Website maintenance costs: what do you pay per month?

I am Yassine Seghrouchni, founder of Your Tech Club in Amsterdam. We maintain websites and online stores on WordPress, WooCommerce, Laravel, Next.js with Strapi and Shopify, with an SLA and a website agent that checks versions, alerts and news about vulnerabilities.

What does website maintenance cost per month?

What website maintenance costs per month depends on your site and on the agreements you make. Five things drive the price: the number of plugins, the amount of custom work, the hosting, the response time you want and the hours for small changes. That is why we do not work with fixed package prices. After the takeover check you get a proposal that matches what your site needs.

The difference between cheap and expensive maintenance is rarely in the updates themselves. What takes time is testing whether your site still works afterwards, and being ready when it does not. So you mainly pay for certainty: who is paying attention, and how quickly are they there?

My view: a cheap package without backups and without an agreed response time is not maintenance. It is an update button with an invoice.

Also watch out for one-off costs at the start. When a new party takes over your maintenance, they first need to get to know your site: arranging access, making a full backup, checking all plugins and versions. So ask whether that first check is included in the monthly fee or listed separately on the quote. With us, that step is the takeover check: we look at where your site runs, which PHP and CMS versions it uses, which plugins are installed, where the backups are and who has access. If there is overdue maintenance, such as a PHP version without security updates, you hear about it first. We fix that before the SLA starts.

Which factors drive website maintenance costs?

Five factors drive website maintenance costs: the number of plugins or separate components, the amount of custom work, the hosting, the response time in your SLA and the number of hours for small changes. The first two decide how much work the updates are. The last three decide how much certainty you buy.

Plugins and custom work

Every plugin is software from a different maker, with its own update rhythm. More plugins means more updates, more testing and more chance of a conflict. According to Patchstack, 91% of new vulnerabilities in 2025 were in WordPress plugins (Patchstack, State of WordPress Security in 2026, accessed October 2026). A site with 8 plugins is therefore cheaper to maintain than a site with 40. Something similar applies to custom work: nobody can update custom code blindly. The better it is documented, the lower the costs.

Hosting and response time

If hosting is included in the package, you also pay for the server, the backup storage and keeping the PHP version up to date. A concrete example: PHP 8.2 stops receiving security updates after 31 December 2026 (php.net, supported versions, accessed October 2026). So someone has to plan and test that upgrade.

For response time, the rule is simple: the faster, the more expensive. Responding within an hour, also in the evening, means someone is on standby. For an informational company website that is often overkill. For an online store that does most of its sales in the evening, it is not. The same goes for a site with peaks around an event, such as a concert website that moves with ticket sales every season.

Hours for small changes

Changing a text or adding a page usually falls outside pure maintenance. Some providers include a few hours a month, others charge every change separately. So ask beforehand. With us, the SLA states what is included and what is not.

What does website maintenance from Your Tech Club always include?

With us, maintenance always includes an SLA with updates, monitoring, backups stored separately from the server, security and a deadline for closing a critical vulnerability. What differs per site is how much work that is and which deadlines you agree. You see that in the proposal, not in a fixed package.

After the takeover check we set out per site what is included, who you call, the deadline for closing a critical vulnerability and how you hear about it. That goes into the proposal and then into the SLA.

A simple company website on a standard CMS needs less work than an online store linked to stock and accounting. If orders or enquiries come in through your site, you usually want shorter deadlines. After all, one hour of downtime then quickly costs you more than the maintenance.

How much does WordPress maintenance cost?

WordPress maintenance usually takes a little more time than maintaining a custom site with few separate components. That is because of the plugins: every plugin has its own maker and its own update rhythm. With WordPress, most of the work is in the PHP version, the theme and the plugins. A WordPress site with few plugins and a standard theme is therefore much less work than a site with forty plugins and a custom theme.

We do not build new WordPress sites ourselves, but we do maintain existing ones. What that involves, you can read on our page about WordPress maintenance.

Why is cheap maintenance often more expensive?

Cheap maintenance becomes expensive as soon as something goes wrong. Without backups and without a fixed response time, you still pay by the hour when there is an outage, often at a rush rate. On top of that comes the revenue or leads you miss while your site is down. So the real comparison of website maintenance costs is: monthly fee plus the risk.

Take this scenario, for example: Friday evening, 9 pm, a plugin update and your online store no longer takes payments.

We saw on 21 October 2026 that this is not theory. A PHP vulnerability hit websites across the Netherlands that day, and at many companies it turned out nobody was responsible. Several of our client projects run on PHP. That day we went through them one by one and decided per project, together with the client: some larger projects went offline until the update was out, others stayed online with the risks in view. What happened that day, you can read in the PHP vulnerability on your website.

Familiar when you switch after cheap maintenance: nobody knows exactly where the backups are or who has access to the hosting. That has to come to light first. That is why switching to us starts with a takeover check.

How do you compare website maintenance quotes?

Compare website maintenance quotes on what they include, not on the amount. Check whether there is a test environment, where the backups are stored, which response time is in the SLA and whether hours for changes are included. Two quotes with the same amount can turn out to be completely different.

So ask every provider these questions:

1. Do you test updates on a copy of my site first?
2. Where are the backups stored, and how quickly can you restore one?
3. What is the response time for an outage, also outside office hours?
4. What falls outside the maintenance, and what does that cost per hour?
5. Who keeps the PHP version and the hosting up to date?

What I would not do: look only at the monthly fee. Always ask what happens if your site goes down on a Friday evening. The answer to that one question says more about the price than the price itself.

You can find a more detailed checklist in comparing quotes (in Dutch). If you are also having a new site built, see what website development costs. All our cost checks are listed on our costs page.