Website maintenance cost per month is two numbers added together: the fixed fees you pay vendors to keep the site online, and the hours someone spends keeping it working and up to date. Fixed fees are predictable, such as the platform plan, the domain, email and paid apps. Hours vary with how often the site changes and how much it does.
Published ranges are wide. GoDaddy’s 2026 guide to maintenance costs puts small and medium business sites at $50 to $500 a month and online stores at $300 to $1,000, and GoDaddy sells hosting itself. Your own budget, line by line, is more useful. Here’s how to build it, and what managed website hosting should cover if you hand the work to someone else.
Why fixed fees and hours belong on separate lines
A single “maintenance: $X a month” figure hides two very different things. Fixed fees go to the platform, the registrar and app makers whether anyone touches the site or not. Hours pay for a person’s time.
When a quote lumps them together, you can’t tell how much of it pays for work and how much for software, and you can’t compare two quotes fairly. Ask any provider to list each fixed fee and the number of hours separately, with the hourly rate for extra hours.
Fixed fees, line by line
Platform or hosting plan
This is what keeps the site online. On a hosted platform such as Wix, it’s the site plan on your account; Wix’s plans page shows current prices, which depend on the billing term and your region. On self-hosted WordPress, it’s the web host’s fee.
Look at the billing term. Yearly plans are often paid up front, so divide by 12 for your monthly figure.
Domain renewal
Your domain renews once a year (or for several years at once). Check the renewal price in your registrar account, not the first-year price you paid. Turn on auto-renew, and make sure the renewal notices go to an inbox someone reads. Under ICANN’s expired registration policy, registrars send reminders about a month and a week before expiry, so a lapsed domain usually means those emails went to an old address.
Email on your own domain is usually billed per user. As one example, Google’s billing comparison page listed Google Workspace Business Starter at $7 per user per month on the annual plan, or $8.40 on the flexible plan, when we checked in November 2026. Three people on the annual plan comes to $21 a month. Prices and promotions change, so check the current page.
Paid apps, plugins and subscriptions
List every paid add-on: booking tools, review widgets, form builders, premium themes, backup services, map or search tools. Many are billed separately from the platform, sometimes to someone’s personal card. Cancel anything nobody uses.
Card processing fees for orders and bookings are a cost of sales, not maintenance, so keep them out of this budget.
Hours, line by line
Backups and security updates
On self-hosted WordPress, updates are your job. WordPress’s own updating guide says to back up first and to check that plugins and themes work with the new version. Each plugin adds updates to test.
On a fully hosted platform, the host runs and updates its servers, so there are no plugin updates to install. The hours go elsewhere: checking the site after platform changes, keeping custom code current, and watching anything the site does on its own. A store with a daily inventory sync, for example, needs someone to notice when the sync fails.
Monitoring and fixes
Time spent finding and fixing problems: a form that stops sending, a page that errors, checkout that won’t load. Good monitoring cuts this down, because problems are caught early. More on that below.
Support hours for changes
New pages, a staff photo, a new service, a price change, a new form. Most plans include a set number of hours each month. Ask whether unused hours roll over and what extra hours cost.
Content updates
If you make your own edits in the dashboard, this line can be zero. If someone else writes and posts updates for you, budget their time.
SEO work
Basic upkeep is checking Google Search Console for errors and pages that dropped out of the index, fixing broken links and redirects, and updating pages that are out of date. Writing new pages or guides is a bigger line. Our SEO and AI visibility page explains what that work involves.
Accessibility checks
Each new page, form or template change can introduce problems for people using screen readers or keyboards. A periodic check against WCAG 2.2, using a free tool such as WAVE plus a manual keyboard test, catches most regressions. See our website accessibility page for what ongoing checks cover.
A worksheet you can fill in
| Line | Fixed fee or hours | Who bills it | How often | Your monthly amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform or hosting plan | Fixed | Platform or host | Monthly or yearly | |
| Domain renewal | Fixed | Registrar | Yearly | |
| Fixed, per user | Email provider | Monthly or yearly | ||
| Paid apps and plugins | Fixed | Each app maker | Varies | |
| Backups and updates | Hours | You or your provider | Monthly | |
| Monitoring and fixes | Hours | You or your provider | As needed | |
| Support hours for changes | Hours | Your provider | Monthly | |
| Content updates | Hours | You or a writer | Monthly | |
| SEO work | Hours | You or your provider | Monthly | |
| Accessibility checks | Hours | You or your provider | Quarterly or per change |
Fill in the fixed lines from your invoices first. Then estimate hours from the last six months: how many changes you asked for and how long each took.
What “only alerts on real problems” monitoring means
A lot of monitoring is noise. A checker that emails every time a page takes an extra second trains everyone to ignore it, and then the real alert gets ignored too.
Monitoring that only speaks up for real problems works like this:
- It tests what customers use. Key pages load and return no errors, forms deliver, checkout opens, and any data feed ran on schedule and changed a sensible number of items.
- It confirms before it alerts. One slow response at 2 a.m. isn’t a problem. A page that fails twice in a row is.
- One alert per problem, sent to a person who can act, followed by a short “fixed” note when it’s resolved.
- It runs on a schedule in the cloud, not on someone’s laptop that might be closed.
Ask a provider what their checks test and what triggers an alert. If the answer is “uptime only,” a broken form could go unnoticed for weeks.
What a monthly report should show
A useful report fits on one page and answers “is the site working, and what did we pay for?”
- Checks run, and any that failed, with what caused them
- Fixes made and why each was needed
- Changes requested and made, with hours used and hours left
- Form leads, bookings or orders for the month
- Search clicks and impressions from Search Console, with notable changes
- Renewals coming up (domain, plan, apps)
- Anything waiting on your decision
If a report is all charts and no plain sentences, ask for the plain sentences.
Questions to ask before you sign
- Which fixed fees are included, and which do I pay directly?
- How many hours a month, do unused hours roll over, and what’s the rate for extra hours?
- What do your checks test, and who gets the alert?
- How fast do you respond to a broken form or checkout?
- Are the domain, platform account and email in my name?
- What happens to the site if I cancel?
How we can help
You can run this budget yourself in an afternoon with your last few invoices. If you’d rather hand the work off, our managed website hosting covers monitoring that stays quiet unless something is broken, monthly support hours and a plain monthly report. We quote it per project, with fixed fees and hours on separate lines. For what a new site costs to build, see our website cost guide, or tell us about your current site through our contact page.
