Website Maintenance Cost per Month: Prices, What’s Included and When DIY Is Enough

01 / Insights

What website maintenance costs per month: the short answer

Website maintenance costs anything from nothing but your own time to several hundred euros a month. The spread is wide because “maintenance” covers very different services: a plugin update once a month is not the same as a business-critical shop with a guaranteed response time.

These are the market ranges we see in 2026 offers across Germany, Portugal and the UK. They are orientation, not our price list:

• Do it yourself: no fee, but 2–4 hours a month of your time, plus premium plugin and theme licences of roughly €50–300 a year
• Basic care plan (updates, backups, monitoring): around €25–80 a month
• Care plan with small changes included (usually 1–2 hours a month): around €80–200 a month
• Online shops and business-critical sites with staging, faster response times and more hours: around €150–500 a month
• Ad hoc work without a plan: typically €60–120 an hour in Germany and the UK, noticeably less in Portugal

02 / Insights

What a maintenance plan should include

A care plan earns its fee by preventing problems you would otherwise notice too late. Ask every provider to list these items in writing. If something is missing, ask why:

• Updates of the CMS, plugins and theme, tested on a staging copy before they reach the live site
• Daily backups stored off the server, with a restore that has actually been tested
• Uptime monitoring with an alert when the site goes down, and a person who reacts to it
• Security: malware scans, a firewall, and SSL certificates that renew without anyone noticing
• Server and PHP version upgrades before the host forces them
• A monthly check that forms, emails and checkout still work
• A small quota of content changes, with a clear rule for unused hours
• A short monthly report: what was updated, what was fixed, what needs a decision

03 / Insights

What usually costs extra

Maintenance keeps the website running as it is. New things are projects. Most disputes about care plans come from blurring that line, so expect these items to be quoted separately: new pages and features, a redesign, copywriting and photography, SEO campaigns, work outside agreed hours, and the clean-up after a hack if the plan does not include it.

Licence fees and hosting are the grey zone. Some providers bundle them, others pass them on. Neither is wrong, as long as you can see which costs belong to the service and which to third parties. Our article on what a website costs lists the recurring line items one by one, and the guide to online shop costs does the same for Shopify.

04 / Insights

What drives the price of a care plan

The platform matters most. A WordPress site with 30 plugins needs weekly attention, because every plugin is a separate piece of software with its own update cycle and its own security history. A static or custom-coded site has far fewer moving parts and needs little more than monitoring, backups and the odd dependency update.

Shopify sits in between. Shopify runs the servers, security and checkout itself, so maintenance there means keeping apps and the theme current, checking that integrations still sync, and making content changes. A headless store built with Hydrogen adds a codebase that a developer has to keep up to date; our Shopify Hydrogen guide explains why that is part of the deal.

After the platform come the number of integrations (payment, invoicing, newsletter, booking), how often you change content, how many languages you run, and how fast someone has to react when something breaks. A guaranteed four-hour response costs more than “next working day”, and it should.

05 / Insights

DIY or contract: an honest calculation

Doing it yourself is realistic for a simple site with few plugins, if you are comfortable in the admin area and keep a routine. Price your time honestly: three hours a month at €50 an hour is €150, which is more than most basic plans. The real difference is responsibility. With DIY, nobody else notices when the backup has silently failed for six weeks.

If you maintain the site yourself, this is the minimum monthly routine:

• Take a full backup (files and database) and store a copy outside the hosting account
• Update plugins one at a time, then click through the key pages and submit the contact form
• Delete plugins and themes you do not use, instead of only deactivating them
• Check Google Search Console for errors and security warnings
• Once a quarter: restore a backup on a test environment to prove it works

06 / Insights

What no maintenance costs

Skipping maintenance feels free until it is not. Security reports from Patchstack and Wordfence attribute the vast majority of WordPress vulnerabilities to plugins rather than to WordPress itself, which is why outdated plugins are the classic entry point for hacked sites. The clean-up, the lost enquiries and the time Google spends warning visitors about your domain often cost more than a year of care.

The quieter failures are just as expensive: an expired SSL certificate that scares visitors away, a contact form that stopped sending emails three weeks ago, a host that switches off an old PHP version and takes the site down with it. None of these show up in the browser of the owner who never visits the contact page.

07 / Insights

What belongs in a website maintenance agreement

A good maintenance agreement fits on two pages and leaves no room for guessing. Before you sign, check that it covers:

• The exact scope: which updates, how often, on staging or live
• Response times for outages and for normal requests, and the hours in which they apply
• The hour quota for changes, the hourly rate beyond it, and whether unused hours roll over
• Backup frequency, retention period and who restores, at no extra cost
• Access and ownership: you keep the admin account, the domain and the hosting in your name
• Notice period and price adjustments; monthly or quarterly notice is fair, multi-year lock-ins are not
• A data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR, because whoever maintains your site can access personal data such as form entries and customer accounts

08 / Insights

Hosting inside the plan or separate?

Bundled hosting is convenient: one invoice, one contact, no finger-pointing between agency and host. The risk is lock-in, especially when the hosting account belongs to the agency. Our recommendation is the same either way: the hosting contract and the domain should be in your name, and the maintainer gets access as a user.

For transparency: we are a verified Hostinger partner and recommend it where it fits, but we also maintain sites on other hosts. What matters more than the brand is that backups, PHP versions and access are documented.

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How we handle care at Tanomedia

Support after launch is part of every project we build and develop, and many clients keep us on for ongoing care afterwards. We also take over hand-coded websites and Shopify stores built by others, starting with an inventory of code, dependencies, apps and access before we agree a fixed monthly scope. What we do not offer is WordPress maintenance: everything we build is hand-coded, so a WordPress site gets rescued if it is in trouble and then moved to our own code or to Shopify before we look after it.

We quote care as a fixed price after a short call, based on the platform, the integrations and how often you need changes. Content changes are part of it: the sites we build have no CMS, so you send us new text or images and we put them live, without a plugin or admin login that could be attacked. If your site does not need a care plan at all, we will tell you that too. Send us your URL and we will tell you what your site actually needs.