El Coco Website maintenance is the work that keeps a site running after launch. It covers software updates, backups and renewals, a check of the live site after every change, and fixes when something breaks. Market guides put a small business site at $30 to $250 a month. Very little of that is hard cost, so most of the price pays for someone's time.
What you are paying for
A typical maintenance quote lists updates, backups, uptime monitoring, domain and SSL renewals, broken-link checks and small content edits. Those belong on it. The line that protects you most is often missing, though. It is a check of the live site right after any change.
A website is not set and forget. Sites go down. Mobile layouts break after an update. A contact form can stop sending with no error on screen. Many of those failures start with a change someone made, and a scan or an uptime report only tells you after visitors have hit the broken page.
Ask a provider to show you their routine in writing. A useful one covers these:
- A live check after every change. Load the home page, a key page, a stylesheet and the sitemap, and stop if any of them fails.
- A dated snapshot of the site on every publish, so the last good version is one step back.
- Google Search Console, read often enough that Google tells you about a broken page before a customer does. You should be protecting your pages that rank high on Google.
- A speed audit now and then, with the causes named.
- A short server config that someone can read line by line.
What a missed check costs you
A broken site rarely announces itself to the owner. The customer finds it first. They see a page that will not load, or a layout squashed on a phone, and they judge the business by it. An enquiry or a booking that would have come in goes somewhere else, and nobody tells you it happened.
Two failures are common enough to ask about by name.
The first is a redirect loop. Many hosts already send www traffic to the bare domain, or the other way round. Ask who owns the host settings. Whoever maintains the site should check what the host already does before adding rules on top of it.
The second is a config change that looks valid and is not. One badly written line in that same file can return an error on every page, images and stylesheets included, while the upload tool reports success. Only loading the live site shows the problem. That is why the live check is the line to insist on.
So ask two things before price. What do you check on the live site after a change? What do you do first when it returns a 500?
Why the build sets your monthly bill
A typical WordPress site runs its plugins on the public server. Each plugin ships updates on its own schedule, and any one of them can clash with another plugin or the theme. On a site with a long plugin list, a good share of the monthly hours goes to applying updates, testing pages and rolling back whatever breaks. Every plugin you add at build time is a line on the upkeep bill later.
A leaner build moves those hours. Some sites use WordPress only as a place to write, on a separate api subdomain. A build step turns each post into a plain HTML file, and those files are what the host serves. The pages visitors load run no plugin code. The writing backend still needs updates, but a bad one there leaves the public pages standing.
The hours that remain go to checks and speed, and speed is the part no alert covers. A page can work on a desktop and still load slowly or lay out badly on a phone. Two common causes are web fonts pulled from an outside server, which can hold the page blank while they arrive, and oversized images. Self-hosting the fonts and resizing the images fixes both. Nothing is broken, so a provider who only watches for outages never sees it. Ask whether a plan includes a mobile speed review, and whether it names causes or only scores.
What website maintenance costs
Price ranges for a small business site are from about $30 to $250 a month.
The hard costs are small. A domain renews for about $10 to $25 a year. Hosting goes from about $2 to $15 a month. Together that comes to somewhere between $35 and $205 a year. Everything above it pays for a person. Ask how many hours you get and what happens to the ones you do not use. Then ask who picks up when the site goes down on a Saturday.
Run the yearly number before you sign. A $150 a month plan comes to $1,800 a year and $5,400 over three years. On a small brochure site, that money should buy checks and fixes before it buys edits. Be wary of a cheap plan that offers unlimited edits, because someone has to do that work.
Who should do it
A managed WordPress host will usually apply core updates and keep server backups. It will not test your contact form or notice that a theme update broke a page. A freelancer is often cheaper by the hour, so ask who covers when they are away. An agency brings set response times at agency prices.
Lean toward whoever built the site, if they offer upkeep. They picked the stack. They know what the host already does, and they know where the error log lives. A newcomer is more likely to stack a rule on top of a host setting they never checked. If you do switch providers, hand over a written list of every login and plugin.
A simple site can be kept by its owner. That takes a backup you have restored at least once, reminders for renewals, and the habit of testing the contact form after each update. Once the site brings in bookings or leads, paying someone usually makes sense. A dead form on a listing page loses enquiries you never hear about.
If you are still choosing a builder, ask about upkeep in the same conversation. Our guide to choosing a website design company covers the rest of that list. To compare plans tier by tier, see website care plans: what each tier covers.
Questions
What is not included in website maintenance?
Redesigns, new pages or features, copywriting, ad campaigns and ongoing SEO. Those are projects or separate services with their own prices. Search pricing is covered in what local SEO services cost.
Is hosting included in website maintenance?
Sometimes. Some plans include the server and some assume you pay a host yourself. Check before you compare two quotes, since a $99 plan with hosting and a $99 plan without it are different prices.
How often should a website be maintained?
Check the live site after every change. Apply plugin updates as they ship, because security fixes cannot wait for a monthly visit. Look at speed and Search Console once a month.
How much does website maintenance cost per year?
For a small business site, market guides put it at about $360 to $3,000 a year. The domain and hosting inside that run about $35 to $205.
Most owners would rather spend their week on the product or service they sell. Keeping the site, the host and the rest of the digital work in order behind the scenes is what puts more eyes on it.