How much does website maintenance cost?
Hosting, updates, backups, and small fixes: what care really costs per month, and when a well built site barely needs any.
Updated July 2026
Website maintenance for a small business typically costs $30 to $300 a month, with full service agency care plans running $150 to $500 and up. Hosting alone is cheaper, about $10 to $50 a month, but hosting is not maintenance. At A Visual Identity we quote care as a flat monthly number after a free checkup of your site, because what maintenance should cost depends entirely on how the site was built.
Here is the part most maintenance pitches skip: a well built site needs far less care than the industry sells. A fast static site has almost nothing to patch, while an aging WordPress install with twenty plugins genuinely does need monthly attention. Before buying a care plan, find out which kind of site you own.
What the market charges per month
| What you buy | Typical price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting only | $10 to $50 | The server keeps running. Nobody is watching the site, updating anything, or answering when something breaks. This is the floor, not a care plan. |
| Platform subscription (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify) | $16 to $100 | Maintenance is genuinely built in: the platform patches itself. The trade is monthly fees forever and a ceiling on what the site can do. |
| Freelancer retainer | $50 to $150 | Updates, backups, and small edits from one person. Works well until that person gets busy, changes careers, or stops answering email. |
| Agency care plan | $150 to $500+ | Monitoring, security patches, backups, small content edits, priority support with an actual response time. Worth it for sites where downtime costs real money. |
What decides how much care a site needs
How the site is built
WordPress with many plugins needs regular patching because each plugin is a moving part. A static site has nearly no moving parts and needs a fraction of the care.
Whether you sell online
Stores need real monitoring: orders, inventory, payment provider changes, and updates that can break checkout. Ecommerce care fairly costs more.
How often content changes
If you send in edits weekly, a plan with included edit time beats paying per request. If the site barely changes, do not pay for edit hours you never use.
Backups and security
Ask where backups live, how often they run, and who restores them at 2am. This is the part of a care plan you hope never to use and the reason it exists.
Who you call when it breaks
The real product of a care plan is a phone number that answers. Response time commitments are worth more than long feature lists.
What we charge
We build sites that need little babysitting, and we will tell you when the honest answer is that you barely need a care plan at all.
Care for your site
quoted flat after a free checkupWe look at how your site is built and price care honestly against what it actually needs, which for our static builds is very little.
SEO and getting found on Google
from $500Local SEO setup and Google Business Profile work, priced separately from care so you only buy what you need.
Common questions
Keep reading
The service behind these numbers, and what everything else costs.
Let's Build Something Amazing
Get a free website audit and honest advice about what it would take to start getting more customers online. No pressure, no obligation.
Cave Creek, Arizona
Serving North Phoenix and the North Valley
Response within 24 hours
Mon–Fri: 9am–6pm MST
Weekends by appointment
🌵 Arizona Local Special
Mention "Phoenix" for 10% off your first project!