Market ranges
Website maintenance cost
by type of site.
The biggest single driver of the cost for website maintenance is what kind of site you have. A five-page brochure site and a busy WooCommerce store are different jobs, with different risks when an update goes wrong. The same is true of WordPress website maintenance cost: a simple WordPress site and a WooCommerce store sit in different bands.
Market ranges from Gravitate’s 2026 website maintenance cost guide, checked November 2026; how they compare with three other published guides is in the next table. Our own rates are the fixed monthly prices we publish and quote. They cover the maintenance work, not hosting or licences, which are listed separately below.
Sources compared
Website maintenance rates:
what four published guides say.
Every cost guide quotes a range, and they don't agree. Here are four of the most-read 2026 guides side by side, so you can see where a quote sits rather than trust one source.
| Published guide | Small business site | Ecommerce site | Corporate or enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gravitate (2026) | $50–$250 a month | $500–$2,000+ a month | $1,000–$5,000+ a month |
| WebsiteSetup (2026) | $30–$250 a month | $500–$2,500 a month | $1,000–$5,000+ a month |
| GoDaddy (2026) | $50–$500 a month (small to medium) | $300–$1,000 a month | $1,000–$5,000+ a month (corporate); $2,000–$25,000+ (enterprise) |
| WebFX | $35–$100 a month ($125–$500 for an SMB site) | $1,500–$2,500 a month | $200–$3,500 a month (corporate) |
| PixelGravitas | $89 (simple) or $179 (business) a month | $249 a month | Quoted after a free assessment |
Figures as each guide publishes them, checked November 2026. The guides agree on a small-business floor of about $30 to $50 a month and disagree most on stores, from $300 to $2,500. That spread is mostly about what each guide counts as maintenance: tested updates, hack cleanup and support time, or automatic updates alone. The six questions to ask about any maintenance plan help you tell which one a quote is.
WordPress
WordPress maintenance pricing:
what a WordPress site costs to look after.
WordPress maintenance pricing runs a little above a hosted builder like Wix or Squarespace, because nobody updates the site centrally. Core, theme and every plugin come from different authors on different release schedules, so each round of updates has to be tested together, ideally on a staging copy, before it reaches the live site. A store adds checkout, payment gateways and stock to that test.
| Your WordPress site | Published market figure | Our plan |
|---|---|---|
| Simple WordPress site | Basic plans (updates, security, backups) $50–$150 a month (WebsiteSetup) | Care · $89/mo |
| Business WordPress site | Codeable’s own maintenance plans start at $240 a month | Care + Secure · $179/mo |
| WooCommerce store | Maintenance retainers $500–$3,000 a month (Codeable) | Store Care · $249/mo |
Figures from WebsiteSetup’s 2026 maintenance cost guide and Codeable’s 2026 WordPress maintenance pricing guide, which puts the whole WordPress market at $30 to $5,000 or more a month (checked November 2026). What each of our plans does on a WordPress site, step by step, is on the WordPress website maintenance service page; stores are covered on the WooCommerce maintenance service page.
Cost breakdown
What you're actually
paying for.
Ask for a price for website maintenance and the number usually bundles two different things: fixed running costs you'd pay anyway, and the labour of someone looking after the site. Only the second is a maintenance plan.
Running costs are typical list prices, not quotes. For comparison, WebFX’s guide gives hosting at $2 to $500 a month and a domain at $10 to $130 a year (checked November 2026); your own bills depend on the host and registrar you already use.
Our rate card
Our website maintenance pricing:
one published rate per site type.
Pick the plan by the kind of site you have. Our prices sit toward the lower end of the ranges above because you deal directly with the lead engineer: no sales team and no account managers. Every plan covers the labour, not your hosting.
| Your site | Your plan | What that looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Simple site | Care · $89/mo | Up to 10 pages and a contact form. No bookings, logins or payments. |
| Business site | Care + Secure · $179/mo | More than 10 pages, or a blog, bookings, memberships, integrations or lead forms that feed a CRM. Up to about 50 pages. |
| Online store | Store Care · $249/mo | Any site that takes payments: WooCommerce or similar, with products, checkout and customer accounts. |
| Larger or custom | Quoted after a free assessment | More than about 50 pages, multisite, or custom-built applications. |
Not sure which one you are? Send the URL and we'll tell you in writing. If your site changes type, for example you add a shop, the plan changes with it from the next month. What each plan includes, task by task, is on the plans page: compare website maintenance plans line by line.
No lock-in. Month to month, cancel any time with 30 days' notice, and you keep every login and backup. Not sure which plan? Send your site and we'll tell you in writing, free.
Unused support hours roll over for one month, then expire. Need more time? Extra hours are $125 each, billed by the hour, and we always ask before using them. The included hack cleanup covers a hack that happens while the site is on the plan; a site that is already hacked when it joins is cleaned first at the fixed fee.
Before you choose: see the work behind the price, from a hacked site with hundreds of spam pages removed to a fake CAPTCHA that locked out every visitor. All case studies →
What moves the price
What changes the price
of website maintenance.
Across the market, price follows site type, ecommerce, update frequency and how much hands-on support is included. Ours follows two of them, with one published price for each.
Everything else, and how it's priced
Compare website maintenance plans line by line →i
What “from $2,500” covers A business website of up to 10 pages, researched before anything is designed, and built to turn visitors into enquiries. Research first. Your competitors, what your customers search for, and what makes them get in touch. A page plan. Every page, its message and its next step, agreed with you before design starts. Custom design & build. Designed for your business, built on WordPress, fast and mobile-friendly. Built to convert. Clear calls to action, forms that reach your inbox, and enquiries tracked in Google Analytics. Ready for Google. Page titles, descriptions and structure set up for search from day one. After launch. 30 days of fixes, and a handover so you can edit the site yourself. Fixed price in writing before we start. Larger sites, online stores and custom features are quoted after a free call.Redesigns have their own published prices and market comparison: website redesign pricing. Agencies looking after client sites: see agency partner pricing.
Pricing models
Hourly, monthly plan
or retainer?
Website maintenance is sold three ways. The cheapest-looking option on paper is rarely the cheapest over a year.
| Hourly / ad hoc | Monthly plan | Growth retainer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical market price | $75–$200 per hour | $50–$750 per site per month | Priced by scope |
| Our price | $125 per extra hour on a plan; small jobs quoted as a fixed price | $89, $179 or $249 per site per month | Quoted by scope after a free call |
| Who watches the site | Nobody, until you notice a problem | Monitored continuously | Monitored, plus planned improvement work |
| Cost predictability | Low. One serious incident can cost more than a year of a basic plan | High. Fixed price for a fixed scope | High, with a named deliverable each month |
| Best for | Very small sites, or one-off changes | Most business and ecommerce sites | Sites that need SEO, conversion or automation work every month |
Market prices: hourly rates from Seahawk’s 2026 maintenance packages guide; monthly plans from Gravitate’s 2026 ranges for small-business to mid-size sites (checked November 2026). Retainers vary too much by scope for one range to mean anything.
The other side of the ledger
What it costs to skip
website maintenance.
Unmaintained sites don't fail on a schedule, so the cost doesn't show up until it arrives all at once.
Cleanup and hourly figures are published market ranges (cleanup from a $95 flat fee at FixRunner to $2,000 or more per incident, checked October 2026; hourly from Seahawk, checked November 2026). The rebuild figure is our own project starting price.
Pricing questions, answered
Website maintenance cost:
common questions.
How much does website maintenance cost per month?
Most small-business websites cost $50 to $250 a month to maintain professionally. Ecommerce sites usually run $500 to $2,000 or more, and enterprise or custom-built sites $1,000 to $5,000 or more. Our own plans are $89 per site per month for a simple site (Care), $179 for a business site (Care + Secure) and $249 for an online store (Store Care).
What is the average cost of website maintenance per year?
For a typical small-business site, expect roughly $600 to $3,000 a year for the maintenance work itself, plus hosting, domain, SSL and any premium plugin licences. Our Care plan works out at $1,068 a year per site, Care + Secure at $2,148 and Store Care at $2,988.
How much does WordPress website maintenance cost?
WordPress maintenance usually costs a little more than a template-builder site because core, theme and plugin updates have to be tested together. Basic plans covering updates, security and backups start around $50 to $150 a month (WebsiteSetup, 2026). Codeable's 2026 guide puts the whole market at $30 to $5,000 or more a month, with its own plans starting at $240. Our plans are $89 for a simple WordPress site, $179 for a business site and $249 for a WooCommerce store; the WordPress maintenance pricing section above compares them by site type.
Does website maintenance include hosting?
Usually not, and ours doesn't. Hosting is a separate bill of roughly $5 to $25 a month for shared hosting, $30 to $150 for VPS or cloud, and anywhere from $20 to $300 or more for managed WordPress hosting, depending on the host (GoDaddy and Gravitate, 2026). You keep your own hosting account; we work inside it.
Is it cheaper to pay hourly or monthly?
Hourly is cheaper only if nothing goes wrong. At $75 to $200 an hour, a serious hack cleanup (often $2,000 or more at market rates) can cost more than a year of a basic monthly plan. A monthly plan fixes the price of the routine work and makes someone responsible for catching problems early.
What does it cost if I skip website maintenance?
Nothing, until something breaks. Published malware and hack cleanup prices run from around $95 for a simple job to over $2,000 per incident, before you count downtime, lost sales or a Google warning on your site. An unrecoverable site with no clean backup means paying for a rebuild.
Is there a setup fee or a contract?
There's no long-term contract. Plans run month to month with thirty days' notice to cancel. Any one-time setup or migration work is quoted and confirmed in writing before it starts, never added afterward.
What's the difference between a website maintenance charge and the monthly rate?
The monthly rate covers everything listed in your plan. A separate charge only appears for work outside that scope, such as a hack recovery on the Care plan or support time beyond your monthly allowance, and it is quoted and agreed before we start. Nothing is billed without warning.
Can I get a quote for a one-off fix instead of a monthly plan?
Yes. Fixes and recovery are quoted as a fixed fee before any work starts, from $300 per incident. Small changes outside a plan are quoted the same way: one fixed price, agreed before we start.
How much should I charge for website maintenance as an agency or freelancer?
There is no standard agency rate. Published 2026 guides put a small or mid-size business site at $50 to $500 a month (GoDaddy) and hourly work at $75 to $200 (Seahawk), so most agencies price inside those bands depending on scope. If you'd rather resell than run it yourself, our agency partner pricing is published separately on the For Agencies page.
How much does ecommerce or WooCommerce website maintenance cost?
Across the market, ecommerce maintenance usually runs $500 to $2,000 or more a month, because every update has to be tested against checkout, payment gateways and stock. Our Store Care plan is $249 per site per month for a WooCommerce store and includes a test purchase after every update, 6 support hours a month and one hack cleanup a year.
Why do website maintenance prices vary so much?
Three things move the price: the type of site (a store needs every update tested against checkout), what the plan actually includes (tested updates and hack cleanup, or only automatic updates), and who does the work. Even the published guides disagree: for an ecommerce site they range from $300 a month at the low end (GoDaddy) to $2,500 at the top (WebsiteSetup and WebFX). Compare what is included before you compare the number.