WordPress Website Maintenance Costs: How Much Should You Pay? (2025)

You may be tempted to design a new WordPress site and consider it done and dusted. However, that’s a recipe for disaster.

Without regular maintenance, WordPress sites inevitably slow down, develop security problems, and fall down the search engine rankings. That’s why it’s worth investing in website maintenance now to avoid losing business later.

Yet, how much should you pay to maintain your WordPress site, and what’s considered good value for your business’s needs?

Below, we explore the answer to this question and also discuss:

• What factors affect the price you pay
• Why it’s worth investing in a maintenance partner

Let’s get started!

How Much Does WordPress Website Maintenance Cost?

Maintaining a WordPress website costs between $10 and $10,000 a month, depending on size and functionality.

Here’s a quick look at how these costs break down based on size, type, and functionality.

Note: These figures do not include hosting costs (c. $20-$60 per month)
and domain registration fees (c. $10-$1,000 per year).

Now the details:

One-page websites and basic personal sites

Average cost: $10-$50 per month

One-page or personal blogs usually only need basic functionality, like design templates, malware scanners, contact forms, and simple caching plugins (for site speed), so you can expect to pay relatively low maintenance fees.

You’re in this price bracket if:

• You run simple blogs like a basic educational or entertainment site
• You can manage simple maintenance on your own to avoid additional costs
• You’re not planning to develop and scale your site
• You only need a simple one-page site or an “online business card” to display services and prices

For example, Monte Cafe’s hospitality site is a one-page design that hides menu items and opening times behind simple drop-down boxes without needing to host lots of different pages. Its only major maintenance cost is ensuring the booking plugin works smoothly.

Small-medium business websites with basic functionality

Average cost: $50-$200 per month

Basic but professional small-medium enterprise (SME) websites need blazing-fast websites and solid functionality to support a growing client base. This includes gated lead magnets and many landing pages to attract searchers and collect inquiries for sales teams.

With these sites, you must invest time and money into checking that features work properly, monitoring web analytics, and optimizing content for accessibility, conversion rates, and speed.

Expect to pay a figure in this range for monthly maintenance if you:

• Are a small business or startup company expecting to grow and scale your business quickly over the next few years
• Rely on your site to deliver leads to your sales team
• Want to capitalize on SEO best practices to grow your visibility
• Need the peace of mind that 100% uptime and regular backups deliver

A good example of this type of site is Piboco. The children’s book app provider only has a few pages and forms, encouraging clicks toward its app store pages where it converts attention into paying customers.

Small-medium business websites with advanced functionality

Average cost: $200-$500 per month

Advanced maintenance for small business sites includes managing location pages, user accounts, live and AI chatbots, accessibility adjustments, regular content publishing, and knowledge bases.

These costs apply if you:

• Have many services you want to showcase (e.g., a law firm with many practice areas)
• Desire advanced functionality on your site (e.g., a custom chatbot that helps direct calls to the right lawyer)
• Want to publish regular content on your site
• Have strong visibility and traffic, placing you at a higher security risk
• Don’t have time to manage any part of your website and online marketing
• Need timely support from technical experts to ensure your site is working tirelessly to drive leads

Tangram Insurance Services, one of several sites StateWP designed and developed for Heffernan Insurance Brokers, is a good example of a small-medium business site with advanced functionality.

It has many details about the company’s different services and packages, an accessibility widget, a well-organized and regularly updated blog, a newsletter, and contact links. These features help the business reassure visitors it’s knowledgeable, reliable, and easy to approach for support.

E-commerce sites and platforms

Average cost: $300-$5,000 per month

Setting a maintenance budget for online stores is tricky because they have many moving parts, including changing categories, new product updates, promotions, abandoned cart sequences, delivery integrations, and secure payment gateways.

The lower end of the tier normally applies to simple shops with basic functionality, few products, and limited amounts of traffic and sales. The higher end is for large webshops with advanced features like custom designs, dynamic pricing, live chatboxes, personalized pricing, and complex email sequences.

For instance, The Jack Rudy Cocktail Co. runs a simple online store with less than 100 products, a recipe page, and user accounts for privates and wholesalers. Still, the company has custom designs, good website traffic, and email marketing. These features cement the brand as exclusive, high-quality, and trustworthy. We expect them to spend around $500-$750 per month for maintenance.

Large business websites with advanced functionality

Average cost: $2,500-$10,000+ per month

Large corporate websites serve millions of customers, so owners must work harder than most to have a backup strategy and keep up with traffic, customer service, and on-site interactivity.

These expensive websites typically cost in the thousands monthly.

Besides cutting-edge security monitoring, these businesses must:

• Maintain and update content weekly
• Rely on custom design features to align with the brand
• Add advanced functionality to cultivate a unique user experience (UX) reflective of their marketing messages
• Offer integrated online and offline customer service
• Integrate with the impressive range of tools that make up a corporate’s technology stack (from CRM platforms to sales enablement tools to accounting software)

Consider Fareway Meat & Grocery’s website as an example.

This Midwestern retail chain has a multifunctional custom web design boasting tons of regular content, downloadables, and video guides. The site blends online and offline shopping with an e-commerce portal and a custom gift card tool you can use in a physical store. There’s also a dedicated careers portal and store locators wrapped up in a responsive design.

What Factors Influence Your WordPress Maintenance Costs?

As you can guess from our discussion so far, the biggest factors that affect WordPress maintenance costs are:

• Size, complexity, and traffic
• Purpose
• Basic vs. advanced functionality
• Level of support

Let’s break them down.

Size, complexity, and traffic

If your site has landing pages, contact forms, chatbots, and technical knowledge bases, you must regularly check that they are relevant, working correctly, and protected by the latest core updates. With each additional tool and functionality you add, you introduce more complexity and, hence, a larger need for performance optimization and maintenance.

You also need to check all your content is relevant and edited with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. For example, you must use the right keywords for searchers to find you, build links, and fix errors. Regular performance checks with web analytics are also important.

Moreover, an increase in traffic puts your server under more pressure to keep things running smoothly. Additionally, the more visitors you welcome, the more sensitive data you must protect. To address this, you must invest in reliable hosting, run regular malware removal scans, ask an expert to check compatibility issues, protect visitors with an SSL certificate, and set up secure payment gateways – all expensive features. 💰

Purpose

The purpose of your site often dictates how complex it is. For example, if you have a landing page that directs people to an app store download, you only need to perform essential maintenance tasks that command low fees. You don’t need the extra bells and whistles of larger business sites, additional landing pages, email ticketing, and content refreshes that add to your overall maintenance costs.

However, more complex sites built to attract and convert leads onsite need lead generation features, like a chatbot and a checkout process. They also need to follow industry trends and technological advances more closely to ensure high conversion rates.

Basic vs. advanced functionality

A site packed with premium plugins and custom themes costs much more in routine maintenance than a stripped-back design that only requires essential services.

Besides, adding more software like plugins can increase security breach risks, so you must be more vigilant with ongoing protection and perform regular audits. You’re spending more time and money backing up data, running security scans, and upgrading licenses.

Level of support

If you decide to delegate website maintenance support, you must make informed decisions between hiring an in-house team or choosing a reliable outsourcer.

What if you run a costly risk, like an error that takes your site offline? Do you approach an expert for a one-off fix, or should you hire a team off-site to fix your problems?

For short and long-term support, partnering with a dedicated third-party agency is the most cost-effective option to manage a business website. You always have access to expert guidance that scales with you, and you save money on in-house salaries, benefits, and training.

With maintenance agencies like StateWP, you have a dedicated account manager and a team constantly offering security services and monitoring your downtime. We’re on hand to measure and boost your load speeds, improve your UX and visual design, and even pore through your content so it’s relevant and appealing. We also make sure all your links go to the right place.

How To Determine the Right WordPress Site Maintenance Cost for Your Business: 2 Worked Examples

Now, let’s look at two business websites and calculate how much they should pay in monthly WordPress maintenance costs. We’ll also assign them to a monthly maintenance package and explain why it’s the right choice for the company.

This practical exercise helps you learn:

1. How to estimate a ballpark figure for the costs of managing your website (not including domain registration and hosting)
2. What to look for in a pre-packaged maintenance plan

Example 1: Lead Liberated

Lead Liberated, a nonprofit organization, has a simple site design that educates people about what it does and how visitors can donate

To encourage donations and support, the site uses a stripped-back design, with much of the relevant information accessible on the front page. To convert visitors, the organization delivers a clear, simple message, an action plan, and proof of its current efforts.

Although the website offers a deep dive into Lead Liberated’s cause, it only has five pages – making content management, SEO, and general maintenance relatively simple.

The donation button leads to a secure payment form. Given that the site frequently handles sensitive payment information, regular malware checks, data backups, and frequent updates are a must to protect data.

There’s also a short contact form at the bottom of the page, designed to engage with undecided visitors.

This site falls under the small-medium business with basic functionality tier, priced at between $50 and $200 per month because it:

• Has a simple, direct lead magnet for form donations
• Needs regular security maintenance and plugin and core updates
• Tells visitors what they need to know in five pages or less
• Uses a professional, polished custom design to encourage donations

We recommend a maintenance plan like our Starter plan, priced from $99 per month and paid annually, for this client.

The package offers relevant help such as:

• Setup and assessment at contract start
• Complete update coverage
• 24/7 site monitoring
• Hack protection and remediation
• Data backup and restoration
• SSL certificate setup and site updates
• Monthly site performance reports

Example 2: Lamano Law

Lamano Law, a criminal defense firm based in Oakland, California, has a WordPress site designed to reassure, educate, and persuade visitors to reach out for help with worrying charges.

The site uses an AI-driven video chatbot, a click-to-call button, and a simple web form to encourage people to seek legal advice. For visitors who need a little more time, hamburger and sliding menus offer detailed attorney profiles to help build trust and reassurance. There are also various detailed, specialized guides and legal dives – such as federal crimes and DUI defense.

Lamano Law’s large site needs a maintenance team to handle core, theme, and plugin updates, functionality checks, and conversion rate optimization via analytics.

Given all these moving parts, this site tips into the small-medium business and advanced functionality category, priced at $200-$500 per month because it has:

• A high volume of content to update, refresh, and publish
• Excellent user experience
• Customizable features such as video chatbots and click-to-call
• A large sitemap and link map requiring extensive technical SEO management

We recommend our Elite package, billed annually at an equivalent of $630 per month, for this site.

This plan offers support such as:

• Monthly dedicated website edits
• Regular SEO audits
• Staging site support for plugin and content updates
• Integration with Google Analytics 4
• Dedicated account management and 24/7 site monitoring
• Complete plugin, theme, and core update management
• Malware scans and protection and site restoration

Why Should You Invest in WordPress Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance is crucial for attracting visitors, achieving strong Google rankings, converting customers, and keeping your data and reputation safe.

Many business owners see building a site as a one-off expense. They don’t typically consider the maintenance cost until they start managing WordPress on their own (often ending up with sketchy freelancers or expensive in-house staff), or their site is so poorly maintained that they run into a major problem (like a costly hack).

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Top-quality WordPress website maintenance is a fantastic investment. When you partner with a trusted WordPress maintenance company like StateWP, your website:

• Is always up to date with the latest software patches and upgrades
• Receives real-time error and performance monitoring
• Is updated with SEO optimization adjustments
• Loads perfectly (and quickly) on all devices
• Receives regular content and security updates
• Benefits from a rapid-response support team
• Converts undecided clickers and keeps your client base growing

Conversely, a poorly maintained website spells disaster for your business. For instance, failure to manage your site’s security updates puts your data at serious risk of leaking into the wrong hands.

Believe it or not, over half of all breached WordPress sites aren’t up to date! If you forget to patch yours, sensitive customer information risks getting stolen and sold to cyber criminals, so you rightly lose customer trust, reputation, and revenue.

With so many different risks to manage, you need expert support. That’s where StateWP comes in. As a proven WordPress maintenance service provider, we give business owners complete peace of mind for a minimal monthly fee.

Take the produce gurus at Sun Pacific, for example. The company’s sites were slow, inaccessible, and buggy, resulting in poor UX. After partnering up, we increased the company’s website loading times by 25%, greatly improving its UX and conversion potential.

Beyond performance fixes, Marketing Manager Emma Wollenberger is happy to have a knowledgeable team in the background to maintain Sun Pacific’s online presence.

“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.”
– Emma Wollenberger

Maximize the Value of Your WordPress Website Maintenance Budget

The size and functionality of your business website dictate your WordPress website management costs.

You can expect to pay between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars each month to maintain your site – and it’s worth investing in expert talent to save you time and money in the long run.

Yet, did you know you can get started for free? With StateWP’s free auditing service, there’s no money down and no commitment required.

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Let us assess your website’s needs and discuss how we can help you grow your business at a minimal monthly cost.

Alternatively, skip straight to booking a free demo with our friendly team to learn more about how we can tailor high-value maintenance to your site’s needs.

Either way, it’s time to start seeing the genuine value in investing in WordPress maintenance now to avoid additional expenses in the long run.

WordPress Website Maintenance Costs: FAQs

Here are some final questions about ongoing WordPress maintenance costs to wrap up this deep dive.