How Much Does It Cost to Maintain a Website in 2026? Prices and What Each Plan Includes
In short: the median basic website maintenance plan costs €47 a month excluding VAT; the mid-range one, €89, and the advanced one, €105. Online shops are counted separately: €100 for the basic plan and €349 for the advanced one. These figures come from our website maintenance pricing observatory, which brings together 140 plans from 52 providers, checked on 17 October 2026. What sets one plan apart from another isn’t “updating plugins”, which everyone does, but what comes on top: hosting, hours for changes, response times, daily backups and SEO.
Market prices
The observatory only includes published prices: plans with a fixed price shown on each provider’s website, read on their page on the day of the check. To make them comparable, every price is per month and excluding VAT. The tier is set within each provider: their cheapest plan is the basic one, the most expensive is the advanced one, and the ones in between are mid-range. Websites and online shops are kept apart, because maintaining them does not cost the same.
| Tier | Websites | Online shops |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | €47 | €100 |
| Mid-range | €89 | €200 |
| Advanced | €105 | €349 |
These are medians of the monthly price excluding VAT. The median is the price in the middle: half of the plans cost less and the other half cost more. Providers with a single plan are not in the table, because they have no tiers.
The ranges are very wide. For websites, basic plans go from €15 to €149 and advanced plans from €29 to €597: one provider’s most expensive plan can cost less than another provider’s cheapest. That’s why the median tells you more than the lowest or the highest price, and why it’s worth looking at what each plan includes before the figure.
Website maintenance pricing observatory
Every price, with filters, a plan comparison tool and open data.
What the price includes
This is what the providers’ pages say about the 140 plans:
- 19% include hosting. For 49%, the page doesn’t say whether it’s included or not.
- 55% include hours of work every month, for changes or for support.
- 58% say there is no lock-in period, and 6% require one.
- 39% don’t say whether the price includes VAT.
If a page doesn’t mention something, that doesn’t mean the plan lacks it, but it does mean you’ll have to ask before signing up.
What makes a plan cost more
- Hosting. If the plan includes hosting, part of the price is the server. In the observatory, website plans that include hosting have a median of €79 a month, and those that say they don’t include it, €64. Compare it with what you currently pay for hosting separately.
- How often backups are taken. A weekly backup and a daily one don’t protect an online shop that takes orders every day in the same way.
- Response time. Replying within 48 hours is not the same as within 4. If your website sells, a day-long failure costs money.
- The hours or minutes of changes included. Some plans include time for small content or design changes; others charge for them separately.
- Premium licences. Page builders, caching, SEO and translation plugins have yearly licences. If the plan includes them, you avoid paying for them separately.
- SEO. Reviewing Search Console, fixing errors or keeping the content up to date is extra work that only the most complete plans include.
- Whether the website sells. An online shop has payments, orders and more plugins to watch over, which is why maintaining it costs more, as the table shows. Not every website plan covers a site that charges for courses, tickets or bookings either: in the observatory you can filter them by “Selling online”.
What it costs not to maintain your website
Recovering a website with malware costs between €300 and €800 + VAT in our case, and takes one to two days. Add to that the sales or enquiries you lose while the website is down or flagged as dangerous. A full year of our Essential plan costs €468 + VAT: roughly the same as a single recovery.
If nobody has looked after your website for a while, we explain what to do with a website nobody maintains.
How to choose
- If your website is a business card that hardly changes, a basic plan with updates and backups is usually enough.
- If your website brings you customers or sells, look for daily backups, emergency recovery included, a response within 24 hours or less and a plan that says it covers websites that sell.
- If traffic from Google matters to you, check what SEO work the plan includes or whether you’ll have to pay for it separately. If you also want AI assistants to find you, we explain how in what GEO is.
- Ask about what the page doesn’t say: whether there’s a lock-in period, whether the price includes VAT and whether hosting is included. A good service doesn’t need to tie you down.
- Compare plans, not figures. In the observatory you can pick up to three plans and see them side by side, each one with the median for its tier.
Our plans
At Desatranques WEB we have three maintenance plans for WordPress websites, all with no lock-in:
- Essential, €39 + VAT per month: updates, regular backups, monitoring, image optimisation, database cleanup, a monthly report and email support with a 48-hour response.
- Smart, €59 + VAT per month: everything in Essential, plus speed optimisation, advanced security, daily backups, emergency recovery included, hosting management, premium licences and a 24-hour response.
- Business, €100 + VAT per month: everything in Smart, plus SEO and GEO content maintenance, monthly SEO consulting and urgent support with a 4-hour response.
None of them includes the hosting itself, which you keep paying for directly: on Smart and Business we manage it for you. If your website is built with another technology, we maintain it too, with a custom quote.
We publish the observatory ourselves, and our plans are in it like any other provider’s, with the same details you see here.
Sources
All the market figures in this article come from the website maintenance pricing observatory:
- Each price links to the provider’s page where it was read.
- How it was done explains which prices are included, how the monthly price excluding VAT is worked out and how each plan’s tier is set.
- The data can be downloaded as a CSV under a CC BY 4.0 licence, and every page is checked again each quarter.
Website maintenance plans
From €39 + VAT per month, no lock-in. Updates, backups, security and support.