Website maintenance cost: what you pay each month
Website maintenance cost explained, item by item: hosting, domain, SSL, updates, backups, content and SEO, plus what freelancers and agencies charge.
Updated November 1, 2026A small business website usually costs $50 to $500 a month to maintain, according to GoDaddy's 2026 guide. Where you land in that range depends less on the site than on who does the work: running it yourself on a website builder is the bottom of it, a freelancer's care plan sits in the middle, and an agency retainer that includes new content and SEO sits at the top or above it. Below is what each part costs, what the people who sell maintenance actually charge, and how to work out which you need.
What website maintenance is
Website maintenance is everything that keeps a site online, safe and accurate after it launches. Some of it is fixed and boring (paying for hosting and the domain), some of it is technical (updates, backups, fixing what breaks) and some of it is the work that brings visitors (new pages, refreshed content, search optimisation).
GoDaddy's list for a small or medium business site is a fair summary: hosting and domain renewal, security updates and backups, plugin or platform updates, content updates and performance monitoring. Its checklist adds monthly speed tests and broken-link checks, a quarterly content audit and SEO review, and an annual review of legal pages and backups.
Most quotes bundle these differently, which is why prices are hard to compare. Split any quote into the items below and it gets easier.
What each part costs
| Item | Typical cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | $10-$20+ a year | Renews every year; let it lapse and the site goes down |
| Hosting | $5-$15 a month shared, $20-$150+ managed | Website builders include it |
| SSL certificate | $0 to $300+ a year | Free certificates are standard now |
| Security tools | $5-$50+ a month | Mostly a WordPress cost |
| Backups | $0-$20+ a month | Often included with hosting |
| Uptime monitoring | $0-$30+ a month | |
| Fixes and development | $50-$150+ an hour | Or a retainer of $100-$1,500+ a month |
| New content | $0-$500+ per piece | Articles, page updates |
All figures in the table are from GoDaddy's guide, as of November 2026. A few notes on the lines that cause the most confusion:
SSL. Paying for a certificate is rarely necessary. Let's Encrypt gives anyone who owns a domain a trusted certificate "at zero cost", and most hosts and builders set it up for you. A paid certificate makes sense for specific compliance needs, not for a typical business site.
Updates and security. This is where WordPress sites spend most of their maintenance budget, and for a reason. Patchstack counted 7,966 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2024; 96% were in plugins and only seven in WordPress core. Every plugin a site uses is something that has to be updated, and occasionally something that breaks when it is.
Content and SEO. Updates, backups and hosting keep a site alive. They don't make it rank. Writing pages people search for, refreshing old ones and fixing titles is a separate job, and usually the most expensive one. In an Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO providers, the most common monthly retainer was $501-$1,000.
Cost by type of site
| Site | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Personal site or blog | $5-$75 | $60-$900 |
| Small to medium business | $50-$500 | $600-$6,000 |
| Online shop | $300-$1,000 | $3,600-$12,000 |
| Large corporate or custom | $1,000-$5,000+ | $12,000-$60,000+ |
Source: GoDaddy, as of November 2026. The same guide puts a website builder at $10-$30 a month and a self-hosted site at $50-$300+ a month, before anyone writes new content.
DIY, freelancer or agency
There are three ways to get the work done, and they differ more in what's included than in the headline price.
Doing it yourself
On a website builder, hosting, SSL and updates are part of the subscription, so the cash cost is the plan and the domain. On a self-hosted WordPress site, you pay for hosting and any premium plugins, and you spend the time: checking updates, testing that nothing broke, keeping backups. The real cost of DIY is the hours, and the content work usually doesn't happen at all.
A freelancer's care plan
Freelancers mostly sell flat monthly plans. FreshySites' guide puts freelancer retainers at $50 to $150 a month, with hourly work at $50 to $150 an hour.
What freelancers say among themselves is similar. In a r/webhosting thread on what people charge clients, replies included $75 a month for a "managed plan" for small business sites, $99-$149 a month for a care plan covering hosting, support and maintenance, $149 a month with WordPress and plugin updates, and $249 a month with an hour of support or on-page SEO added. Extra work is usually billed by the hour, sometimes with a minimum: one freelancer charges a two-hour minimum of about $350.
Notice what the $99 plans cover: hosting, updates, backups, small fixes. New pages and SEO are either an hour a month or extra.
An agency retainer
Agencies charge more for a team, a defined response time and a project manager. FreshySites lists agency plans at $100 to $500+ a month and $100 to $250 an hour. Retainers that include monthly content and SEO run higher, toward the SEO survey figures above. In the same Reddit thread, one replier quoted $500-$1,000 a month for a local business and $6,000-$10,000+ for a state government department.
Side by side
| DIY on a builder | DIY on WordPress | Freelancer | Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $10-$30 | $50-$300+ | $50-$300 | $100-$1,000+ |
| Hosting, SSL, backups | Included | You arrange | Usually included | Included |
| Updates and fixes | Included | You do them | Included | Included |
| New content and SEO | You do it | You do it | Extra, or an hour a month | Higher tiers |
| Your time | Some | The most | Little | Least |
Ranges combine GoDaddy, FreshySites and the freelancer replies linked above, as of November 2026.
Where an AI-maintained site fits
Firetend (our product) is a different shape of maintenance: the site is built and hosted by Firetend, and a content agent keeps it current. You ask in plain words, it proposes the work, and you approve each change before it goes live. Here is how its plans map onto the items above.
| Starter | Growth | Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $39 a month ($32 a month yearly) | $99 a month ($82 a month yearly) | $249 a month ($207 a month yearly) |
| Sites | 1 | 3 | 10 |
| AI actions a month | 150 | 500 | 1,200 |
Hosting, SSL and updates are in every paid plan. Pages are static, served from Cloudflare, and there are no plugins to keep up to date. HTTPS certificates on your own domain are issued and renewed for you. You can roll back any publish in one click, and download the whole project or the built site at any time.
Content and SEO are what the actions pay for. An article or a refreshed page is 10 actions, a new service page about 10, a site-wide SEO audit 8, keyword research 2, a small edit 1. So a Starter site can get roughly 15 articles or refreshed pages a month. For bigger work, the agent first proposes the search phrase and how many people search for it in your market, the title, the outline and any facts it needs from you; you reply "go" and it writes, checks and saves a draft. It doesn't invent prices or qualifications; it asks. See working with the content agent and refresh a page.
Built in, at no extra cost: structured data for search engines, a sitemap, contact forms with an inbox and spam filtering, a WhatsApp button, site search and up to four languages. See how your site shows up in search and AI answers.
Not included: the domain itself (you register it with any registrar and connect it with one DNS record, see connect your own domain), an online shop, a booking system of its own (it embeds Calendly, Acuity, SimplyBook and the like), member logins, and a drag-and-drop canvas. When actions run out, agent work pauses until the next month or until you add 100 actions for $15; there's no surprise overage. Editing the site yourself never uses actions.
The honest trade-off: a freelancer can fix anything on any platform and will pick up the phone. Firetend only maintains sites it hosts, and if your site needs a shop or a custom app, it's the wrong tool. For a service business site (a clinic, a school, a studio, a firm) that mostly needs to stay accurate and get new pages, it replaces the hosting bill and much of the content retainer for one monthly price.
As an example of what the agents produce: for Fresh Minds Academy, a tutoring school in Richmond, BC and Singapore, the design agent read their Google Sites website and built a 49-page site with 21 programme pages and 18 teacher profiles. On PageSpeed Insights (mobile, 31 October 2026) the performance score went from 68 to 98. If your current site needs rebuilding before it's worth maintaining, start with an AI website redesign.
How to budget
- List the fixed costs. Domain, hosting, any paid plugins or tools. For most small sites this is $10-$50 a month.
- Decide who does the technical work. If you're on WordPress and won't check updates every month, pay someone who will.
- Decide whether the site needs to grow. If it brings you customers from search, budget for content and SEO separately, and ask any quote how many pages or articles a month it includes.
- Ask what's not included. Hourly rates, minimum charges and response times are where maintenance bills grow.
FAQ
How much does website maintenance cost per month?
For a small business site, $50 to $500 a month is the common range in GoDaddy's guide. A builder you run yourself is $10-$30, a freelancer's care plan roughly $50-$300, and an agency retainer with content and SEO from a few hundred dollars upward.
What's included in a website maintenance plan?
Usually hosting, SSL, platform and plugin updates, backups, uptime monitoring and a small number of content edits. New pages, articles and SEO work are often a higher tier or billed by the hour. Ask for the list in writing.
Is website maintenance worth paying for?
If your site runs on WordPress with plugins, someone has to keep them updated, and most owners don't do it reliably themselves. If your site is on a hosted builder or a static host, the technical side is mostly done for you, and the question becomes whether you want help keeping the content current.
What does website maintenance cost for a small business per year?
GoDaddy puts it at $600 to $6,000 a year for a small to medium business site. Firetend's Starter plan is $384 a year paid yearly, plus your domain, with the content agent included.
Can I maintain my website myself?
Yes, on most builders. The technical work is handled for you; what's left is keeping hours, prices, team and services accurate and adding pages people search for. That second part is the one most owners don't get to.