Website Maintenance Costs: How Much Should You Pay

Websites are one of the most important parts of running an online business. If you have a website of your own, you need to take care of it as much as possible. The website will require constant updates. If you want to know how much to charge for website updates, you must know the complete website maintenance costs.

The real cost of web presence is underlined in the maintenance of a website. It is one key factor of growth and sustainability. Creating a website is super easy these days.

However, maintaining the website would require a proper website maintenance plan and website maintenance checklist to fulfill the basics. These will require you to pay a certain amount of money.

In this article, we will look deeply into website maintenance and the costs associated with it.

Website maintenance cost 2023 can vary depending on a lot of things. The size, functionality, and complexity have a huge impact on the overall cost of maintaining a website. There are agencies who can help you with your website maintenance.

In addition to this, several other factors like the idea, skillset, features, and pricing model can greatly impact the cost to maintain a website.

Average Website Maintenance Cost

On average, the lowest you can spend on maintaining a website would be somewhere around 35 USD. This is the monthly web maintenance cost. This can increase up to $5000 a month if your website is huge and provides a significantly better service to the visitors.

Monthly Website Maintenance Cost for Different Types of Website

The monthly website maintenance cost heavily depends on the type of your website. It is obvious that a simple blog website will not require you to spend a lot of money on its management compared to an e-commerce site.

Website Category	Average Website Maintenance Cost (Monthly)
Small business websites	$50–$500/month
Personal Blogging websites	$5–$75/month
Professional websites	$25–$75/month
Big enterprises website	$350–$4,500/month
Entertainment websites	$300–$2,500/month
Ecommerce store website	$1500 to $5000/month

• If you intend to spend money on your personal blog website, you can allocate around $5 to $75 each month
• This amount will surely go high when it comes to the small business website. You will need to pay between 50 USD to 500 USD every month
• On the other hand, corporate website maintenance is quite expensive as well. The range is between $350 to $4500 each month
• The highest amount of money you may need to pay is for e-commerce websites. Starting from $1500, you can spend as much as $5000 every month to manage a custom e-commerce website

  Website maintenance cost 2023 can vary depending on a lot of things. The size, functionality, and complexity have a huge impact on the overall cost of maintaining a website. There are agencies who can help you with your website maintenance.

  In addition to this, several other factors like the idea, skillset, features, and pricing model can greatly impact the cost to maintain a website.

  Average Website Maintenance Cost

  On average, the lowest you can spend on maintaining a website would be somewhere around 35 USD. This is the monthly web maintenance cost. This can increase up to $5000 a month if your website is huge and provides a significantly better service to the visitors.

  Monthly Website Maintenance Cost for Different Types of Website

  The monthly website maintenance cost heavily depends on the type of your website. It is obvious that a simple blog website will not require you to spend a lot of money on its management compared to an e-commerce site.

  Website Category	Average Website Maintenance Cost (Monthly)
  Small business websites	$50–$500/month
  Personal Blogging websites	$5–$75/month
  Professional websites	$25–$75/month
  Big enterprises website	$350–$4,500/month
  Entertainment websites	$300–$2,500/month
  Ecommerce store website	$1500 to $5000/month

• If you intend to spend money on your personal blog website, you can allocate around $5 to $75 each month
• This amount will surely go high when it comes to the small business website. You will need to pay between 50 USD to 500 USD every month
• On the other hand, corporate website maintenance is quite expensive as well. The range is between $350 to $4500 each month
• The highest amount of money you may need to pay is for e-commerce websites. Starting from $1500, you can spend as much as $5000 every month to manage a custom e-commerce website

Several factors will impact the overall website maintenance cost of your website. We have listed a total of 11 of them. Here they are:

1. Domain Name

The obvious first one is the domain name of your website. It is unique for each website on the internet. It is basically the URL of your website. You may have to spend around a dollar per month for domain maintenance.

2. SSL Certificate

The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate helps your website to be protected. Any sensitive data on your website is protected through the SSL certification. The usual price for per month SSL certificate ranges from a dollar to $125.

3. Website Hosting

Website hosting is just as important as the domain name. Without it, visitors will not be able to access your website. There are 4 types of website hosting. These are shared host, website builder, virtual private server (VPS), and dedicated server.

The cost of website hosting varies depending on the type of hosting you decide to choose for your website. A shared hosting system is the cheapest option that will cost you from 2 USD to 10 USD a month.

The dedicated server is the most expensive, which is between $1000 to $2,000. Website builder and VPS will cost you around 5 USD to 50 USD each month.

4. Website Updates

It is important to keep the software and the overall user experience up to date every now and then. This will cost you starting from $15 to $105 each month. The more you are willing to spend, the more you can upgrade the User Interface (UI) of the website on a regular basis.

5. CMS Updates

The full form of CMS is Content Management System. It is crucial to upgrade the contents of the website for at least a month. The monthly cost for such maintenance could reach up to $3500.

6. Required Tech Support

To tackle the variety of issues of a website, you will need to hire professional and skillful tech support. This will probably cost you the most. The lowest you will be able to spend is 1500 USD. On the other hand, you can spend as much as $3000 a month on tech support.

7. Web Analytics Report

Analysis of the web page is extremely necessary. This service may cost you from $5 to $15. There are several analytical tools that the tech support will analyze and act upon.

8. System Support for e-Commerce

For e-commerce sites, you will need a different and unique set of system support. This is because the main function of an e-commerce site is the buy and sell of the products. Therefore, the website will contain a huge chunk of information that needs to be generated quicker than other websites.

However, the cost of using system support for e-commerce can be relatively low. In most cases, you may have to spend around 15 USD to 25 USD each month.

9. Email Services

Owners of websites can generate unique email addresses using their domain names, such as support@viserx.com, thanks to professional email hosting.

Businesses can earn client trust by promoting their brand, coming off as professional, and using customized emails.

For $6 per mailbox each month, Google Workspace offers a well-liked premium email solution.

The quantity of mailboxes you want also affects the maintenance costs of email services. Your purchase will cost more if you add more mailboxes.

Email services are included with several website builders' plans. For instance, a free three-month trial of Titan email is included with all Zyro Premium Plans.

10. Plugins

A website's functionality is increased through plugins. The official library of WordPress plugins currently has more than 59,000 selections. Install plugins to help with website optimization.

Consider adding a free caching plugin like W3 Total Cache to help in website maintenance and lower site maintenance costs.

There are also fully premium plugins like WP Rocket and OptinMonster. These plugins provide greater features than free alternatives and are frequently more actively maintained by their authors. Paid plugin maintenance fees for WordPress range from $4 to $49 per month.

11. Marketing and SEO

To increase website traffic, marketing and SEO methods must be planned for.

It's essential to provide recent, high-quality content, such as blog posts, videos, and images, to draw in your target audience. Trust is built through quality content, which also improves your search engine rating and produces leads.

Consider your website's specialization and long-term objectives when promoting your brand. Then, when planning your website maintenance fees, take into account the following digital marketing tactics:

• Search engine optimization: Search engine optimization raises the position of your website on search results pages (SERP). SEO tools include things like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and Moz. There are alternatives for free, while paid subscriptions range in price from $12 to $150 per month.
• Content marketing: To draw in, hold the attention of, and keep audiences, content marketing provides timely and relevant material. You can either produce content yourself or contract it out to freelancers or digital marketing firms. Rates vary depending on the sort of content, but you should budget $1/word or $50–$3,000 for a job.
• Email marketing: Email marketing informs customers about your company's operations. For between $0 and $310 a month, you can use various email marketing software or email marketing plugins for WordPress.
• Social media marketing: A wider audience is targeted via social media marketing. An average business spends $6,000–$10,500 each month on social media managers, ads, and digital marketing tools.

These marketing tactics don't have to be used all at once. Simple SEO, email marketing, and content marketing tactics can be used to start with smaller websites.

The majority of the website maintenance costs come from the subscription packages that you pay each month. For the most effective and cost-efficient services, you can follow a checklist. This checklist will allow you to track the maintenance activities. You can monitor whether you are getting the services you are paying for.

• Checking the Website for Any Broken Pages

Broken pages mean the pages that show 404 or error messages. It will downgrade your website if important pages often break down and show such error messages.

As a result, the website maintenance cost will keep on increasing. It is crucial to check the top to bottom of a website at least once a month. Therefore, you can allocate a decent amount of money for such a purpose.

• Checking the Website for Any Broken Links

Broken links will hamper the SEO of your webpage. As a result, visitors will face difficulties in navigating your website on the search engines. A majority of the money will go to maintaining that there are no broken links on your website.

• Checking the Website for Any Broken Images

Having images on your website is a common form of attracting visitors. If these images are broken, customers will think that the website is not properly maintained. This can hamper the conversion rate of your offerings. You can allocate a budget on third-party crawlers to find the broken images and fix them every now and then.

• Performing Updates on a Regular Basis

Being up to date is extremely crucial for online platforms. You must keep pace with the latest upgrades. As a result, a very high amount of money should be allocated to update packages. Your website should show that updated software and coding systems have been utilized in its maintenance.

• Ensuring Regular Backups

Keeping a backup of your website regularly is a very wise option. You will find several options that provide the service to back up the previous data of your website.

Investing in such maintenance work will ensure that you can move to a previous version as soon as there is a major problem with the website.

• Regular Checkup of Rankings and Analytics

This is one of the most important tasks of website maintenance. You must regularly be updated about the Google rankings and analytics of your website. These can help in identifying problems and finding innovative approaches to grow the reach of the website.

However, analyzing all these can be tough as they can be complex. Therefore, it is best to buy service packages and keep track of the progress every now and then.

The creation of the website can be expensive. This is something you cannot avoid. But the maintenance cost is something that you can reduce as much as possible.

The first thing you should do to cut the cost of website maintenance is to identify what kind of services you will need and the frequency of the services.

It is somewhat impossible to reduce the cost for large websites. However, small websites like blogs or others can be maintained with a lower amount of money.

Therefore, you should first start with the most important and unavoidable maintenance package for your website. This service is something that you cannot live without. Whenever you have a budget crunch, you must remember to at least continue those maintenance activities for the month.

On the other hand, automation can reduce a lot of the maintenance costs for large company websites. For these large websites, human touch increases a lot of the maintenance cost.

So automation can reduce the cost by replacing the human touch with a more efficient and effective Artificial Intelligence (AI) system to detect problems and solve them.

Website is an integral part of our day-to-day lives. For almost every bit of information, we search different websites. Especially in the product and service industry, websites are significant in today’s world. Therefore, maintaining the quality of the website is crucial.

Website maintenance cost in 2023 can be high depending on the kind of package service you are availing. Nevertheless, it is always a great idea to strategize enough budget for website maintenance activities to ensure efficiency and growth.

How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?

Depending on the size and purpose of your website, website maintenance costs might vary, but even the smallest sites should budget around $100 per year. Mid-sized websites will ultimately cost $400 to $500 a year, while larger business and e-commerce sites can easily cost $1,000 or more per year.

How Much Does Monthly Website Maintenance Cost?

A monthly website service agreement normally costs between $35 and $5000. You could spend various amounts, depending on your website and business. It's good to refer to this monthly average rather than considering it as the ideal because of this.