When you launch a website, the build cost is easy to see. The ongoing costs are what catch businesses off guard.
Hosting bills. Plugin renewals. Security patches that break the layout. Emergency fixes after an update goes wrong. A developer charging €120/hour to edit a paragraph because the CMS is "complicated". Backup systems you're not sure you even have.
This guide breaks down what website maintenance actually costs — by platform and by what you're getting.
The Five Cost Layers of Website Maintenance
Every website has the same basic maintenance categories. What varies dramatically is the cost and complexity within each.
- Hosting: where your site lives. Shared hosting vs managed WordPress vs edge CDN — differences of €5/month to €150/month with very different performance and reliability.
- Security: SSL certificates, malware scanning, firewall rules, software updates. Especially painful on WordPress, the most-targeted CMS platform online.
- Updates: core platform, plugins, themes, dependencies. On WordPress, updates require testing — they regularly break things.
- Backups: automated daily backups with a tested restore capability. Often forgotten until something goes wrong.
- Content edits: text changes, image swaps, new pages. Either DIY, hire a developer by the hour, or pay an agency retainer.
What WordPress Maintenance Actually Costs
WordPress powers around 43% of the web, so most businesses start there. The maintenance burden is real and consistently underestimated.
| Task | Frequency | Outsourced Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Core + plugin updates (with testing) | Monthly | €50–120/month |
| Security monitoring and firewall | Ongoing | €20–50/month |
| Daily backups with restore testing | Monthly check | €10–30/month |
| Performance monitoring | Ongoing | €10–20/month |
| Content edits | As needed | €60–150/hour |
| Emergency fix after failed update | 2–4×/year | €200–800/incident |
A properly maintained WordPress site costs €100–350/month in outsourced maintenance, or 5–10 hours/month of your own time. Most businesses pay neither — and pay far more when something eventually breaks.
What a Static Site Costs to Maintain
A site built with Next.js and deployed to a CDN (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages) has a fundamentally different maintenance profile.
| Task | Frequency | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting (Vercel/Netlify) | Monthly | €0–20 for most business sites |
| SSL and security | Automatic | €0 — platform-managed |
| No PHP, no database, no plugins | — | No attack surface to patch |
| Framework dependency updates | Quarterly | 1–2 hours, once per quarter |
| Content edits (headless CMS) | As needed | Self-serve or minimal dev time |
| Emergency fixes | Rare | Low — no plugin conflicts |
A static Next.js site typically costs €20–80/month to maintain. The gap versus WordPress widens further when you factor in security incidents — dramatically rarer on static architectures with no server-side execution.
The 'Set and Forget' Myth
No website is maintenance-free. But there's a meaningful difference between a system that needs active management to stay secure, and one that only needs occasional content updates and quarterly dependency bumps.
WordPress sits in the first category. The plugin ecosystem — what makes it flexible — is also its biggest liability. Every plugin is a potential attack vector, a potential conflict source, and a potential breaking point when the next major update ships.
Modern static sites sit in the second category. Once deployed, there's no PHP running on every request, no database to inject, and no plugin maintained by someone who stopped updating it in 2022.
What a Maintenance Retainer Should Include
If you're outsourcing maintenance, here's the minimum a retainer should cover:
- Monthly updates to platform and all dependencies
- Automated daily backups with a tested restore process
- Security monitoring and defined incident response
- Performance monitoring — uptime and Core Web Vitals
- A defined number of content edit hours per month
- Clear escalation path for emergency issues
If your current provider can't answer "when did you last test a restore?" — that's a problem worth fixing before it becomes a crisis.
The Real Cost of Not Maintaining Your Site
An unmaintained WordPress site gets hacked. It's not a question of if — it's when. Average recovery cost: €500–2,000. Average downtime: 24–72 hours. Typical collateral damage: lost leads, lost search rankings, and reputational damage that takes months to recover from.
Spending €150/month on a proper maintenance retainer is cheap insurance. But only if the retainer actually covers what matters — not just a cron job that runs plugin updates and calls it "maintenance".
Not sure what your site is running or whether it's being properly looked after? Get a free website health report at webvise.io/wp-health-report. It flags outdated software, security risks, and performance issues — in 60 seconds, no signup required.
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