Two different questions get asked as though they are one. "What does website maintenance cost" is a vendor-pricing question. "What should I charge my client for it" is a margin question, and the answer depends on decisions the vendor's price has nothing to do with. Most of what ranks for the first question is written for a single business owner comparing a cheap plugin-update add-on against doing nothing at all, not for an agency pricing a retainer it plans to resell.
The two numbers connect, but treating them as one is where agencies lose margin without noticing it happen. What follows is the real cost structure behind website maintenance done properly, what actually moves that number, and a separate answer to the question that matters more if you are reselling it: what to charge your own client.
What real maintenance actually covers
Ignore the price for a moment and start with scope, because a number only means something once you know what it buys. A plan that is really just "we will update your plugins" is not maintenance, it is one task inside it. The baseline that makes the rest of the price defensible looks like this:
- Uptime monitoring that alerts before a client notices, not after
- Core, theme and plugin updates applied on staging and tested before production, which is the first item on WordPress's own hardening guidance
- Offsite backups that are periodically restored to confirm they actually work
- Security patching and malware scanning, against a known risk list such as the OWASP Top Ten rather than whatever a plugin flags
- PHP and platform version management
- Core Web Vitals monitoring, so performance decay is caught early rather than discovered in an audit
Every item on that list is baseline hygiene, not a differentiator worth billing extra for. A vendor charging separately for one of them is charging for the minimum. What should genuinely vary between tiers is how much of the site changes each month, content edits, small requests, development work, because that is the part that actually scales with a client's needs.
What it actually costs
There is no single honest figure, because the answer depends on how a vendor structures the price: hourly, a flat retainer, or a tiered plan built around included hours. What can be described is the structure, and one real reference point.
Ours is public, because a comparison is only useful if at least one side of it is real. Our plans run $99, $199 or $299 a month per site, and the difference between the three is entirely about included hours for changes and development work, not which baseline tasks are covered. If a vendor cannot tell you upfront what it costs beyond the plan's included hours, that usually means the real number only becomes clear on the first invoice that exceeds it.
What to charge your own client
This is the question that actually matters if you are reselling maintenance rather than buying it for your own site, and it is the one almost nothing written on this topic addresses, because almost everything written on it is aimed at someone buying for themselves rather than an agency pricing a retainer for someone else.
The honest starting point is that your price has very little to do with the vendor's price. A maintenance retainer is worth to your client whatever downtime, a compromised site, or a slow page would cost them, not whatever it costs you to deliver. Pricing it as a fixed markup on cost caps what you can charge at a number that has nothing to do with the value your client is actually buying.
An illustrative example, not a recommendation. If a vendor's plan costs you $199 a month and you resell it at $350, that reads like a healthy margin on paper. It ignores the time you spend relaying client requests, chasing down content for updates, and being the point of contact when something breaks at an inconvenient hour, which across a handful of retainers adds up to real hours a month that are not in that margin anywhere.
Working out what that unbilled time is actually worth, against what a vendor charges you and what you could reasonably charge a client, is exactly the arithmetic our margin calculator is built to do, using your own numbers rather than an assumed rate.
The tasks that matter versus the ones that pad an invoice
Not everything billed as maintenance is maintenance. A few patterns are worth checking for before signing anything, whether you are buying it for your own site or evaluating a vendor to resell.
- "Restore testing" billed as a separate line item, when it should simply be how backups are proven to work
- Security scanning sold as a premium add-on, when it is baseline hygiene on any site handling real traffic
- A response-time SLA that describes when someone starts looking at a problem rather than when it is fixed, presented as though the two are the same
- Development hours priced identically to routine content edits, when the two need entirely different skill levels
None of this means maintenance should be cheap. It means the price should be attached to something specific enough that you could explain to a client exactly what it buys, and specific enough that you could tell, from the invoice alone, whether you were being charged for hygiene that should already be included.
