrastructure — domain, hosting or VPS, DNS, domain mailboxes, SSL certificate. These invoices arrive whether or not anyone touches the site.
- Updates and security — patches for the CMS core, plugins and dependencies, vulnerability checks, credential rotation. One or two hours a month that close the largest class of risk.
- Backups — daily database and file snapshots, stored away from the web server, plus the quarterly test that proves the archive actually unpacks.
- Monitoring — an uptime ping every one to five minutes, certificate expiry tracking, alerts on 5xx errors. Without it you learn about downtime from a customer on Monday.
- Content edits — change a price, add a service, refresh the team photos, publish a new case study. The most common reason maintenance is needed at all.
- Technical review — a quarterly pass over speed, broken links, analytics integrity and Search Console errors. Small things that accumulate silently.
The annual budget, line by line
The figures below are the ranges we see on live projects. The top of each range applies to high-traffic sites and stores, the bottom to straightforward corporate sites. The third column matters more than the second — it tells you what you are actually buying.
| Line item | Per year | What happens if you stop paying |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | $10–30 | The site disappears entirely; after 30 days the name can be bought by someone else |
| Hosting or VPS | $60–480 | The site is switched off within days of a missed payment |
| SSL certificate | $0–150 | Browsers show a warning and conversion drops to zero |
| Updates and patching | $150–600 | Automated scanners find known holes within weeks |
| Backups | $0–120 | Any incident turns into rebuilding from scratch |
| Uptime monitoring | $0–60 | You hear about outages from customers, not from a system |
| Small content edits | $200–1,200 | Content goes stale and technical debt accumulates |
| Plugin and font licences | $0–300 | Features switch themselves off, sometimes including forms |
The most underrated line is patching. It looks optional right up until the site becomes a spam relay and the domain lands on blocklists. What that line should actually contain is spelled out in our website security checklist.
What it really adds up to: four typical sites
| Type of site | Infrastructure | Work | Total per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing page or brochure site | $60–120 | $100–300 | $160–420 |
| Corporate site, 20–50 pages | $120–300 | $400–1,000 | $520–1,300 |
| Online store with integrations | $300–900 | $900–2,500 | $1,200–3,400 |
| Static site or headless architecture | $0–120 | $200–600 | $200–720 |
The gap between the first and fourth rows is architecture, not magic. A static site executes nothing on the server, so there are no plugins to patch and no database needing hourly snapshots. That saving is almost never presented at the moment the technology is chosen — we unpacked it separately in the guide to headless architecture. A store is expensive for the opposite reason: every payment gateway and courier service revises its API every year or two, and that is always unplanned hours.
Three engagement models and who each suits
- 1
Ad hoc, billed on request
You pay for hours when something is needed. $30–60 per hour, usually with a half-hour or one-hour minimum. Fine for sites that barely change. The downside is the queue — "urgent" is not guaranteed here.
- 2
A monthly block of hours
The most common arrangement: 2–10 hours a month for a fixed $80–400. Unused hours normally expire, so check that clause. Suits sites with steady edits — promotions, vacancies, news, catalogue updates.
- 3
Full stewardship with an SLA
Patching, monitoring, backups, a guaranteed 1–4 hour response, sometimes weekend cover. From $250 a month upwards. Worth it only when downtime costs you money by the hour — stores and booking-driven services.
The question is not what maintenance costs. The question is what a day of downtime costs you — and where those two numbers cross.
What belongs in the agreement, and what gets paid for twice
The usual financial injury in maintenance is not an inflated rate — it is paying for the same thing twice. The classic version: you pay the studio for hosting "as part of support", they resell you ordinary shared hosting at a 300% markup, and you have no access to the control panel. The second most common version is edits that are really new development, billed out of the monthly hour block at the same rate as swapping a paragraph.
Clauses worth putting in writing
- The list of included work and the number of hours per month
- Response times stated separately for outages and for routine edits
- Who owns the domain, hosting and repository — it should be your account
- Backup frequency and where copies are physically stored
- The rate for hours beyond the block, and whether unused hours roll over
- The handover procedure for a new contractor: credentials, documentation, deadline
- What counts as new development and is therefore quoted outside maintenance
Frequently asked questions about website maintenance
Can I simply not pay for maintenance at all?
Domain and hosting have to be paid regardless — that is $70–150 a year at minimum, or the site is switched off. Everything else can be dropped if the site is static, rarely changes and has no plugin-based admin. On a CMS-driven site, skipping updates makes a breach a question of timing rather than probability.
What does an hour of technical support cost?
Expect $25–60 per hour depending on seniority and stack complexity. Rates below $20 usually indicate either a very narrow specialism or nobody taking responsibility for outcomes. Retainer packages typically work out 15–25% cheaper per hour than ad hoc work, because the vendor can plan capacity in advance.
Does maintenance include building new features?
No, and this is the single biggest source of misunderstanding. Maintenance keeps what already exists working: updates, bug fixes, small content changes. A new section, a CRM integration or a rebuilt catalogue is a separate project with its own estimate, and it should not be squeezed out of a monthly hour block.
How much should I set aside for running costs right after launch?
Use 5–15% of the build cost per year as the anchor. For a $1,500 site that is $100–220; for a $6,000 store, $500–900 before hosting under real load. Reserve this while planning the original budget rather than afterwards — our breakdown of what a website costs to build shows where it fits.
Who should own the domain and hosting accounts?
You should, even when the contractor manages everything technically. Register the domain to your company with your own recovery email, put hosting on your account, and issue the team separate logins with the permissions they need. That way you can change vendors in a day without losing the site or the email running on your domain.
In short
- Running a site costs 5–15% of its build price per year: from $160 for a brochure site to $3,400 for a store with integrations.
- Maintenance is six independent blocks. A proposal that does not list them cannot be compared or held to account.
- Architecture affects running cost more than size does — static and headless setups cost a fraction of a plugin-heavy CMS.
- Domain, hosting and repository should be registered to you. It is the cheapest insurance against a vendor change.
- New development is not maintenance. Put that boundary in writing before the first disputed task, not after it.
Related reading
What a Website Really Costs in 2026: An Honest Breakdown
From $300 to $15,000 — and both numbers are honest. Here is exactly what you buy at each level.
Website Security: The Checklist That Stops 90% of Attacks
Most hacks are not targeted. They are bots checking for unlocked doors. Let us lock them.
Headless CMS: When It Pays Off and When It Is Overkill
Headless is not automatically better. Here are the conditions under which it actually pays for itself.