How much does website maintenance cost in 2026?

Typical website maintenance costs in 2026

The ranges are wide because “maintenance” means very different things. At the low end you get automated updates and a backup; at the high end, development hours, contractual response times and a cleanup if you get hacked. The sections below explain what each tier usually includes, with real plan prices from Spain, where I checked them provider by provider.

Published plan prices, provider by provider (Spain)

These are the prices providers publish on their own websites, checked on October 7, 2026. They are Spanish rates in euros, they can change, and not all of them say whether VAT is included, so treat them as an order of magnitude. The checklist at the end works anywhere.

Basic: €15 to €80 a month

WordPress, plugin and theme updates, a regular backup and some monitoring. This is the most crowded tier: there are offers from €15/month (SomlaWeb) or €29/month (Simio Digital and MantPress's entry plan, excl. VAT). A 2026 market study by Nerade puts basic WordPress maintenance at €30 to €80/month.

Standard: €80 to €200 a month

Adds frequent security scans, some technical time included (small changes, support) and faster responses. Nerade puts it at €80 to €200/month; MantPress's mid-tier plan is €69/month and its plan for online stores, €139/month.

Premium: €200 to €500 a month

Development hours every month, contractual response times, a guaranteed cleanup if you get hacked and, sometimes, performance or SEO work. MantPress has a €195/month plan with a guaranteed cleanup; Nerade puts the ceiling at around €500/month.

PrestaShop is a different story

For PrestaShop, almost nobody sells plain "updates": they sell time. Tiendaprest charges €165/month for 3 hours and €500/month for 10; Liewebs, €100/month for 5 hours and €350/month for 10; Nubeser lists plans from €54/month and Webconsulting from €75/month for PrestaShop. The gap with WordPress makes sense: updating paid modules on a store takes more work and carries more risk.

What changes the price

Two plans with the same name can have nothing in common. These are the things that really move the monthly fee:

• Whether updates are supervised or run blind. Clicking "update all" is free; taking a backup first, checking the site still works and rolling back if something fails takes time.
• Where the backup is stored. A backup on the same server is useless if the server goes down or gets hacked. Off-site daily backups kept for several weeks have a storage cost.
• What happens if you get hacked. This is the clause that separates plans the most. Some include the cleanup, others charge for it separately (among the Spanish providers I checked, a one-off WordPress cleanup runs from €150 to €590).
• Hours of work included. Changing a text, adding a product, checking a form that doesn't send. If the plan includes none, every request is a new invoice.
• Type of site. A store with a payment gateway, stock and orders needs more checks than a five-page website.
• Committed response time. A response time guaranteed by contract forces the provider to keep someone on call, and that has a price.

Monthly or annual

Among the providers I checked, the norm is to pay month to month with no lock-in, with a discount if you pay the year up front. The most common discount works out to two free months: you pay ten and get twelve.

Paying annually makes sense if you already know the provider. If it's your first time, start monthly and check for two or three months that the reports arrive, that the backups exist and that they answer you. And be wary of a long lock-in for no reason: good maintenance keeps customers because it works, not because of a contract.

Online store vs business website

A business website (a company, a law firm, a restaurant) can go weeks without changes. A store changes every day: orders, stock, prices, shipping and payment modules. That's why maintaining a store usually costs twice as much or more:

• Payments are what attackers are after. Skimmers that copy card details at checkout don't break the site: you have to actively look for them.
• Updates break more things. A payment or shipping module that stops working after an update costs sales from the first minute. The careful approach is to test on a copy first.
• The checkout has to be tested. A home page that loads doesn't mean customers can pay. A regular test purchase catches failures that no uptime monitor sees.
• More personal data. If a store has a breach, the GDPR comes into play, and so do the bank or the payment gateway.

My prices

I have two maintenance plans, published on the pricing page, excluding VAT. Customers outside the EU pay in US dollars, without Spanish VAT.

Business website: €35/month

For WordPress or a company website. $29/month outside the EU; paying for the year, €350 a year. Includes:

• Supervised updates of core, plugins and theme, with a backup first
• Daily backup stored off your server
• Weekly security scan
• Downtime alert (checked every 5 minutes)
• Monthly PDF report
• One cleanup a year included if it gets infected (from the 3rd month)

Online store: €69/month

For PrestaShop or WooCommerce. $59/month outside the EU; paying for the year, €690 a year. Includes:

• Everything in the Business website plan
• Daily scan and file integrity monitoring with the connector
• Module review before updating (on a staging copy when possible)
• Monthly test purchase
• 1 hour of technical work a month
• Cleanup included if it gets infected (from the 3rd month)

There's also an optional Priority add-on (€25/month, $19/month outside the EU): your issues go ahead of the rest of the work. I don't sell guaranteed response times; I sell priority. The conditions of both plans:

• No minimum term: cancel whenever you like, effective at the end of the month already paid.
• Annual payment: you pay 10 months and get 12.
• The included cleanup applies from the third month (so nobody signs up the day of the hack and cancels the next).

The table with the website maintenance price of each plan and what it includes is on its own page; the platform-specific details are in WordPress maintenance and PrestaShop maintenance.

Checklist before you sign

Ask any provider these questions, me included. If an answer is vague, you know where to look:

1. Do you take a backup before every update? And what do you do if something breaks after an update?
2. Where are the backups stored and how many days are they kept? Ask to see one. Better still: ask them to restore one to a staging copy.
3. What happens if I get hacked? Is the cleanup included, how many times a year and from when? Do you request the review from Google?
4. How many hours of work are included, and what counts as an hour?
5. What report do I get, and how often? A monthly report with what was updated, the backups and the alerts is the only way to know the work is being done.
6. Is there a lock-in or a cancellation fee? Will you hand back the logins and the backups if I leave?
7. Do the prices include VAT or sales tax, and hosting? In Europe, most business-to-business rates are published without VAT, and many maintenance plans do not include hosting.
8. Who holds the passwords? The domain, the hosting and the website should be in your name, not the provider's.

Before you hire anyone, you can see what state your site is in with the free scan: version, plugins with published vulnerabilities, HTTPS and headers. It helps you compare quotes with real data.

Sources

Typical ranges from 2026 price guides, and plan prices checked on each provider's website on October 7, 2026 (providers in Spain):

• GoDaddy: How much does it cost to maintain a website in 2026? (April 13, 2026)
• WebsiteSetup: website maintenance costs (updated March 2, 2026)
• MantPress, plans
• Nerade, website maintenance pricing
• SomlaWeb and Simio Digital
• Tiendaprest, Liewebs, Nubeser and Webconsulting