What Website Maintenance Costs, and What It Should Include
Pricing · Published
Website maintenance is the line item most often sold as something it is not. A great many plans are hosting with a markup and a monthly email, and a great many businesses pay for years without ever establishing what they are receiving. This sets out what real management covers, how the market prices it, and the questions that separate the two.
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What maintenance actually has to cover
Group it into four categories. A plan that does not address all four is not covering the job, whatever it is called.
- Keeping it running. Hosting, the domain and certificate renewals, uptime monitoring, and someone who responds when it goes down. Monitoring nobody is watching is not monitoring.
- Keeping it safe. Platform and plugin updates applied and tested rather than applied and hoped about, malware scanning, backups taken on a schedule, and the part that is nearly always missing: a restore that has actually been tested. An untested backup is a belief, not a backup.
- Keeping it fast and findable. Performance checks, broken link checks, Search Console errors reviewed, and the technical drift that accumulates on every site caught before it costs rankings.
- Keeping it current. Content changes, new pages, seasonal updates, staff and price changes. This is the part businesses actually feel the absence of, because it is the reason a site shows last year's hours.
How the market prices it
These are observed ranges in the Ottawa area rather than quotes, and the spread inside each band is wide because "maintenance" is not a standardised product.
The platform matters more than the page count. A hand-built static site has very little that can rot. A WordPress installation with a page builder and a dozen plugins has a continuous stream of updates, each of which can break something, and that difference is most of the gap between the tiers above.
| Tier | Typical monthly range | What it usually covers |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting only | $10 to $50 | The site stays online. Updates, backups and changes are yours. |
| Basic maintenance | $50 to $150 | Hosting, automated backups, platform updates, uptime monitoring. Content changes billed hourly. |
| Managed | $150 to $400 | The above plus tested restores, security monitoring, performance checks, and an allowance of content changes each month. |
| Managed plus marketing | $400 and above | The above plus ongoing SEO, reporting, and substantive content or landing page work. |
Ranges describe what is commonly charged, not what we quote. A static site needs far less than a WordPress site with fifteen plugins, and an e-commerce store needs more than both.
What is padding
- "Security monitoring" that is a plugin sending alerts to an inbox nobody reads.
- Monthly reports generated automatically, never interpreted, and never acted upon. A report is a by-product of the work, not the work.
- "Unlimited content updates" with a definition of update so narrow that anything you actually want is out of scope.
- SEO bundled in as a line with no deliverable attached to it. If nobody can say what was done last month, nothing was.
- Hosting marked up several times over its cost and presented as the substance of the plan.
- A lock-in contract for maintenance, which is a retention mechanism rather than a service.
Three questions that settle it
Ask these of any provider, including us. The answers are more informative than the price.
- "When was a backup last restored, and how long does a full restore take?" Anyone doing this properly can answer immediately. Anyone who has never tested one will talk about backup frequency instead, which is not the question.
- "If the site goes down at 9am on a Tuesday, what happens and how fast?" You want a named response time and a route to a person, not an assurance of commitment.
- "What did you do last month?" A maintained site has an actual log: updates applied, issues found, changes made. If the answer is general, the work was general.
When you do not need a plan
A small static site on good hosting, with nothing that updates itself and no content that changes, genuinely does not need a monthly plan. Pay for hosting, keep a backup, and call someone when you need a change. Anyone selling a monthly retainer for that arrangement is selling you insurance against a risk you do not carry.
The calculus changes as soon as the site takes bookings or payments, runs on a platform with a plugin ecosystem, or carries content that goes stale. At that point the monthly cost is smaller than one emergency, and considerably smaller than a site that has been quietly broken for a fortnight.
Related reading
- Our website management service
- How much does a website cost in Ottawa?
- Twelve questions to ask before you sign
- The Ottawa small business website checklist
- Ottawa web design pricing, published in full
- Ottawa web design by Shinobi Media
Frequently asked questions
What should website maintenance cost per month?
Observed rates in the Ottawa market run from around $50 a month for hosting with light oversight to $400 and above for genuinely managed plans that include content work. The number matters less than what is inside it. A $150 plan with tested restores and a real change allowance is better value than a $300 plan that is hosting plus an automated report.
Is hosting the same as maintenance?
No, and conflating them is the most common way businesses overpay. Hosting keeps the site online. Maintenance keeps it updated, backed up, secure, fast and current. A plan that only does the first should be priced like hosting.
Do I need maintenance for a static website?
Much less of it. A hand-built static site has no plugins to update and very little that degrades on its own, so hosting plus a backup is often sufficient. The need rises sharply with a content management system, a plugin ecosystem, or anything handling payments or bookings.
Can I do it myself?
Some of it, yes, and the parts most people skip are the parts that matter: testing a restore, reading Search Console, and noticing that a form stopped sending. If you will genuinely do those on a schedule, self-managing a small site is reasonable. If they will be done when something has already gone wrong, a plan is cheaper than the incident.
Should maintenance be under contract?
It does not need to be, and month-to-month is the norm for good reason: a plan that has to lock you in is telling you something about how it expects to be judged. We work month to month with no notice period for exactly that reason.