What Should Website Maintenance Cost?

By Tyler Brown, FUTR Agency · Published 27 October 2026

What we charge

Every plan includes the same foundation — updates, backups, security scanning and uptime monitoring. What changes between them is how much of our time comes with it.

Beyond twenty hours a month we quote per client, because at that point the work has stopped being maintenance and started being a part-time job, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

On a business site the included hours are for the small things that otherwise never get done: a price that changed, a staff photo, a new service, a page that needs rewording. Most months they go unused. The months they do not, they tend to be needed urgently.

Why does a store cost so much more?

Because a business site is maintained and a store is managed, and those are different verbs doing very different amounts of work.

A brochure site can sit untouched for a month quite happily. Updates run, backups run, nobody needs to look at it. A store cannot: it needs daily management and tracking. Orders that failed silently, payments that did not reconcile, stock that drifted out of step with the warehouse, a gateway that quietly started declining one card type, an app that updated overnight and broke the checkout for everyone on Safari. None of that announces itself. Somebody has to go and look.

Then the stakes differ. When a brochure site goes down, people cannot read about you for a few hours. When a store goes down, you are shut. Every hour is money that did not arrive, and nobody who tried to check out and failed is coming back later to try again.

Does a Shopify store need maintenance too?

Yes, and this one surprises people more than anything else here, because Shopify's entire pitch is that it handles everything for you.

It does handle everything — about the platform. Shopify patches the software, runs the servers and keeps the thing online, and you will genuinely never think about a security update again. What Shopify does not do is run your store.

Apps still update and conflict with one another. Payment gateways still fail in ways nobody notices for a day and a half. Stock still drifts. Orders still get stuck in limbo between paid and fulfilled. Shipping rules still produce a confidently wrong number for the one province nobody tested. The platform is maintained for you. The business running on top of it is not.

So Shopify and WooCommerce stores sit on the same plans here, from R3,000 a month. The work is a different shape — less patching, more watching — but it is not less work, and the month you find out is not the month you wanted to.

What is maintenance actually doing?

It is unglamorous, which is why it is so easy to cancel and so expensive to have cancelled.

• Updates. WordPress, themes and plugins release constantly, often to close security holes that are public knowledge the moment the patch ships. An unpatched site is not merely out of date, it is advertised.
• Backups. Worth nothing until the day they are worth everything. The question is never whether you have backups, it is whether anyone has tested restoring one.
• Security scanning. Catching a compromise in hours rather than discovering it when Google flags your site as dangerous and your traffic falls off a cliff.
• Uptime monitoring. Knowing the site is down before a customer tells you, which is the difference between an incident and an embarrassment.

What happens if you skip it?

Nothing, for a while. That is the trap, and it is why maintenance is the first line cut and the one most regretted.

Then one of a small, predictable set of things happens. A plugin update that never ran leaves a known vulnerability open and the site gets compromised, usually to serve spam you cannot see but Google can. Or two years of deferred updates means nothing can be updated safely any more, because the gap is too wide to cross in one jump, and the fix is a rebuild. Or the site simply breaks and nobody has a recent backup, so the most recent version of your website is whatever Google happened to cache.

A cleanup and recovery costs more than several years of maintenance. A rebuild costs more than that again. The saving was never a saving, it was a deferral with interest, and the interest rate is worse than it looks.

How to judge someone else's plan

Prices vary enormously and the word maintenance means whatever the seller wants it to. Before comparing numbers, ask:

• Are backups offsite, and has a restore been tested? Backups stored on the same server as the site are not backups, they are optimism.
• Who is responsible when an update breaks something? Updates do occasionally break things. The plan should say who fixes that and whether it comes out of your hours.
• What is the response time? Especially for a store, where the gap between broken and fixed is measured in lost orders.
• Do unused hours roll over? Usually not, and that is reasonable, but you should know rather than assume.
• Is hosting included or separate? Some plans bundle it, which makes comparison harder. Establish what you are actually paying for.

When you genuinely do not need this

If your site is a single static page with no forms, no logins and no database, there is very little to maintain and a plan would be us charging you for watching something that cannot break.

If you have someone in-house who genuinely does run the updates, test the backups and watch for problems, you do not need us doing it twice. The word doing is carrying the weight there — intending to is not the same thing, and the gap between the two is where most compromised sites live.

Everyone else is making a bet. It is a perfectly rational bet right up until the moment it is not, and the losing version is substantially more expensive than the premium. For what the build itself costs, our prices are published.

Common questions