How much does website maintenance cost? Monthly ranges by site type
Website maintenance costs $50 to $500 a month for most company sites, or ₹3,000 to ₹35,000 in India. What each tier includes and what you can skip.
By Sohail Hussain29 October 20267 min read
As of October 2026, maintaining a company website costs between $50 and $500 a month for most businesses, or ₹3,000 to ₹35,000 a month in India, depending on the platform and how much changes each month. A simple static site on a modern host can cost almost nothing beyond the domain. A WordPress site with a dozen plugins and weekly content updates sits near the top of that range, and an e-commerce store or web app goes higher still.
The number on the invoice depends on three things: the platform, the number of hours of human work per month, and whether hosting is bundled. The rest of this guide breaks those down so you can tell whether a quote is fair, and whether you need a plan at all.
What does "maintenance" actually include?
Maintenance is a bundle of small, unglamorous jobs. A good plan covers all of these; a cheap one quietly covers two or three.
- Hosting and domain. The server, the CDN, SSL certificates and the domain renewal. Someone has to make sure the card on file still works.
- Updates. Platform, theme, plugin and dependency updates, applied on a staging copy first and then on the live site.
- Backups. Taken automatically, stored somewhere other than the server, and restored at least once to prove they work.
- Monitoring. Uptime checks on the site and on the forms, with a person who gets the alert.
- Security. Patching known vulnerabilities, removing abandoned plugins, keeping admin accounts tidy.
- Content changes. New pages, job posts, team changes, pricing edits, blog posts.
- Small fixes. A broken layout on a new phone, a form that stopped sending, a third-party script that changed.
- Reporting. A short monthly note on uptime, speed, traffic and what was done.
Our own website care and maintenance plans cover all eight, which is why we price them the way we do below. If a quote is much cheaper than the ranges here, ask which of the eight it leaves out. The answer is usually monitoring, tested backups and staging.
What does each tier cost?
Prices below are what we see in the market and charge ourselves, as of October 2026. India prices exclude GST, which is 18 percent on services; check with your accountant for how it applies to you.
| Tier | What you get | USD per month | India per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting only | Server, CDN, SSL, domain renewal. No human work. | $0 to $40 | ₹0 to ₹3,000 |
| Basic care | Updates, backups, uptime monitoring, security patches | $50 to $150 | ₹3,000 to ₹10,000 |
| Standard care | Basic, plus 2 to 5 hours of content changes and fixes | $150 to $500 | ₹10,000 to ₹35,000 |
| Retainer | 10 or more hours a month of development and design | $1,000 and up | ₹50,000 and up |
A few notes on reading the table.
The hosting-only row is wide because the platform matters more than the host. A static Next.js site on Vercel's Hobby plan or Cloudflare Pages costs nothing for hosting, as of October 2026, though Vercel's Hobby plan is for non-commercial use and a company site belongs on Pro at $20 per team member per month. See Vercel's pricing page for the current limits. Managed WordPress hosting from the better-known hosts starts around $20 to $40 a month for a single small site. Shared hosting at $3 to $10 a month exists, and we do not recommend it for a site that brings in business.
The jump from basic to standard is the jump from "keep it alive" to "keep it current". If you post news, change prices, add team members or publish case studies, you want standard. If the site has not changed in a year and nobody plans to change it, basic is enough.
The retainer row is a different product. It is a dedicated development team on a monthly plan, and you buy it because you have a backlog of improvements, not because you need updates applied.
Why does WordPress cost more to maintain than a static site?
Because more can break. A WordPress site has a database, a theme, a handful of plugins and PHP, each updated on its own schedule by a different author. Every update is a chance for a conflict. Most are harmless. Some take a site down on a Saturday.
A static or mostly static Next.js site has no database to corrupt, nothing for an attacker to log in to, and dependencies that are updated as part of deliberate development work rather than from an admin panel. The site can sit untouched for months with no security exposure.
In practice, as of October 2026, we see WordPress care plans running roughly 1.5 to 2 times the price of a care plan for a static site with the same amount of content change. That difference is mostly the staging-and-update cycle: an hour or two a month that a static site does not need.
This is not an argument that every site should be static. WordPress is the right choice when your team edits a lot of content themselves. It is an argument to count the maintenance cost when you choose a platform, not after.
What does maintenance cost for an online store or a web app?
More, because downtime costs money by the hour and because there are more moving parts.
An e-commerce site on Shopify has most of its maintenance inside the subscription: hosting, security and platform updates are Shopify's problem. What you pay for on top is theme and app changes, product updates and fixes, which is similar to the standard tier above. A WooCommerce store has all the WordPress costs plus payment, shipping and tax plugins that update often. Budget the top of the standard tier or above.
A web app or client portal needs the retainer model. Dependencies need updating on a schedule, the database needs monitoring and backups with tested restores, and there are usually feature requests every month. As of October 2026, $1,500 to $5,000 a month (₹1 lakh to ₹4 lakh in India) is a normal range for a small app with a part-time developer attached. Anything less than that is probably hosting plus hope.
What can you skip without regret?
Some things in a maintenance quote are worth questioning.
Monthly "SEO reports" with no actions. A PDF of rankings is not maintenance. If the plan includes technical SEO work, such as fixing crawl errors, broken links and Core Web Vitals regressions, that is useful and belongs with technical SEO and performance. A chart with no work behind it is padding.
Daily backups for a site that changes monthly. Weekly is fine. What matters is that a restore has been tested, not the frequency.
Premium security plugins on a static site. There is nothing for them to protect.
Hosting bundled at a markup you cannot see. Ask for hosting as a separate line, or hold the hosting account yourself and let the studio manage it. You should own the account either way. Our hosting cost calculator gives a rough monthly figure from your traffic and page size, so you can see what the host itself charges before any management fee.
And in one case you can skip the plan altogether: a small static site, no forms you rely on, built in the last year or two, with a founder who will remember to renew the domain. Put a calendar reminder on the renewal date, check the site twice a year, and spend the money elsewhere.
What happens if you do nothing?
The failure modes are slow, then sudden.
For WordPress, an unpatched plugin is the common entry point. The site gets injected with spam links or redirects, Google flags it, and the cleanup costs more than two years of a basic plan. We have cleaned up several of these and the pattern is always the same: a plugin last updated three years ago, an admin account with a weak password, nobody watching.
For any platform, the quiet failures hurt more. A contact form that stopped sending in March and nobody noticed until July. An SSL certificate that expired and showed every visitor a warning for a weekend. A domain that lapsed because the card on file was cancelled. None of these need a developer to prevent; they need a person who checks.
How to compare two maintenance quotes
Ask each provider for the same five things in writing:
- Hours of human work included per month, and the rate for hours beyond that.
- Whether updates are tested on a staging copy before going live.
- Where backups are stored, how often, and when the last restore test was.
- Who gets the uptime alert, and the response time you can expect for a site-down event versus a content change.
- Who owns the hosting account, the domain and the code if you leave.
If the answers are vague on points 2, 3 and 5, the plan is cheaper than it looks because it is doing less than it says.
For the full picture of what a site costs over its life, including the build, read how much a website costs. It covers the one-off numbers; this post covers the recurring ones.
Was this guide useful?