In this article
Website maintenance costs €0–50 per month for a modern static site and €100–500+ per month for a typical WordPress or plugin-based site in 2026. The gap is architectural: one stack needs constant patching to stay safe, the other has almost nothing to patch. Since maintenance is forever, it deserves the same scrutiny as the build quote — and usually gets none.
What "maintenance" actually includes#
- Security: core, theme and plugin updates; monitoring; incident response when patching was late.
- Reliability: hosting management, backups, uptime monitoring, SSL renewals.
- Performance: keeping the site fast as content and plugins accumulate.
- Content support: small text and image changes your team cannot make in the CMS.
- Dependencies: license renewals for premium themes, page builders and plugins.
Cost by stack, honestly#
A typical business WordPress site: €100–300/month for a proper retainer (updates, backups, monitoring, small fixes), plus €10–50/month in plugin and theme licenses, plus hosting strong enough to compensate for the architecture. An e-commerce WooCommerce site: €200–500+, because downtime costs orders. A static-first site with a headless CMS: hosting from €0–20/month, no plugins to license or patch, no security retainer — maintenance shrinks to occasional dependency updates, measured in hours per year.
Retainer red flags#
- A monthly fee with no listed deliverables — "maintenance" should itemize like any invoice.
- Paying to patch problems the vendor’s own stack choice created.
- Hosting markup: reselling €20 hosting at €100 with "management" as the difference.
- No monthly report: if you cannot see what was done, assume the answer.
DIY, retainer or rebuild: the decision#
Handle it yourself only if someone genuinely owns the task — an unmaintained WordPress site is a countdown, not a saving. Buy a retainer when the site earns money and the stack demands care: €150/month is cheap insurance against a €5,000 incident and a week of downtime. And run the third calculation everyone skips: if maintenance exceeds €200/month just to keep a slow site alive, a rebuild on a low-maintenance architecture often pays for itself within two to three years — while upgrading speed, security and rankings in the same move.
That calculation is worth doing annually. Maintenance costs creep — one more plugin license, one hosting upgrade, one extra support hour a month — and because each step is small, nobody notices the total until it rivals a mortgage payment on a site that was "cheap to build".
The most honest maintenance contract is an architecture that barely needs one.
Frequently asked questions#
Can I skip maintenance entirely?
On a plugin-based CMS — no; unpatched plugins are the top attack vector, and a hacked site costs far more than a year of retainers. On a static architecture, "maintenance" genuinely shrinks toward zero, which is the point.
Is a €50/month maintenance plan trustworthy?
For WordPress, €50 buys automated updates and backups at best — fine until something breaks and "response time" turns out not to be in the plan. Read the deliverables, not the price.
What should a maintenance report show?
Updates applied, backup status, uptime, page speed trend, and hours used versus included. Five lines, monthly. Vendors who cannot produce it are billing for ambiance.