What website maintenance costs, and what you're paying for.

Website maintenance for a small business costs somewhere between $30 and $500 a month, depending on whose numbers you read and what the plan covers.

That is a wide range. Most of the gap between the bottom and the top comes down to whether a person is watching your site or a machine is, and what happens when something breaks. This page explains what the work is, so you can read a quote and know what is on it.

What website maintenance is.

Most trade websites run on software, and that software needs looking after the same way your trucks need oil changes. Skipping it for a month changes nothing you can see, so it is easy to put off. Here is what maintenance plans in general cover:

• Software updates. Most small business sites run on WordPress or something like it, with plugins added for the contact form and the photo gallery. Their makers release updates all year, and somebody has to install them and check that nothing broke.
• Backups, meaning a full copy of the site kept somewhere other than the server it runs on, so it can be put back after a bad update or a hack.
• Security, which means watching for logins that should not happen and files that changed when nobody touched them.
• Small changes, like a new phone number or a photo of the new truck.
• Someone to call when it breaks, who knows your site and picks up the phone.

Hosting (the server your site lives on) and the yearly domain name renewal are sometimes part of the plan and sometimes billed on their own. Ask which, because it changes how two quotes compare.

Maintenance keeps the site working, and getting found on Google is separate work on its own bill, which is what monthly SEO is for.

What maintenance costs.

Two published guides give a fair picture of the market. Both are written by companies that sell hosting and website tools, so treat them as a rough guide. Both quote US dollars, so convert before you hold them up against a Canadian quote.

• WebsiteSetup, last updated March 2, 2026, puts a small business website at $30 to $250 a month, or $360 to $3,000 a year. Its numbers include hosting, the domain renewal, basic security and routine upkeep. It puts agency maintenance packages at $200 to $2,500 a month or more, and freelance developers at $30 to $200 an hour, with most US developers between $45 and $80.
• Hostinger, updated October 14, 2026, puts small to medium business websites at $35 to $500 a month, and yearly maintenance contracts at $500 to $5,000. It puts freelancers at $25 to $150 an hour.

Put the two together and a normal trade website lands somewhere between $30 and $500 a month. The sample quote at the top of this page comes to $145 a month, which sits inside both ranges.

The low end of those ranges tends to be hosting with automatic updates and nobody checking the result. The high end buys time from a person who knows your site.

Some costs sit outside any monthly plan. A redesign or a new section of the site is a project with its own quote, and so is cleaning up after a hack on a site nobody was looking after.

What moves the price.

Five things decide where your quote lands.

• How much site there is. A ten-page site with a contact form costs less to look after than one with online booking or a parts store, because every extra piece is more software to update and more things to test after each update.
• Who does the work. A freelancer bills by the hour, and an agency sells a monthly package. At the hourly rates in the two guides, a single hour of changes from a freelancer costs somewhere between $25 and $200. Doing it yourself costs the hosting and your evenings.
• How many changes you want. Most plans include a set number of hours or changes each month, and anything past that is billed at an hourly rate.
• How fast they answer. A plan that promises a reply the same day costs more than one with an email inbox somebody checks on Fridays.
• Whether hosting and the domain are in the price. A quote that looks cheap sometimes leaves both out.

None of these are good or bad on their own. A two-truck outfit with a small site and no online booking does not need the same plan as a company with a customer portal.

What happens to a site nobody looks after.

The most common website I come across in the trades went up around 2014 and has not been touched since. The phone number on it is the one the shop had before it moved, and nobody remembers the login. Customers who find it call a number that does not work, and then they call somebody else.

It goes stale in smaller ways too. A contact form that stopped sending emails two years ago looks fine from the outside, and nobody notices until a customer mentions they wrote in and never heard back.

The quieter problem is the software underneath. Patchstack, a company that tracks WordPress security, counted 11,334 new security holes in WordPress software in 2025, and 91 percent of them were in plugins. For the holes that got attacked the most, the median time from the hole being made public to mass attacks was five hours.

Nobody picks a plumber's website on purpose. A program scans thousands of sites for an old plugin with a known hole, and an unmaintained site is the easiest one to find.

When Google believes a hacker has changed pages on a site or added spam pages, it can show "This site may be hacked" beside it in search results. The message stays until the owner cleans up the site and asks Google for a review. You pay for the cleanup by the hour, and you lose the calls that would have come in while the warning was up.

What to ask before you sign.

Whoever you hire, these questions tell you what the monthly number buys. A good provider answers them in one email without any fuss.

• Who owns the domain name and the site? The domain should be registered in the business name, with you holding the login.
• What happens if I leave? Find out how much notice you have to give, and whether you get a full copy of the site when you go.
• Where are the backups kept, and when did you last restore one? A backup nobody has tested might not work when you need it.
• How many changes are included, and what does the next hour cost?
• How fast do you answer when the site is down, and who answers?
• Is hosting in the price, and is the domain renewal?
• What happens to the plan if I sell the business? A plan in your personal name, or paid on your personal card, is one more thing to untangle when a buyer takes over.

That last one matters more than owners expect. Every site I build comes with a maintenance plan, and it stays with the business when the business sells, so the buyer has someone behind the website from the first day. The website design page explains how that works.

If you already pay for a plan, send your provider these questions this week. If the answers are vague, ask for them in writing before the plan renews.