What Are the Website Maintenance Costs? – A definitive guide

Many website owners make the critical mistake of not considering the costs associated with the website maintenance to ensure they can run the website efficiently. As a website owner, you could lose out on valuable traffic, leads, and sales if you overlook the website maintenance costs or try to cut costs.

In some cases, you may end up paying a lot more than you could imagine, particularly if costly emergency repairs must be paid for because the website was not regularly maintained.

Website maintenance is always cheaper than paying for website repairs, which results in a loss of traffic and sales.

 A well-maintained website has several other benefits, including but not limited to – it helps you save money in hosting and storage costs, runs efficiently, provides a great user experience, generates more leads and sales, and ranks higher in search engine results.

In this blog post, we will be breaking down the most significant costs associated with website maintenance. The maintenance costs provided apply to all types of websites regardless of their niche, design, and size.

We have also provided you with strategies for reducing the costs linked to website maintenance and the recommended maintenance checklist to help you stay on the topic of things. While the exact cost of maintaining your website may vary depending on your custom requirements, we have provided an estimate of the average monthly maintenance costs based on our years of experience in managing and maintaining websites.

Costs according to the type of website

The three primary factors determining the website maintenance costs are personnel costs, tool costs, and hosting costs. You can find below the breakdown of the average monthly maintenance costs for different types of websites.

Small blog website maintenance cost breakdown

A small blog website with less than 200 visitors per month is usually the least expensive website to maintain. The cost of maintaining a small blog website can range anywhere between $10-$30 per month, depending on your exact. The majority of the cost is paid toward the website domain and hosting.

Since the website owner is responsible for designing the website, writing the content, taking the photographs, and adding and removing any tools, the cost of setting up the website and maintaining is very low.

In most cases, shared hosting packages work perfectly with small blog websites having 100-200 visitors. It is possible to further cut costs by limiting yourself to free tools, plugins, templates, and copyright-free images. Besides, it wouldn’t make any sense to pay for additional tools or services that you aren’t fully taking advantage of.

Medium blog website maintenance cost

A medium-sized blog website that doesn’t engage in expensive marketing and advertising costs shouldn’t cost you more than $25-$60 per month. Again, the exact website maintenance costs depend on several factors. The maintenance costs of a medium blog website are certainly higher than that for a small blog website, primarily because you expect to pay a higher price for the hosting services and any additional paid tools, such as website security plugin.

Medium-sized blogs are those that have up to 1000 unique monthly visitors. Content writing and photography costs are usually not very high because either the website creator develops the content or the content is obtained through partnerships with other blogs.

In most cases, the website owner is also responsible for setting up the websites and dealing with technical maintenance issues, so the technical website maintenance doesn’t cost a lot. If technical maintenance expertise is occasionally required, the website owner hires a freelancer on a per-project basis.

The website maintenance costs can be further reduced by limiting yourself to free content, templates, and free marketing initiatives, and through collaboration with other medium-small blog owners.

Large and growing blog website maintenance cost

A large blog with monthly website traffic between 1000 and 5000 visitors with the website owner determined to increase the monthly traffic is likely to spend a lot more on website maintenance costs than small and medium-sized blog websites.

In most cases, the most considerable expense that the owner of a large blog website has to bear are those incurred towards advertising and marketing campaigns. The monthly costs of a large blog website are high but primarily depend on a budget of the website owner. The costs associated with the hosting, content creation, photography, and freelancer projects increase considerably because the website must entertain a large audience.

Similarly, the maintenance budget must also increase because a large blog will use several plugins and paid tools to satisfy the needs of the visitors. As always, there is a price for success, and large growth-oriented blogs are no different. In short, you can expect to be investing $50-$300 to manage the whole project.

Small ecommerce website maintenance costs

Luckily, a small ecommerce business website that enables the owner to sell products worth up to $50k per year doesn’t cost a lot. You can expect to pay $30-$50 per month to manage and maintain a small ecommerce website.

For example, the Shopify basic plan costs just $29/month and includes almost all the design and functionality tools you would need including but not limited to professional themes, payment gateway setup, SSL certificate, domain, and hosting. The cost will be similar for ecommerce websites managed through free and open source content management systems such as Woocommerce of WordPress.

Medium eCommerce website maintenance costs

The cost associated with running and maintaining a medium-sized professional ecommerce website can be anywhere between $80 and $200 depending on the number of unique visitors and the amount of content published on the website. However, if certain additional costs such as a premium theme, custom domain, and photography and video making/editing services are considered, the final cost per month can be a lot higher.

If you are managing a professional ecommerce website that is selling products worth over $100k per year, then in addition to the basics, you might also want to be using paid tools to streamline your business processes.

For example, you may be required to pay extra for reputation management, link building, networking, integrating SMS service, having a tool for bulk order processing. For example, the Shopify standard package, which costs $80/month, includes advanced features such as the cart recovery, discount codes, professional reports, USPS priority mail cubic pricing, and more.

Enterprise ecommerce website maintenance costs

A large enterprise ecommerce website selling over $300k per year will cost between $300-$1000 with the exact cost depending on several factors. One of the critical factors affecting your monthly operating costs will those in personnel costs – how much you are paying to others you have hired to do the work for you.

The marketing and advertising costs for an enterprise ecommerce websites are substantial but mainly depend on the owner’s monthly budget. You may also need to hire a permanent and dedicated search engine optimization expert and a maintenance expert.

As far as the maintenance costs are concerned, the largest contributor will be the monthly hosting cost, even though the advanced hosting packages such as VPS and dedicated hosting package offer several extra features that would enable you to run your website more smoothly and satisfy the needs of a diverse audience.

For example, the Volusion’s business plan for large ecommerce websites costs $300/month but includes several extra features and tools required to run a large scale business such as an advanced report builder and third party shipping rates. You can also expect to pay more in security costs to make sure you stay on top of things.

Disadvantages of not maintaining your website

The most notable drawbacks of not maintaining your website are;

• You can expect to face several costlier problems in the long run
• Outdated website design means that the website visitors will eventually turn to more user-friendly and better-designed competitor websites.
• Losing rankings in search engines
• Obsolete content will increase the bounce rate
• Outdated code can lead to a broken website – which is the last thing you want after years of hard work.

Website maintenance checklist

The majority of your website maintenance costs will from recurring services and subscriptions. However, to ensure your website runs perfectly and smoothly, there are a few steps that you must take. You can find below our website maintenance checklist, which was developed to enable website owners to keep track of their website maintenance tasks.

How to reduce your website maintenance cost?

According to Kevin Flower of Vlusion, “while the initial setup cost of your website is a one-time concern, it’s the ongoing maintenance costs that will add up over time. To cut maintenance costs for your website, start by identifying what recurring costs you’re paying on your site (both annual and monthly).

Once you’ve got a list of all of your recurring website-related costs, go down the list and ask yourself if they’re 100% necessary. For larger sites, higher maintenance costs are unavoidable, but many smaller blogs and ecommerce sites can get by perfectly fine with free or built-in tools.

If you’re  beginning to build your website, use free or low-cost options wherever possible – it’s usually much quicker and easier to upgrade to more expensive and feature-rich tools in the future than it is to downgrade if you’re overpaying.”

If you have a limited budget to work with, it would be best to identify the lastest monthly costs first and try to streamline those processes efficiently. Once you have identified the features, tools and subscriptions you can downsize on, proceed to work out the time and cost required for migration.

For example, migrating from one hosting platform to another less expensive service provider could help you to save a considerable amount of money in the long run. Still, you must factor in the cost of hiring a professional to help you with the migration process.

Hiring a firm or an individual for website maintenance

Many website owners and project managers managing several websites and projects simultaneously struggle with their website maintenance tasks due to time constraints.

If you don’t want to do the maintenance work, you can always hire a professional webmaster whose responsibilities will include but are not limited to website designing, maintenance and upgrades. However, when hiring a WordPress web development agency or a website maintenance company, it is recommended to list the essential responsibilities and duties you would expect them to manage.

The cost of hiring a full webmaster depends on the nature, complexity, and depth of the responsibilities you will assign to them and their professional expertise and experience. However, regardless of who you choose, the right webmaster for you should be trustworthy, honest, capable, and reliable. Because you will be giving access to sensitive and confidential information to the webmaster, it is vitally important that they are not only qualified but also honest so they don’t ruin your years of work.

In general, hiring a website manager for a small website which would need just a few hours of webmaster’s time every month, shouldn’t cost you in excess of $100. On the other hand, owners of medium and large-scale websites will be required to hire a full-time webmaster to manage the website and pay anywhere between $200-$500 per month for full-time services, with the exact cost depending on the job specifications.

Interested in hiring a webmaster to manage your website so you can sit back and relax while your website makes money for you? Get in touch with us to discuss your needs.