Affordable Website Maintenance: Here’s What Actually Works

If you do it yourself, website maintenance might seem affordable… until you realize the hidden costs. It can stunt your business growth by taking up your precious time, and if you make a mistake (which beginners often do), you could end up causing serious damage.

So, do nothing?

That alternative is even costlier. Without maintenance, your WordPress site progressively gets slower and harder to use. You stand to lose revenue and credibility.

Instead, invest in affordable website maintenance with the right provider: StateWP.

Let’s explore how to get the best value deal on website performance, security, and usability, all with a reliable partner.

How Much Does Affordable Website Maintenance Cost?

The amount you pay for website maintenance depends on several factors. For example, the size of your website, its features, and traffic volumes affect what you pay.

Here’s a quick breakdown of typical costs. If you want all the details, read our WordPress website maintenance cost guide.

Pro tip: The costs of website hosting and domain management are usually charged on top of maintenance fees. Your best bet for lowering costs is to consolidate hosting and domain fees within a maintenance package.

The factors that drive website maintenance costs

Here’s a general idea of what you need to budget for, with some examples:

• How you maintain your site (DIY, freelancing, or agency maintenance costs)
• Domain registration (reserving and retaining a URL)
• Website hosting (keeping your site live on a fast, active server)
• Security and updates (monitoring, malware plugins, scanning, firewalls, and expert support)
• Backups (backing up data via host or plugins, or both)
• Functionality and features (the more advanced your site is, the more support it needs)
• Regular editing and development (website design, content, and functionality audits)
• Performance auditing (tracking and maintaining site speeds)
• Content and search engine optimization/SEO rankings (adjusting and creating new content and making technical tweaks to help your site rank highly on search engines)
• Performance reporting (analyzing traffic in Google Analytics, marketing effectiveness, and conversion rates)

Yeah, that’s a lot to think about.

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But don’t panic… It’s easy to keep these costs low. We’ll show you how!

5 Tips for Making Website Maintenance More Affordable

Here are five essential tips for reducing your maintenance budget and still keeping your site healthy:

1. Opt for a lean site
2. Minimize spend on themes and plugins
3. Don’t wait for things to break
4. Avoid DIY website maintenance
5. Consolidate web hosting and maintenance with one provider

1. Keep your site lean

The fewer features to keep track of and update, the cheaper your site is to maintain. You don’t need a big, flashy website with all the bells and whistles. Direct language, clear calls to action, logical navigation flows, and a basic web form to capture interest are enough to start attracting leads.

Besides, gradually building your site up from a simple starting point is more affordable than shelling out initially (or for a full redesign later on).

So, start with the basics. Create an “About” page, describe your services, and sell yourself with concise, engaging copy. Add client testimonials and case studies for credibility and guide readers to contact you.

Once your basic site starts attracting customers, you can include more features. For example, you could:

• Include a small knowledge base to boost your authority in online search results
• Install WooCommerce to add eCommerce features and sell products and services

That’s what our client, Lead Liberated, does. The nonprofit collective has fewer than five pages, but uses space wisely to present its core messages and calls to action. Its main page ends in a short scroll to a donation button and form:

This simple setup keeps maintenance costs low while still delivering a powerful message to convert visitors.

2. Minimize spend on themes and plugins

WordPress plugins and themes can get expensive over time. Thankfully, there are two main ways to save money here:

1. Buy lifetime access to plugins and themes, rather than pay for a yearly fee
2. Choose reliable, free options, provided they fit your purpose

Most paid plugins charge a premium rate for annual recurring licenses. However, if you maintain your website regularly, it will endure for years to come – in which case, it’s better value to pay a one-off lifetime fee.

For instance, you could pay $200 for lifetime access to a plugin instead of $125 a year.

Then again, you might not need to pay for plugins at all. Some free plugins, like Broken Link Checker, give you full functionality for their specific maintenance area.

Bottom line: Only use premium plugins when there’s a clear, valuable difference between free and paid versions. For instance, a malware plugin might scan for threats in free mode and quarantine them at the paid level. Here, the premium version offers better value.

3. Don’t wait for things to break

It costs more money to fix a site than to protect it.

A hacked or broken website loses trust, revenue, and business, and can even come with hefty compliance fines. Proactive website maintenance, meanwhile, prevents the worst from happening.

Fixing a broken site means paying out for upfront support and taking your business offline. Even when it’s back online, it could take you months or even years to regain credibility and rankings.

Instead of waiting for things to break:

1. Use a simple maintenance checklist to streamline and schedule tasks
2. Back up your site regularly through your host or a plugin, so you always have “save points” to reload
3. Delegate tasks to an expert, or let them take the wheel

Take PSE Healthy Energy, a StateWP client, as a great example of a company that proactively cares for its website. With our maintenance support, the company uses monthly development hours to refresh content and leans on our team 24/7 to keep everything up-to-date.

As our CEO, Garrett Goldman, says, it pays to be proactive:

“A website can go down for so many reasons, including really silly reasons that we see all the time from businesses. For example, they forgot to put their SSL on auto-renew, or they didn’t pay their hosting bill. Should that happen to one of our customers, we are notified right away.”

If you’d like further insight, check out some of our recommended WordPress maintenance tips.

4. Avoid DIY website maintenance

Doing it all yourself isn’t as cheap as you think.

After all, any time you spend maintaining or fixing your site is time better spent running your business, offering stellar customer service, and improving user experience.

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Plus, it’s easy to get lost on your own. Unless you’re experienced with web maintenance, how do you know you won’t end up paying for something you don’t need?

Delegating security, plugin updates, and health checks to maintenance experts ensures everything is taken care of at minimal cost, thanks to their experience and scale. You’re immediately boosting your site’s return on investment (ROI).

Also, don’t just settle on a company or plan just because they seem cheap upfront, or you feel you need to make a snap decision.

Shop around for the best website maintenance companies for the size and needs of your site, and take time to compare website maintenance plans.

Ask questions like, “Do I just need someone to take care of content updates, technical support, and security patches? Or might I benefit from extra support, such as having access to a staging site and SEO auditing?”

5. Consolidate hosting and maintenance with one provider

Some website owners looking to cut costs might choose cheap web hosting options as an afterthought, but that’s a risky move. Cheaper web hosting options often use shared servers, which threaten your site’s health and performance.

When you’re sharing with other people, your server has to split bandwidth between multiple sites, and your load speeds might fluctuate depending on website traffic. Also, if a neighbor contracts malware, you’re at risk of cross-site contamination. It’s just not worth the risk to save a few dollars upfront.

Instead, prioritize your hosting and consolidate it with a reliable maintenance plan.

This way, you only ever pay one company, have a single point of contact, and get a great value hosting plan that aligns with your maintenance needs.

This brings us to one of our clients who had suffered a costly security breach on a shared server. That partnership was already on the rocks, too, thanks to regular downtime and crippling slowdowns. The client was paying a low fee upfront, but was losing money long term.

For this company, it was a much better value to move to StateWP’s premium hosting package alongside a maintenance package. We guarantee 99.9%+ uptime, dedicated account management, and security protection.

The Best Choice for Affordable Website Maintenance: StateWP

StateWP is the choice for high-value website management without exorbitant monthly fees.

From $99/month, our customers receive website maintenance packages that include round-the-clock updates, fault fixes, backups, and performance tweaks.

We offer three affordable WordPress maintenance plans aimed at different types of websites: Starter, Premium, and Elite. Here’s a quick breakdown of their top features:

We’ve helped create some fantastic success stories across all three packages. Morris & Garritano Insurance, for example, joined StateWP after our sister web design company, State Creative, built its new website.

Our Starter plan got the firm up and running with 24/7 security monitoring and quick assistance, helping it build new leads with ease.

Morris & Garritano soon upgraded to a Premium plan, realizing they’d save more money with two inclusive hours of content editing every month. They were already paying by the hour for extra development, so the upgrade was a no-brainer, as Sara Holloway, Marketing Strategist explains:

“I feel confident that our website is secure and running properly with StateWP. They’re also just really great people to work with. Highly recommend!”

Speaking of Premium clients, citrus fruit expert Sun Pacific turned to us when it needed serious help boosting website performance, functionality, and conversion rates.

Within weeks, we’d transformed its slow, error-riddled sites into lean, fast-loading lead converters. To this day, we use its monthly development hours to edit layouts and content and improve the user experience.

For Emma Wollenweber, Sun Pacific’s Marketing Manager, the value of partnering with StateWP is obvious:

“If I’d watched a ton of YouTube videos, I might have been able to change our sites. But this was a huge project that I just couldn’t, shouldn’t, and wouldn’t do. We got so much out of just paying StateWP to answer all our questions and solve these problems.”

Affordable website maintenance is within your reach, and StateWP is here to help you keep your website healthy and converting leads without breaking your budget.

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Get started now by booking a no-ties, 20-minute call with Garrett, our CEO. He’ll talk you through how StateWP can take care of all your site’s needs for minimal financial investment.

Affordable Website Maintenance FAQs

Let’s finish with some common questions about low-cost website maintenance.