Website Maintenance Cost: What It Includes and What You Should Pay (2026)
By Alexey Chasin · Updated September 18, 2026 · 6 min read
Website maintenance costs $150 to $500 per month for a small-business site on a care plan that covers hosting, uptime monitoring, security, content updates and a monthly report. WordPress sites cost more to maintain, typically $100 to $1,000 or more per month once managed hosting, plugin licenses and update hours are counted, because there is more to break. Hand-coded static sites have no plugins to update, so the low end is realistic.
What maintenance actually includes
| Item | Custom static site | WordPress site |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | $0–$20 / month (Vercel, Netlify) | $30–$150 / month managed |
| Software updates | Dependency updates a few times a year | Weekly core, theme and plugin updates |
| Security | No admin login, no database; minimal exposure | Firewall, malware scans, backups, patching |
| Backups | Code in Git; content versioned | Daily backups required |
| Uptime monitoring | Included in a care plan | Included in a care plan or via plugin |
| Content updates | 1–6 hours / month in a plan | 1–6 hours / month in a plan |
| Performance checks | Monthly Core Web Vitals review | Monthly, plus fixing what updates broke |
| Reporting | Monthly traffic, rankings, leads | Monthly traffic, rankings, leads |
| Typical total | $150–$500 / month | $100–$1,000+ / month |
What you can skip
- Plugin and theme licenses, if you are not on WordPress.
- 'SEO maintenance' retainers that do not produce pages or links.
- Chat widgets, popups and tools nobody uses.
- Premium hosting tiers for a small static site; a global CDN is free or nearly free.
What you should not skip
- Domain renewal in your own name. Set it to auto-renew and keep the login.
- Uptime monitoring with alerts to a phone.
- Backups, or version control, so a bad change can be undone.
- Someone who answers within a business day when the form stops working.
- A monthly look at Search Console and lead counts.
Care plan or pay as you go?
Pay as you go at $75 to $200 per hour works if you rarely change anything and the site is static. A care plan makes sense when you want updates handled, someone watching uptime and performance, and a monthly report, without invoices for every small change. Ours run $150 to $500 per month, month to month, with no plugin or license fees because there are no plugins.
If your maintenance bill is mostly plugin renewals and fixing what updates broke, the site is costing you twice. A rebuild as static code usually pays for itself in reduced maintenance within two to three years.