How Much Does it Cost to Maintain a Website?

Website Maintenance Cost

A website has become the most integral part of a vast number of businesses worldwide. They invest a lot of money in creating and launching an awe-inspiring website.

By doing proper marketing, they start getting traffic and sales on their website. However, many businesses think their work is over, but the real work starts after that. They have to consider website maintenance.

Generally, all the things that you do after creating a website fall under website maintenance. Every website requires maintenance to run efficiently on the internet. For the same, you need to consider the website maintenance cost.

If you neglect these costs, then you may lose your traffic and sales. There is also a chance you might pay more for emergency repairs.

On the contrary, if you have looked after website maintenance, then the cost of website maintenance is less compared to emergency repairs.

Besides this, there are numerous benefits of maintaining a website, such as better traffic, fast loading, better security, updated content, and more. After knowing all these benefits, you might have a question, how much does it cost to maintain a website?

In general, the website maintenance cost depends on a lot of things. Here, we have done in-depth research and found what goes into website maintenance.

Therefore, we will walk you through the estimated website maintenance cost and factors that affect the website maintenance cost.

Without further ado, let’s get started:

How Much Does it Cost for Website Maintenance?

The website maintenance cost changes year on year. Based on the complexity, features and functionalities, size, etc., you have to pay 10-20% of the overall website development cost. Further, the website maintenance costs vary based on your goals and requirements.

Website Maintenance Pricing By Category in 2022

Different types of websites have different maintenance costs. For instance, big eCommerce website maintenance costs are different compared to a small eCommerce website. Here is the website maintenance pricing as per the category:
Type of WebsiteAverage Website Maintenance Cost
Professional Blog$25- $75 per month
Small Website$35 – $100 per month
SMEs Website$125 – $500 per month
Corporate Website$200 – $3,500 per month
Custom Business Website$350 – $4,500 per month
Small eCommerce Website$500 – $ 2,500 per month
Custom eCommerce Website$500 – $5,000 per month

After looking at the maintenance cost of different websites, we will look at the price of individual factors.

So, here we go:

8 Common Factors Affecting Website Maintenance Cost

You can calculate the estimated website maintenance cost by summing up the costs of the below factors:

1. Domain

The domain name is the first recurring cost for your website. It consists of a unique "URL" on the internet which represents your business. It is not a one-time purchase. You have to pay annually to renew your domain name to ensure ownership of the same, or else you will lose it.

The cost of a domain name varies based on the extension (.com, .net, .co, .net, .in, etc.) and the registrar you opt for your business.

On average, the price of a domain name starts at $1 and can go up to $20 per year.

2. Hosting

Website hosting is the place where all the details of the website are live and stored. If you don’t possess hosting, then nobody can access your website. Hence, website hosting is a crucial part of website maintenance costs.

It is yet another recurring cost that you need to consider to keep your site active all the time. The cost of website hosting depends on the type of hosting and the hosting provider you choose.

Some of the most popular types of hosting available in the market for a website are as follows.

  • Shared Hosting
  • VPS Hosting
  • Dedicated Hosting
  • Cloud Hosting

The cost of hosting a website starts from $2 per month.

Various businesses choose cheap hosting and then suffer in the later stages. Here, it is recommended that you should never go with cheap hosting. Instead, you should choose the best type of hosting as per your business needs and future goals.

3. SSL Certificate

Security is one of the major concerns for all websites on the internet. It doesn’t matter what type of website you have, but offering the best security to the users is essential. That is where the need for an SSL certificate arises.

SSL stands for secure socket layer. It helps you to keep your website and your site visitor’s data protected. By getting an SSL certificate, you can receive and transfer data to the users effectively.

Google gives more importance to secure websites. Hence, you should consider SSL in the website maintenance cost.

To check whether your site has SSL or not, you need to check two things. First of all, the site should be ‘HTTPS’ & not ‘HTTP’ secure. Secondly, you have to check the padlock sign before the URL.

If your site doesn’t have these things, then you should buy an SSL certificate as soon as possible.

Various sites offer the SSL certificate for free. However, most of the sites on the web choose to go with a paid SSL certificate as it provides more benefits than the free ones.

The average cost of an SSL certificate starts from $7.99 per year.

4. General Updates

Keeping your site up-to-date and secure is necessary to attract new users and keep them hooked on the website. Whether you have a small or a big website, it is crucial to update the site regularly.

Various things included in the general website update are as follows:

  • Webpages
  • Files
  • Links
  • Media
  • Navigation
  • Forms
  • Background Images
  • Colors

Apart from these, if you are using the CMS (content management system) in your website, then updates related to CMS, themes, and plugins are also included in the general website update.

The cost of general website updates varies on the site you are using. Here, if you are using free plugins and themes, then it is absolutely free. However, if you are using paid themes, plugins, etc., then it has its own license costs.

If you choose to hire a developer to update all the things on your website, then it might cost $20 to $125 per hour. Further, the majority of companies invest 2 hours a month for these kinds of updates.

5. Content Updates

Your website design is one of the most important things. The second most important thing is the content. The entire content on the website, such as website pages, blogs, etc., is required to keep users engaged. Moreover, up-to-date content helps you rank well in the leading search engines. Therefore, it is a part of the website maintenance cost.

If you are good at creating content, then you can do it yourself. However, you require the help of a freelance writer or content writing agency at some point in time.

Hence, you should hire a good content writer. The charges of a good writer start from $0.15 per word and can go up to $5 per word or more. Here, if you want to update more pages, then content update costs will be higher.

6. Technical Support

Technical support is yet another thing that falls under the website maintenance cost. There are times when you are facing issues related to the features or functionality of your website.

All of these issues need to be addressed instantly to keep users on the website. If you fail to do so, then you will lose users.

The cost of technical issues relies on the amount of work you have. If you have small errors and you can resolve them yourself, then no need to hire someone.

On the contrary, if you have issues every month and want to save time, then you should outsource the work.

The majority of website maintenance service providers offer different packages for technical support. You can choose the best plan as per the needs of your website.

Here you can hire someone for as low as $20-60 per hour. Further, if you want technical support every month, then you can purchase a website maintenance support plan for the entire year.

7. Tracking and Analytics

Even though it is a crucial part of every website, various businesses and startups neglect the tracking and analysis of their website. Due to this reason, many service providers have included tracking & analysis in their website maintenance packages.

By tracking and analytics, you can determine some of the crucial metrics of your website, such as the total number of visitors, average session time, and average bounce rate of your site.

Apart from these, you can measure the essential metrics of your website. These things can further help you make better decisions to achieve your business goals.

In general, the website tracking and analytics reports cost around $5 to $15 per month.

8. Marketing

The ultimate goal of a business is to sell products/ services through the website. Hence, it is very much crucial to reach a wider audience. For the same, you need to focus on the effective marketing of your website.

Here, there are various methods through which you can do marketing of your website. It can be email marketing, social media marketing, paid marketing, etc. Hence, it is really challenging to determine the exact cost of marketing a website.

The amount of time and money you can invest in marketing is unlimited. However, your marketing cost must be in line with your business. To achieve this, you need to know your current position in the market and then set specific goals for the future. Based on your goals, you can allocate money for website marketing.

Lastly, the average cost of website marketing can be between $100 to $5,000 per month.

Wrapping Up

Here we provided the estimated cost of maintaining a website. By summing up the costs of different parts, you can calculate how much does it cost to maintain a website.

There is no exact cost for maintaining every website. Based on your budget and future goals, you can make sufficient investment in website maintenance.

If you are still confused about the website maintenance cost, then don’t hesitate to contact us.

WebyKing provides website design & development services to businesses and startups around the globe. Moreover, we possess a highly skilled team of professionals. Hence, we can analyze your site and provide you with the estimated maintenance cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Website maintenance involves finding various errors in the website and resolving them regularly. Also, it includes keeping the website updated as per the latest trends in the industry.
If you don’t maintain your website, then your site will become slow and will have bugs. Further, your sales will decrease and in the end, your site will stop working.
There is no fixed cost for website maintenance. The average monthly cost of website maintenance is between $100 and $5000. You can spend on website maintenance based on your goals and requirements.
Maintaining a website requires some time and effort every week/month. Therefore, if you don’t have time for the same, then you can outsource this work to a website maintenance service provider. They will keep your site up-to-date.
There is no fixed time to maintain a website. It can take from a few minutes to hours or more. Depending on your website goals, you can decide how much time to allocate to website maintenance.