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Read the guide →How much does website maintenance cost in 2026?
Keeping a small business website running costs about $200 to $700 a year if you handle the updates yourself, or $40 to $180 a month if you pay a care plan company to do them, usually on top of hosting. Most of the yearly bill is hosting, your web address and paid add-ons. The rest is someone's time.
By Elijah Ching · Published Oct 29, 2026 · 7 min read
The short version, by how your site is built:
- A WordPress site you look after yourself: roughly $200 to $700 a year, plus an hour or two a month of your time.
- A WordPress site with a care plan: $39 to $89 a month for updates, backups and monitoring at three well-known companies, and $179 a month and up if you want edits included.
- A Squarespace or Wix site: the subscription, $17 to $39 a month on the main plans billed yearly, covers hosting and security. You still update your own words and photos.
Every price on this page was checked on the seller's own website in October 2026. The links are at the end.
What you pay for every year
| Item | Typical price | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Web address (.com) | $11–$23 a year | Cloudflare sells at cost, about $11. Namecheap renews at $18.48 and GoDaddy at $22.99. The first-year deal is not the price you keep paying. |
| Hosting | $11–$35 a month after the first term | Intro prices of $2.49 to $4.99 a month renew at $10.99 to $29.99 at Hostinger and SiteGround. Kinsta charges $35 a month from the start. |
| Security certificate | Free | The padlock in the browser. Let's Encrypt, a nonprofit, issues them for free, and good hosting sets it up for you. |
| Paid add-ons | $49–$84 each a year | For a WordPress site: ACF PRO $49, Gravity Forms $59, Elementor Pro with forms $84. Each one renews at list price every year. |
| Uptime monitoring | Free | UptimeRobot's free plan checks up to 50 sites every 5 minutes and alerts you when one goes down. |
| Someone's time | $0, or $39–$89+ a month | Your own hour or two a month, or a care plan. More on both below. |
One thing to know this year: Verisign, the company that runs .com, raises its wholesale price from $10.26 to $10.97 on November 1, 2026, so expect every registrar's renewals to tick up by about 70 cents.
Two real examples
Here is what the yearly bill looks like for a typical small WordPress site, using the renewal prices above rather than the first-year deals.
| Item | Lean | Comfortable |
|---|---|---|
| Web address | $18.48 (Namecheap) | $22.99 (GoDaddy) |
| Hosting | $131.88 (Hostinger, $10.99 a month) | $350 (Kinsta, billed yearly) |
| Paid add-ons | $59 (Gravity Forms) | $143 (Gravity Forms and Elementor Pro) |
| Certificate and monitoring | Free | Free |
| Total a year | $209.36 | $515.99 |
Add more paid add-ons, a premium theme or a second site and you land nearer $700. Add a care plan and the yearly total roughly doubles or triples. That is not automatically a bad deal, as long as you know what the monthly fee buys.
What maintenance actually means
"Maintenance" gets used for everything from a real security routine to a monthly charge for nothing. On a WordPress site, the real work looks like this:
Every week or two
- Install updates to WordPress, the theme and every add-on, then check the site still looks right.
- Confirm a fresh backup ran and is stored somewhere other than the site itself.
Every month
- Send a test message through every contact form. Forms that quietly stop sending are the most expensive problem nobody notices.
- Look at Google Search Console for errors and pages that dropped out.
- Open the site on your phone and tap the phone number.
Every year
- Renew the web address, hosting and add-on licenses, and check each renewal price before it charges.
- Update prices, hours, photos, services and the towns you serve.
- Remove add-ons you no longer use. Each one is something else to update.
Why skipping updates gets expensive
Patchstack, a WordPress security company, counted 11,334 new security holes in WordPress sites' software in 2025, up 42% on the year before. 91% were in add-ons and 9% in themes, while WordPress itself had only 6. Patchstack sells protection, so it has a stake in the numbers, but the pattern is the point: the risk lives in the add-ons, and the fix is usually an update that already exists.
WordPress has been able to update add-ons and themes automatically since version 5.5 in 2020, and it ships two or three major versions a year plus smaller fixes in between. Turning on automatic updates covers most of the risk for a simple site. Never install a "free" copy of a paid add-on from an unofficial site. On Reddit's WordPress forum, one owner traced their malware to exactly that.
Do it yourself, pay for a plan, or use a site builder?
| Option | Fits you if | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Look after WordPress yourself | You are comfortable clicking update, and you will actually do it every couple of weeks. | Updates that break something while you are busy. Keep backups. |
| A care plan | Your site brings in real work and you would rather not touch it. | Plans that do not include edits, minimum terms (FixRunner asks for three months), and fees with no record of what was done. |
| Squarespace or Wix | You want the platform to handle hosting and security, and a template is enough. | Your site lives on their system, and the subscription never ends. |
| Your web designer | You want one person to call for changes and problems. | Make sure you own the site and the web address if you ever stop paying. |
Five ways to stop overpaying
- Budget for the renewal price, not the intro price. SiteGround's $2.99 a month becomes $17.99 at renewal. Namecheap's first-year .com is $11.28 and renews at $18.48.
- Ask what the monthly fee covers, in writing. Hosting and maintenance are two different things. If a fee covers both, it should say so.
- Ask for a record of the work. One owner on Reddit paying about $180 a month for a one-page site was advised to ask for the last three months of change entries. If nothing was done, you have your answer.
- Make sure you own it. The web address should be registered in your name. Some monthly website plans are rentals, where the designer keeps the site and it goes away when the payments stop. Ask before you sign.
- Ignore renewal notices from companies you never hired. Letters that look like invoices for your web address are a common trick. Renew only through the registrar you actually use.
How Primilink handles changes after launch
When a price, a photo or your hours change, you send a quick request and we take care of it. You own the site, the words, the photos and the logins, and your web address is registered in your name from day one, so if you ever leave, everything goes with you. Plans start at $249 a month. If you are weighing a new site against fixing the one you have, what a website costs and how long a website takes cover the other half of the decision.
Where these numbers come from
Checked October 29, 2026. Prices change often, especially intro deals.
- Web addresses: Namecheap, GoDaddy (first year $0.01 with a three-year purchase, then $22.99 a year), Cloudflare Registrar and Verisign's announcement of the November 2026 .com price.
- Hosting: Hostinger ($2.49 a month on a 48-month term, renewing at $10.99), SiteGround ($2.99 renewing at $17.99, $4.99 renewing at $29.99) and Kinsta ($35 a month or $350 a year).
- Certificates and monitoring: Let's Encrypt and UptimeRobot.
- Add-ons: ACF PRO, Gravity Forms and Elementor (the $60 Essential plan leaves out forms, so the comparison uses the $84 plan).
- Care plans: GoWP ($39 a month), FixRunner ($69 a month, three-month minimum) and WP Buffs ($89 a month, $179 with edits).
- Site builders: Squarespace ($19 and $29 a month for its first two plans, billed yearly) and Wix ($17 to $39 a month for its first three plans, billed yearly).
- Security: Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2026 and WordPress.org on automatic updates and its release history.
- Owners' experiences: threads on r/smallbusiness about what a maintenance fee should buy, owning a site you pay for monthly and fake renewal notices, and on r/Wordpress about pirated add-ons.
? / Questions
Frequently asked questions
How much does website maintenance cost per month?
Doing it yourself, about $17 to $60 a month once you spread out the yearly hosting, web address and add-on costs. A care plan adds $39 to $89 a month at the companies we checked, or $179 and up with edits included.
How much does website maintenance cost per year?
About $200 to $700 a year for a small WordPress site you look after yourself. With a care plan, add roughly $470 to $1,070 a year.
What does website maintenance include?
Software updates, backups, uptime monitoring, security checks, testing forms, renewing the web address and hosting, and keeping prices, hours and photos current. Ask any provider which of those their fee covers.
Is website maintenance really necessary?
For a WordPress site, yes. Most security problems come from add-ons that were never updated. Squarespace and Wix handle the software for you, but you still need to keep your information current.
Do I own my website if I pay monthly?
It depends on the contract. Ask whether the web address is registered in your name and what happens to the site if you stop paying. With Primilink, the site and web address are yours, and everything goes with you if you leave.
→ / Keep reading
More plain-language guides
How long does it take to build a website?
A week-by-week timeline of a typical build, who does what, what slows projects down, and how long Google takes to find your new site.
Read the guide →
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