How Much Does It Cost for Ongoing Support and Maintenance of a Website?

Clients often ask us a simple question at the start of a project: “What will it cost to maintain our website after launch?”

Most organizations spend $500 to $20,000+ per month on ongoing support and maintenance. The range is wide because websites vary in complexity, business impact, and the amount of support required to keep them running well.

We’ve managed and maintained websites for organizations of every size, and the same themes show up again and again. This article outlines what maintenance actually includes, what influences the cost, and how to decide which level of support makes sense for your team.

The Cost of Skipping Website Maintenance

Before getting into pricing, it helps to look at what happens when a site isn’t maintained. We’ve stepped into many projects where years of skipped updates led to outages, broken features, or complete site failure. In most of those cases, the cost to repair the damage was far higher than what ongoing maintenance would have been.

A compromised site can put a stop to progress and your team back significantly:

• Revenue loss when customers can’t access the site or complete transactions
• SEO declines that take months of effort to recover
• Legal exposure if sensitive data is accessed or leaked
• Trust damage that affects sales, hiring, and partnerships long after the incident
• Emergency repair fees, which often far exceed routine maintenance costs

We’ve seen businesses lose six figures from a single incident that could have been prevented with routine updates and monitoring.

What Goes Into Ongoing Website Costs?

The following areas reflect the common areas we cover in our maintenance and support work. Each of the plans we offer includes a tailored mix of these services so you get the right level of strategic guidance and technical upkeep for your site.

Website Strategy

Our clients’ teams benefit from reviews that inspect the site’s performance over time and align future work with business goals. These strategic sessions provide space to discuss website results, identify upcoming needs, and plan improvements based on real data rather than guesswork.

Roadmap Execution

We help organizations maintain a forward-looking plan for their website that outlines the path forward including upcoming improvements, content needs, technical updates, and new features. Our ongoing efforts include steady progress against that plan. This ensures that the site evolves in a deliberate way rather than through one-off tasks.

Analytics and Reporting

A good maintenance program tracks site uptime, overall health, performance trends, and user behavior patterns. This information guides decision making and informs where to focus, when improvements are needed, and whether future plans should be adjusted.

Audits

Regular audits help uncover issues that aren’t always visible day-to-day. These are often based on a gut sense or unqualified feeling. We help quantify the issue and make recommendations to ensure an appropriate effort is applied. This can include accessibility checks, performance scans, security scans, and page content reviews. Audits help create a clear picture of your site’s health and prioritize what to fix and what to improve.

Conversion and SEO Improvements

Your website’s marketing performance depends on how well it attracts visitors and guides them toward key actions. Our plans can include updates that improve these outcomes: search visibility, refinements to conversion paths, fixes for indexing issues, and adjustments based on analytics. These help your site bring in the right traffic and make it easier for users to complete important tasks.

Content Support and Governance

Many of our client teams have limited in-house resources and struggle to keep up with the pace of information. We can help get content streamlined or published. Ongoing support can include help refining existing information architecture, reviewing key page content for clarity, and advising on more efficient or AI-driven workflows. This ensures your site stays consistent and aligned with how your organization communicates.

User Experience Enhancements

User behavior shifts as technology and expectations evolve. A strong maintenance program looks at real usage data to identify friction points. This can lead to refinements such as clearer navigation, faster paths to key content, more accessible layouts, or adjustments to mobile interactions. These updates help visitors move through the site with less effort and support your conversion goals.

Feature Improvements

Websites age quickly. What worked well two years ago may not support your goals today. Maintenance often includes updates to existing features or the addition of new ones. This might include improved search tools, enhanced forms, updated content modules, or new integrations that support your internal workflows.

Accessibility Improvements

As new content is added to your site, your site accessibility may fall out of alaignment. Regular accessibility work focuses on fixing issues uncovered in audits, improving readability, supporting keyboard and screen-reader use, and helping your team follow accessible publishing practices. This reduces organization risk and ensures more people can use your site without barriers.

IT and Infrastructure Support

Websites often depend on internal systems, hosting policies, and security requirements managed by your IT or InfoSec teams. We support those teams by helping answer vendor risk assessments, documenting our processes, and making adjustments to the site or hosting setup when new standards are introduced. This includes coordinating on access controls, security updates, and infrastructure changes so your website stays aligned with organizational requirements.

Performance Upkeep and Optimization

As you add content to your site, it is very difficult to ensure that you follow every best practice for a high performance web site. Following a full site audit or page audit, we can tune up performance to ensure a snappy user experience. Core Web Vitals factor into search rankings and influence how users perceive the quality of your site.

Security Updates and Monitoring

Your CMS, plugins, integrations, and server software need routine updates to close security gaps. Skipping these updates leaves your site exposed to automated attacks and data risks. It’s the digital version of leaving your building unlocked overnight.

Bug Fixes and Compatibility Updates

Browsers update. Devices change. Features can break over time. Regular maintenance catches these issues early so visitors aren’t dealing with errors or broken layouts. With our plans, bug fixes are prioritized to avoid costly reputation impacts.

Regular Backups and Recovery

For site continuity, automatic backups and a way to recover your site if something happens is a must. You need a clear path to restore the site quickly and keep operations running without causing major interruptions to the business.

Our Three Tiers of Website Support (and Pricing)

After supporting hundreds of websites across different industries, we’ve found that most organizations fall into one of three support levels. Each tier offers a different depth of coverage so your site gets exactly what it needs without unnecessary spend.

Essential Maintenance: $500-$2,000/month

This tier covers the core technical work required to keep your website stable and secure. It includes routine updates, daily backups, uptime monitoring, and quarterly reviews. Most work at this level is reactive, focused on fixing issues as they appear rather than proactive improvements.

Who it’s for: Organizations with smaller sites that don’t change frequently or internal teams who can handle most updates themselves but want a reliable safety net.

What you get:

• CMS and plugin updates
• Daily backups
• Security monitoring
• Quarterly reviews
• Basic support for critical issues

Why the range? Larger sites take more time to maintain. We support a variety of clients from small businesses to Fortune 1000 teams. The cost reflects the scope and complexity to maintain each type of site.

Proactive Support: $2,000-$10,000/month

This tier is the right fit for most organizations. It includes everything in Essential Maintenance plus ongoing improvements driven by data and structured monthly work. Instead of waiting for issues, we address them early and help the site evolve over time.

Who it’s for: Teams that rely on their website to support sales, marketing, or lead generation and want steady progress without managing the details themselves.

What you get:

• Everything in Essential, plus:
• Monthly optimization sprints
• Bug backlog management
• Analytics-driven recommendations
• Iterative improvements to design and features
• Quarterly business reviews
• Technical SEO reviews

Why the range? The number of pages, templates, and integrations drives how much time your site needs each month. Pace matters too, some organizations move quickly and require more hands-on support.

Fractional Digital Team: $10,000+/month

This tier provides ongoing support at a deeper level. You gain access to one of our dedicated teams that understands your organization’s systems, goals, and constraints. We participate in strategic planning, manage your roadmap, and will support you as an extension of your team.

Who it’s for: Organizations that are experiencing fast growth, major change, or lack in-house capacity. It’s best for teams that want regular, ongoing strategic advice, not just website maintenance.

What you get:

• Everything in Proactive, plus:
• Dedicated team members
• Product roadmap development
• Support for internal discussions
• Increased velocity on improvements
• Deep institutional knowledge
• Strategic guidance on digital initiatives

Why the range? Engagement varies by the level of partnership. Some teams need near-daily collaboration through Slack and standing meetings. Others need support during planning cycles or major initiatives. The cost reflects how involved the team needs to be.

What Drives the Cost?

A few key factors determine where an organization falls within the pricing ranges:

Site Complexity

A small marketing site is far easier to maintain than a large content hub with custom integrations, user accounts, or on-site e-commerce. More layouts, features, and connected systems mean more time spent keeping everything updated, stable, and secure.

Technology Stack

Different platforms carry different levels of maintenance work. Drupal sites and custom web application frameworks often require more time for updates and testing. They tend to be more complex with longer release cycles. WordPress sites tend to be less costly to maintain, though large or heavily custom features still may require a similar effort. A static site may require little to no maintenance. The underlying website technology influences how much effort is needed each month.

Number of Integrations

Most of the websites we support rely on a variety of connected systems: CRMs, analytics platforms, marketing automation tools, authentication systems, search services, payment providers, and more. Each integration requires monitoring, updates, and occasional troubleshooting to keep data flowing correctly. Custom integrations require significantly more time than stock embeds or plugin/module-powered integrations. The more connected systems your site depends on, the more ongoing attention it needs to stay reliable.

Traffic Volume

High-traffic sites place more demand on hosting, caching, and security. They also carry greater risk if something goes wrong, which requires more monitoring and quicker response times. With high quality hosting at a lower cost, this isn’t as big an issue as it used to be, but still an important consideration to ensure quality infrastructure is in place.

Compliance Requirements

Industries such as healthcare, finance, and education often require additional security controls, audit documentation, and review processes. Generating the appropriate reports and communications to meet these standards increases the time and expertise needed each month.

Change Frequency

Sites that evolve often, with new features, new content patterns, or revised layouts, require more ongoing support. Static sites need less attention, while active sites benefit from regular adjustments.

Editorial Team Size and Workflow

The size and activity level of your content team can influence support needs. Larger teams publish more frequently, ask more questions, and rely on clear workflows. This often leads to more content fixes, permissions adjustments, training needs, and support requests. Sites with active editorial teams benefit from more consistent maintenance to keep everything running smoothly.

Business Impact

If your website plays a critical role in generating revenue or leads, the cost of interruptions or downtime is high. This is particularly true when an organization is running expensive ad campaigns or gaining exposure through high visibility events. These organizations tend to invest more in preventive maintenance and faster turnaround times to protect that value.

When “Cheap” Maintenance Costs You More

We frequently take over sites that were covered by low-cost plans, often as low as $99 per month. These plans usually rely on automated updates with no testing, little or no monitoring, and slow response times. When something breaks, the fix is billed at high emergency rates, and the final cost ends up far higher than a proper maintenance plan would have been.

A reliable maintenance partner should provide:

• Clear SLAs
• Proactive monitoring and reporting
• A documented update and testing process
• Regular communication about the site’s overall health
• Recommendations that help guide future decisions, not just short-term fixes

Making the Business Case for Proper Maintenance

Here’s how to think about maintenance investment:

Calculate your website’s value: One way to think about maintenance costs is to estimate the value of the leads your website generates. Take the annual value of those leads and divide it by the number of hours in a year (8,760 hours). If your site brings in $2 million in qualified leads annually, that works out to about $228 per hour. Beyond direct lead generation, consider how much of your revenue depends on the website during the sales process. Prospects rely on your site to validate your expertise, review case studies, and build trust before they ever speak with your team. When you add that influence to the value of the leads themselves, the portion of revenue tied to your website is often far higher than most organizations realize.

Consider opportunity cost: A well-supported site doesn’t only avoid problems. It improves over time. Many organizations see noticeable lifts in conversion rates when they address performance issues, simplify user flows, or refine key templates. These gains directly affect revenue and lead quality.

Factor in internal time: Without dedicated support, issues fall to internal teams who already have full workloads. Marketing staff end up troubleshooting technical problems, digging through settings, or working around limitations that should have been resolved earlier. Their time is far better spent on campaigns, content, and strategy, not debugging technology. When you consider the hours lost to website firefighting, the cost of proper maintenance becomes much easier to justify.

Start with Strategy

For most organizations, the Proactive Support tier delivers the strongest return on investment. It covers the essential technical work while also giving your site steady improvements each month. You get meaningful progress without the commitment of a full fractional team, and you can increase support later if your needs expand.

The larger point is simple: your website plays a central role in how prospects learn about you, evaluate you, and decide whether to move forward. With most customer interactions happening online, keeping that experience reliable and effective isn’t optional. Investing in structured, ongoing support protects the value your website creates and helps it continue to perform at a high level.

Ready to Get Specific?

Now that you have a general idea of your maintenance investment, let’s create a plan tailored to your exact needs. We’ll review your current setup, understand your goals, and recommend the right level of support—with transparent, predictable pricing.

Contact us to get a customized maintenance recommendation based on your site’s complexity, business goals, and growth trajectory. Because your website works 24/7 for your business, shouldn’t your support do the same?