How Much Does WordPress Website Maintenance Cost in 2024?

Your WordPress website maintenance costs will fall into one of two categories: budget-friendly or full-service. You’re faced with choosing to spend the money you need to do it right or save money but receive lesser quality results.

Learn what costs go into website maintenance cost to help you budget and plan for what you need to achieve your website goals.

What Is WordPress Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance keeps your website running smoothly while addressing security risks or technology errors. Having a well-maintained website increases customer engagement, boosts your SEO, and improves your security.

Website maintenance can cost anywhere from $30 for a small or personal website to over $2000 for a complex, custom website. Several factors determine how much you will need to budget for your site.

However, you can’t afford NOT to do website maintenance.

Would you buy a house and then let the appliances break, the roof leak, and dust bunnies get out of control?

Of course not! If you spent your hard-earned money on a new house, you can bet you would put a significant amount of time and money into keeping that house in tip-top shape. You’d be sweeping your floors every week, fixing your roof at the slightest hint of a leak, and performing regular upkeep to prevent issues in the first place.

That way, you create a welcoming, safe place for your family and visitors.

Your website is your digital home. Let’s keep it safe, clean, and inviting for you and your customers. It’s an investment that pays you back tenfold.

What Goes Into WordPress Website Maintenance?

Since 28% of business occurs online, how your website looks and functions matters. It’s not just another marketing channel. It’s THE marketing and conversion channel that can make or break your business.

Here’s what goes into WordPress website maintenance.

Backups

You want to protect all the hard work and effort you pour into your website. Regular backups keep your site secure.

Think of it like playing a computer game. As you progress in the game, accumulating points and reaching higher levels, you cross-spawn points. If your character dies in the video game, you don’t have to start back at level one. You appear at the spawn point. It might not be where you left off, but you aren’t too far off and have much less ground to make up.

If your website glitches, has a security breach, or runs into an error, it can wreak havoc. Having your spawn point, or a website backup, saves code before undergoing regular updates or when you create regular content. That way, when those glitches occur, you have a saved copy of a recent update to rely on so you don’t lose all your website progress.

Website Updates

Your website undergoes regular updates that fix any bugs while being able to run the latest technology. It’s like when your phone undergoes those updates to handle new apps and adopt new technology.

Unfortunately, you can’t click a big red button to update everything connected to your website at once. You have website themes, plugins, PHP, security, and countless other separate techs running your powerhouse of a website. The larger your website, the more moving parts you’ll have to update.

While you can do these updates yourself if you have a small blog, or automate them, once your website grows, you may need some outside help to keep on top of them.

Website Performance

Website maintenance audits your site and content to look for performance issues. These issues might be broken links, slow page load speeds, poorly performing pages, and errors.

If you have regular maintenance checks, we can fix those issues quickly before they negatively impact your business.

How Much Does WordPress Website Maintenance Cost?

How much does website maintenance cost for your specific website?

Website maintenance costs, on average, range from $30 to over $4,000 a month, depending on the size and complexity of your website and maintenance goals. Your cost could be much lower or higher.

Here’s a breakdown of website maintenance fees for different website sizes.

Personal Website Maintenance Costs

Personal website maintenance costs are about $5-$30 a month.

If you’re an individual who started a small business by yourself, you may use a personal website. It includes just a few pages that you may be hosting on Bluehost and build it using WordPress’s handy website builder.

It’s very DIY, and that’s fantastic. I’m glad you were able to start on your path to making your business dreams come true!

Starting, you’ll notice you’ll have very minimal costs. If you’re hosting through Bluehost, you might just have your $5 monthly hosting cost, or more if you’re also paying for pro plans and services to help run your website. The rest you handle yourself because you only have a dozen or fewer items to update and secure.

Small Business Website Maintenance Cost

On average, small business website maintenance costs are $30-$100 a month.

You started a personal website, and it’s taking off faster than your small business can keep up with. Your monthly traffic is growing, and your site has a large content load.

The updates and security are now feeling a little overwhelming. You must also update some of your services to help monitor all the new content and traffic data.

Your costs will rise slightly, but so are your profits. At this point, you might consider outsourcing some of your tasks, which will also increase your costs but free up your time to run your quickly-growing business.

Large Business or E-commerce Website Maintenance Cost

Maintenance costs for large business and e-commerce websites range from $100 to over $2,000.

You have moved past the small business stage (or started as a larger operation). You most likely use premium WordPress themes and dozens of add-ons to support all the resources and website elements.

If you’re an e-commerce store, your website is considerably complex. Not to mention you have added security and encryption to keep people’s payment information safe.

These costs quickly add up, and website maintenance moves from being helpful to being necessary. You have too much traffic and conversions to lose if your website has issues and isn’t on its best behavior.

Custom-Built Website Maintenance Cost

Custom-built website maintenance costs $2000+ a month on average.

You have reached peak website status when you switch to a custom-built website. Some businesses never reach that point, and that’s totally fine. Not everyone needs a custom-built website.

A custom-built website has a lot of moving parts and customized experiences. It’s for businesses that offer unique online experiences that custom themes can’t handle.

A custom-built website means a developer writes the code from the ground up, customizing every detail, from colors and element positions to what items are on the page. It truly makes for a stunning, one-of-a-kind experience.

But that also means you don’t have outside developers posting theme updates for you. You will need to hire a team to handle those updates, look for bugs, and make any adjustments as needed. That’s where those costs add up.

What Affects WordPress Website Maintenance Costs?

What might move your website from those lower-range monthly costs to spending thousands on maintaining your website?

Let’s look at just a few of those factors.

Website Size

Your website size is the amount of information on your website. If you have a four-page website, you’re a pretty small one. You just have your homepage, about page, contact page, and blog. You won’t be spending too much on your site.

However, you are a pretty big site if, for example, you have a navigation bar with seven items and each item has a drop-down of three or more additional pages. There will be many elements to fix, update, and keep running.

You’ll also look at the content you have. This includes how many blog posts you have, downloadable resources, and elements on each page. The more content you have on your site, the more time it will take to check and fix the site.

Website’s Complexity

How you display your information on your website will impact how much it will cost to maintain. Just think about your About Us page.

If you have a page with pictures for each employee followed by a little blurb, it’s pretty straightforward. Its images and text are on one page.

But, say you want images to turn from black and white to color when a reader’s mouse hovers over it. You then plan for a bubble of text to appear next to the image with the team member’s bio. That would be much more complex to maintain.

You’d need someone to test each name to ensure it’s doing what it should. You’ll also have more complicated fixes if it’s not.

That’s where costs add up.

Website’s Purpose

A personal blog has a very different purpose than a restaurant’s website, which will differ from an e-commerce website.

Some websites are educational. You want your resources to be front and center and be focused on new blog posts.

Other websites have physical locations. You might offer information online, but ultimately, you want a website directing customers to your location.

The e-commerce websites offer the entire shopping experience online.

Why does that matter?

Your purpose often goes hand-in-hand with your complexity and size.

For example, if you have a physical location, you’ll need a website connected to your physical store. That means a site that matches your in-store experience, whether having the same products and prices, store hours, or information. It might mean connecting your in-store point of sale with your website product list.

Website’s Audience

Who do you want to reach?

Before building your website, you should have your audience in mind. This audience will also determine how you maintain your website.

You can wow an individual with strategically chosen images and fun, engaging messages.

But if you’re working with other businesses, the slightest security risk or unprofessional error can break their trust in your brand. They want authority, links to government sites and professional journals, and data on your site to back up all claims. That requires far more complexity and maintenance.

Why Is Ongoing WordPress Maintenance Important?

What will regular maintenance do for your website? Here are three primary benefits of maintaining your website.

1. Keeps Your Website Secure

Website maintenance keeps your site safe.

Websites experience 94 attacks daily, on average. That’s nearly four attacks an hour.

Also, the average website receives 2,608 bot visitors a day. That’s just over 108 bots visiting each hour and nearly two bots a minute.

You want to keep your security walls extra tight. A security breach is costly. Not only does it cost you your customer’s trust, but it also costs you repair costs when fixing the breaches and any harm they caused.

If a customer sues you for the data breach because it puts their personal information at risk, you may also have legal costs involved.

Website maintenance to keep your site secure is much more budget-friendly in the long run.

2. Maintains a High Google Search Engine Ranking

Search engine optimization (SEO) prepares your website for search engines. When done well, you can use SEO to rank higher in search results pages, increasing your traffic volume from organic search.

Organic traffic (visitors from search engines) brings in the most website traffic out of all your traffic sources.

In organic search, Google prioritizes content based on keywords and themes, authority websites, and user experience.

If your website has quality content, you should also have a quality website to support that content. Regularly maintaining your website keeps it working well enough for Google to continue ranking it high. Regular maintenance also optimizes your content for search engines (such as fixing broken links and missing data).

3. Improves Your Customer Engagement

Readers will enjoy a well-maintained website and are more likely to return if your site is easy to navigate and use.

Fixing broken links and 404 errors improves the entire experience, so you don’t lose visitors. Nearly 44% of users will tell others if they had a poor online experience (like landing on a 404 page instead of content). Even more concerning is the 88% of visitors who won’t return to your website if they had a poor experience.

Why Outsource WordPress Website Maintenance?

Outsourcing is becoming extremely popular as customers expect more in their online experiences, often surpassing what your in-house team can accomplish independently. Outsourcing is more cost-efficient, scalable, and productive than performing all your tasks in-house.

Outsourcing has multiple benefits, including:

• Saving you hiring costs by only paying for services you need.
• Creating a scalable solution that changes as you grow.
• Tapping into expertise you might not have in-house.
• Receiving an outsider’s point of view for new ideas and inspiration.

A significant 37% of small businesses already outsource at least one task.

Consider the value over the cost of maintaining a WordPress site when choosing the best outsourcing service for your website maintenance.

Sometimes, a service might be more affordable, but you also receive streamlined services. Other WordPress maintenance services may cost more upfront but save you money in the long term.

You’ll lose money whenever you have a data breach, your website goes down, or your customers have a poor experience. The additional cost of maintaining a reliable website will prevent those losses while also creating a positive experience that brings in additional traffic and customers.

Choosing the Right Website Maintenance Service Provider for Your Website

Let’s get on top of your website maintenance so you can stop bleeding money in poor experiences and maintenance issues. Instead, you’ll be generating more traffic and wowing your visitors with top-notch experiences that far outpace your competition.

Our website maintenance packages include:

• Securing your site
• Backing up your hard work
• Optimizing your SEO
• Providing ongoing real-person support

It’s the only package you need to tackle all your maintenance tasks.

Book a consultation to chat about how Fingerprint Marketing can best help you keep your website up and running.