Maintenance is the least examined line on most website invoices. It's often bundled, usually vague, and it's what people keep paying for long after they stop knowing what it buys.
What it should cost depends almost entirely on what the site is built on, and that's where the difference is.
What breaks
Two very different answers depending on what the site is.
On a database-driven site, which means WordPress and most things like it, a lot. Plugins and core need updating, an update can take a page down, an expired licence stops security releases without saying so, and the login page is attacked continuously. That's a real ongoing job. What that costs to run goes through it.
On a site built as code, very little in the site itself. There's no admin login and no plugin stack to keep current. What still needs watching is everything around it: the domain, the SSL certificate, the DNS, the contact form actually delivering, and whatever the site connects to.
That second list is short and it's not empty, and the failures on it are the expensive kind. A domain that lapses takes your email with it.
What a plan should include
- Hosting and SSL, with certificates renewed before they expire instead of after.
- Backups taken automatically and kept off the server, and restored once so somebody knows they work. A backup nobody has tested is a hope.
- Uptime monitoring that tells a person, not a dashboard nobody opens.
- Updates on a schedule wherever the platform needs them.
- Content edits, with the boundary written down: what counts as an edit and what counts as a project.
- A response time you can hold somebody to.
Care plans here start at $89 a month and are never a condition of having a site.
Ask what happens on the day you cancel
The question worth asking before signing anything is what you're left holding when it ends.
If the hosting is bundled into the fee and the site lives in an account you have never seen, cancelling means the site stops. That's a legitimate arrangement and a common one. It's only a problem if nobody told you.
Get the answer in writing. While you're asking, check who the domain is registered to: a domain in somebody else's account is the hard one to get back. Do I own my website is the ten-minute version of that check.
When you don't need a plan
- A brochure site that rarely changes, on hosting in an account you control, with a domain in your own name.
- You're happy running the three checks below yourself.
- Changes are rare enough to quote as they come up. Two edits a year doesn't pay for a monthly fee.
None of that describes a store or anything with a login. There the maintenance isn't optional and the only question is who does it.
Three checks to run either way
- Your domain's expiry date, and which mailbox the renewal notices go to. More sites die of this than of anything technical.
- Submit your own contact form and confirm the email arrives. Forms fail silently, and a site quietly swallowing enquiries for six months is the most expensive fault there is.
- Confirm a backup exists and can be restored. Not that it's scheduled. That somebody has actually done it once.
What it should cost
There's no standard, and the spread in the market is wide enough to be useless as a guide. What makes a price sensible is the list attached to it. A monthly fee with no itemized list of what happens each month is a retainer, and it should be described as one.
Compare on what's included, on the response time, and on what you keep if you leave. A cheap plan covering nothing is more expensive than a dearer one that keeps the site up, because the bill arrives all at once on the day something breaks.