Website maintenance is three separate bills - fixed costs, technical work and development - and most price lists online blend them into a single number. That is exactly why answers to “how much does website maintenance cost” differ so wildly: one person counts hosting only, the second adds WordPress care, the third throws a rebuild of half the site into the same bucket. You end up comparing apples to oranges and learning nothing.
Let me untangle it. Below I split maintenance into those three bills, show the fixed costs in a table, and explain when looking after the site yourself is enough and when a maintenance contract starts to make sense.
Website maintenance is three separate bills
Before any number gets quoted, it is worth separating three things that offers usually lump together as “maintenance”:
- Fixed costs - domain, hosting, SSL certificate. You pay these no matter who looks after the site, or whether anyone does. Without them the site simply disappears from the internet.
- Technical work - updates to WordPress, the theme and plugins, backups, uptime monitoring, small fixes. Someone has to do this regularly: you, or the person you hand it to.
- Development - new subpages, content changes, new features. That is no longer maintenance, it is expansion - and it should be quoted separately, as a concrete scope.
When someone gives you one number “for maintenance”, ask which of those three bills it covers. That single question prevents more misunderstandings than any other.
Fixed costs per year
Fixed costs are the easiest to calculate, because they are actual invoices from a domain registrar and a hosting provider. The figures below are typical Polish market rates, not a price list - your provider may look different:
| Item | What it is for | Rough yearly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | Your address on the internet - without it nobody finds the site | ~50-150 PLN (depends on the extension) |
| Shared hosting | The server the site physically sits on | ~200-800 PLN |
| SSL certificate | The padlock in the browser and an encrypted connection | free on most hosts (Let’s Encrypt) |
That answers “what does a website cost per month and per year” if all you count is the site existing. The catch: a site existing is not the same as a site working - and that is where the second bill comes in.
Doing WordPress maintenance yourself - you pay with time and risk
You can do the technical work yourself, and plenty of small site owners do. Updates are a click in the dashboard, a plugin can handle backups - I laid that out step by step in the piece on how a WordPress backup works. On the invoice this option costs zero.
The real cost sits elsewhere. First, time: regular updating, checking the site after every change and watching the backups adds up to hours disappearing from your calendar every month. Second, risk: sooner or later an update will break the site - that is the normal course of things with WordPress, not bad luck. With a fresh backup, it is fifteen nervous minutes. Without one, a site can stay down for days, and every hour of downtime is customers who hit an error instead of your offer.
What helps: list every recurring website charge from the past year - domain, hosting, plugin licences - and add the hours you personally spend on updates and fixes. That sum is your real cost of ownership. The hosting invoice is only the smallest slice of it.
What a maintenance contract should cover
The third option is handing the technical work to someone who does it professionally. A good maintenance contract should spell out, in black and white: regular updates to WordPress, the theme and plugins, a backup before every change, uptime monitoring, small fixes inside the retainer and a concrete response time when something breaks. If the contract just says “website care” without that list, ask - after an outage it is too late to negotiate what was included.
With me, that care comes in three public plans: Basic from 1,000 PLN, Pro from 2,000 PLN and Premium from 3,500 PLN net per month - they differ in scope and response time, and the full comparison sits on the ongoing support page. It is not an expense for everyone: a brochure site where nothing happens can live on self-service. A contract starts paying for itself when the site genuinely works for the business and every hour of downtime has a price tag.
A simple site versus a store - where the price gap comes from
Maintenance cost scales with complexity, and that is the most honest answer to why the ranges are so wide. A simple company site is a few subpages, a contact form and a handful of plugins - there is simply less that can break. An online store is another league: payments, couriers, stock, customer accounts, dozens of plugins that all have to keep talking to each other after every update. More moving parts means more work at every check and a higher rate, because a store outage stops sales rather than just hiding a brochure.
That is why a simple site fits the lower care plans and a store usually needs a higher one. What exactly goes into store maintenance, and how it differs from looking after a regular site, I cover in WooCommerce store maintenance.
Build cost and running cost are two budgets, not one
One last thing worth settling before the site is even built: building and running it are two different budgets. The build is a one-off; maintenance is a recurring cost that stays with you for years - and it is better known upfront than discovered afterwards. If you are still at the planning stage, start with how much a website costs and treat this article as the second half of the bill.
FAQ
Does a website cost money to keep running? Yes, always - the minimum is a domain and hosting, without which the site disappears. Technical work is on top: either your time, or a retainer with someone who handles it.
How much does it cost to maintain a simple website? Fixed costs are roughly 50-150 PLN a year for the domain and 200-800 PLN a year for shared hosting - SSL is free on most hosts. Add technical work, which on a simple site plenty of owners handle themselves.
How much does a WordPress site cost with managed maintenance? My public care plans start at 1,000 PLN net per month (Basic), with Pro from 2,000 PLN and Premium from 3,500 PLN net covering a wider scope and a faster response time. The right plan follows how hard the site works for the business.
Do I need a maintenance contract? No - you can look after the site yourself if you have the time and you keep backups. A contract makes sense when an outage genuinely costs you customers and you would rather someone caught problems before you noticed them.
Would rather not watch over it every month yourself? I take sites and stores under ongoing care - backups, updates, monitoring, and priority when something breaks. Tell me what you run and I will send back scope and price.