How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost? What Monthly Maintenance Actually Involves

After a website launches, many people get asked: "Do you want to add maintenance?" 🌸 Paying every month without seeing what you get for it makes it hard to decide.

This article breaks "website maintenance" down into the actual tasks, then shares the prices of our Website Maintenance and Business Maintenance so you can compare them against your own needs.

What still needs looking after once your website is live

A finished website isn't something you just leave alone. There's some regular work behind it:

• Security updates: the systems and packages your website uses release new versions that fix known security issues
• Backups: regularly saving a copy of your website data so it can be restored if something goes wrong
• Monitoring: someone needs to know when the website won't load or shows errors
• Content updates: small changes like swapping photos, editing text or updating prices

You can do these yourself, but it takes time and a bit of technical know-how. A maintenance plan hands this regular work to us: we do it on a monthly schedule and keep a record of what was done ✨

Website Maintenance: Basic and Standard

Website Maintenance is our more basic monthly maintenance.

Basic plan US$50 per month, includes:

• Security updates for the system and packages
• Monthly backup check
• Service outage alerts
• Replies to technical questions (business days)

The Basic plan doesn't include hosting fees or content update hours.

Standard plan US$85 per month: everything in Basic, plus:

• 1 hours per month of content updates or small adjustments
• Monthly Google Analytics report
• Monthly report and suggestions

The 1 hours per month are included in the monthly fee; extra time is billed hourly, and we'll let you know before going over 💡

Business Maintenance: monthly maintenance with more update hours

Business Maintenance is monthly maintenance for websites in active operation, with more monitoring, backup restore testing and monthly update hours than Website Maintenance.

Business plan US$115 per month: everything in the Website Maintenance Standard plan, plus:

• Uptime monitoring and outage alerts
• 3 hours of updates per month
• Monthly backup restore test
• Performance and error reports
• Regular SEO checks

Advanced plan US$260 per month: everything in the Business plan, plus:

• 8 hours of updates per month
• Weekly backup restore test
• Performance optimization suggestions and implementation
• Priority handling (reply within 4 business hours)

A "backup restore spot check" means actually taking a backup and trying to restore it, to confirm the backup really works, not just checking that a file was saved 🌸

Business Maintenance doesn't include 24-hour on-call support, or a service level agreement with guaranteed repair times (an SLA, a written promise of how quickly things will be fixed).

What monthly maintenance doesn't include

Maintenance is about "looking after your existing website," so the following aren't in the monthly fee:

• New feature development
• Redesign
• Hosting and domain renewal fees
• Systems we didn't deliver (can be quoted separately)

New features or redesigns are quoted separately, and we only start after the scope and cost are confirmed.

Warranty and maintenance are two different things

Websites we build come with a one-year warranty after delivery. The warranty means anything that doesn't match the quote is fixed for free within one year.

Maintenance is the monthly routine work, such as security updates, backup checks and content adjustments. If you want someone looking after your website long term after the warranty ends, we offer monthly maintenance plans ♡

If your website has a built-in admin panel, you can edit the text and images yourself; for websites without one, contact us for content changes, or add a maintenance plan.

Maintenance is a monthly subscription, so here are the cancellation and hours rules up front:

• You can cancel anytime; it ends at the end of the current period, and the current period's fee isn't refunded
• Unused included hours don't carry over to the next month and can't be exchanged for cash
• If we're unable to provide the service, the period not provided is refunded pro rata by day

For details, see our Refund & Cancellation Policy.

Want to ask first?

Not sure which one your website needs? You can start with Pricing & Plans to compare the maintenance plans side by side.

If your website wasn't built by us, you can also go to Contact Us and tell us about your website's current state. We'll take a look first, then reply on whether we can take it on and a rough price range. Consultations and quotes are free ✨