WordPress Maintenance is all about taking care of your website. Period.
If you are launching a website for the first time, or if you are already earning from your website, you need to maintain it so that it keeps giving you profits.
Think of your WordPress website just like your car. You use it on a regular basis. But to keep it in optimal condition, you have to maintain it. This means visiting a mechanic in your area that can take care of your car needs.
Table of Contents
- How Much Does Monthly Website Maintenance Cost?
- Why Is WordPress Maintenance Necessary?
- Does Your Website Need Maintenance?
- WordPress Maintenance & Benefits On Profits
- How Much Should You Pay For WordPress Maintenance?
- WordPress Maintenance Checklist & Costs
- Can You DIY WordPress Maintenance?
In the same way, you need a WordPress maintenance expert that can take care of your WordPress website. But how much does WordPress maintenance cost? That is the topic of today’s article.
How Much Does Monthly Website Maintenance Cost?
On average, WordPress maintenance costs somewhere between $500 to $2,000 depending on some features and factors including:
- Amount of traffic
- Type of website
- Features on the website
- Theme used
- Maintenance Frequency
- Maintenance Package Inclusions
- Maintenance Professional’s Expertise Level
A basic website that has only a few pages or that just uses blogs to get traffic like a blog or an affiliate website usually takes around a few hundred dollars per month.
Does the website need to undergo maintenance on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis? It’s important to note that the cost of maintenance will increase with the frequency of required updates. Maintenance tasks can range from simple updates to more complex bug fixes, troubleshooting, and feature additions. More intricate tasks will require a higher level of expertise and time investment, resulting in a greater cost.
On the other hand, a WooCommerce-based website has a lot more complexities that need to be focused on during site maintenance. This means improving the site performance, optimizing for search, and enhancing the customer journey of the website. These types of WooCommerce websites have maintenance costs of $1,000 or more on a monthly basis.
Additionally, if the maintenance requires specialized skills like server administration or database management, the cost may be higher. Some developers and agencies offer maintenance packages that include a predetermined amount of hours or tasks per month, providing clients with a predictable cost for maintenance services.
If you are also looking to rebuild your website, see the web design cost guide in Australia.
Why Is WordPress Maintenance Necessary?
In all honesty, WordPress maintenance is not needed on a regular basis. Let’s consider an example:
I have a website that gets 10,000 visitors on a regular basis. My average ranking on Google is around 15. If I want to increase my website rankings, I have to improve my website performance.
This is where I would need a developer to focus on on-site maintenance. This is something that I need to do on a regular basis. Why? Because if I don’t optimize my website on a regular basis, I won’t be able to beat the competition on Google.
The same is the case with each WooCommerce store that is available on the internet.
Even if your website doesn’t get traffic from search engines, it may get traffic from Google Ads or Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads. In all these cases, page quality matters. And a major factor for improving page quality is its performance & customer journey.
That is why WordPress maintenance is important.
Related Read: Speed up your WordPress website with caching.
Does Your Website Need Maintenance?
Your website needs maintenance even if you may not have noticed the need for it. There needs no special case for your WordPress website maintenance. Website Maintenance is a necessity for websites of all kinds to keep up with the standards, security, features and more. However, your website surely needs maintenance if any of the following sounds familiar to you.
- The website takes too long to load.
- Website visitors face challenges in accomplishing website goals, such as sending a chat or adding to a cart.
- Themes, plugins and other add-ons have not received any updates for several months.
- The website has issues with numerous broken links or URL issues.
- The website contains bugs or errors leading to malfunction.
- The website has been infected with malware or spam.
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WordPress Maintenance & Benefits On Profits
On average, one dollar spent on-site maintenance can directly translate into $3 in gross profit. Here is how.
You spend $500 on improving the performance of your website and you spend $1,000 in improving the landing pages of your WooCommerce store.
Now you have spent a total of $1,500 on website maintenance. But do you know that these $1.5k are going to bring in 3X more customers to your website?
This would result in 3X more gross revenue in the end. So, getting WordPress maintenance for your website is a win-win in the end.
Don’t think of WordPress website maintenance as a cost for your website but think of it as an investment that you are putting on your site or your eCommerce store to increase the overall revenue.
How Much Should You Pay For WordPress Maintenance?
As we said earlier, the cost you pay for your WordPress maintenance is not just a cost but an investment in your business. That being said, here is a breakdown of the total cost you will be paying for your website maintenance when using WordPress.
Blogs
The total cost for WordPress maintenance for a blog can be around $95 to $295 depending on the type of optimisations needed on the blog.
A small company blog that provides fresh information on a daily basis will require more thorough coverage. Similarly, a blog that gets a lot of traffic will cost a lot more in terms of site maintenance.
eCommerce Stores
Maintenance expenses will undoubtedly be higher if you have a website with complex features, such as an e-commerce store, a bilingual site, a membership platform, or a multisite network. These maintenance costs can be around $1,000 to $2,000 for a regular e-commerce store that focuses on a single niche. E-commerce stores that have more traffic and products listed can range from $2,000 to $4,000 in maintenance costs on a monthly basis.
Company or Business Websites
Company websites usually don’t have a lot of features that require maintenance. Most of these maintenance tasks are usually updates such as adding new landing pages, creating more content for the site and optimizing speed. On average, company or business website maintenance can cost around $500.
However, if the material isn’t updated on a regular basis and most of the marketing is automated, you may discover that the cost of the company websites can decrease to $295 per month.
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WordPress Maintenance Checklist & Costs
Here is a list of things that you should maintain on a WordPress website. These include:
- Core Site Updates
- Theme Updates
- Plugin Updates
- Tech Support
- Site Analytics and Reporting
- Site Backups
- SEO
- Web design and development
- Security Updates
- Uptime monitoring and Optimizations
Since WordPress site maintenance has become such an important part of every WordPress-based business, hosting companies now offer website maintenance as an add-on service in their plans.
Can You DIY WordPress Maintenance?
Yes, you can DIY WordPress maintenance but the cost will increase. Here is why.
- Do you have the expertise to maintain a website?
- Do you have enough time to maintain your WordPress website?
- How much time can you spend on maintaining your website?
- Finally, is it worth it?
The last question should be your first priority when answering all the questions. If you are already working on other things that can improve your ROI, why DIY your WordPress maintenance?
In fact, you can save more and earn even more by hiring a WordPress development expert that can maintain your website on a regular basis.
That being said, WordPress maintenance focuses on:
- Site Security
- Monitoring uptime
- Debugging development issues
- Improve performance
- Enhancing user journey
These are some things that require professional expertise. So, you will either have to spend time learning more about all of these or hire experts that can do it for you. If you plan to learn, you will still have to pay for learning and spend more time. In the end, it all comes down to your cost vs benefit ratio.
Wrapping Up
Failure to maintain your website is a huge risk. It can have a negative impact on your site’s performance, SEO, security, and a variety of other factors. Once you’ve determined that your WordPress website requires maintenance, the following step is to decide whether you’ll manage it yourself or hire someone else to do it.
By hiring a WordPress development agency, you are not only reducing the risk of poor maintenance but also ensuring that your website remains in secure hands. All this directly impacts your bottom-line such as leads, conversions, and sales.