A Comprehensive Guide to Website Maintenance Costs

If you’re building a website, it’s best to do it right from the outset. Not only does that ensure security and compliance with industry or government regulations, it will save you money on website maintenance.

Before embarking on your web-building activities, we want to ease your mind by providing an overview of the cost by website type and individual components that come with web development.

How the Type of Website Affects Costs

Not all content is created equally. Some websites are heavy with media content like images and video, which use a lot of resources and can affect speed.

Other types of content, like blogs, are rather static and use fewer resources.

There are also differences in resource usage, website maintenance, and storage requirements if you’re creating a personal website as opposed to a large, active eCommerce platform.

Expenses vary by hosting plan and platform, and it will cost more if you’re using a professional development company rather than going the DIY route.

For example, WordPress is free, but you’ll have to pay for your domain and hosting. Website builders like Wix and Appy Pie’s website builder are all-inclusive.

The most expensive build is an organic website with custom coding that a professional developer builds, but that can lead to “bloated” and complicated code.

These are general figures for each of the five most common types of websites:

• Hobby websites: Hobby websites are personal sites that you create to share an interest with others.
  Since you probably won’t need a lot of storage or resources for a static website, and you can get away with a shared hosting plan, the cost is about $3 – $25 per month for domain name registration and hosting costs.
  
• Personal websites: Personal websites are similar to hobby sites. This is the type of platform you would use to create a family newsletter or post photos of your vacation.
  You’ll also need to budget about $3 – $25 per month for domain registration and hosting.
  
• Business websites: The cost of a business is broad and depends on the size and nature of your business. A solo practitioner or small business could pay as little as $225 per month for domain registration, hosting, graphic design, web design and marketing.
  The monthly expense for a larger company could be as high as $2750 monthly.
  
• eCommerce platforms: Where many business websites are promotional, eCommerce platforms need to be functional and dynamic. This type of website needs more functionality and features like shopping cart apps. Depending on the size and expected traffic, expect to pay between $450 and $6,000 or more.
  
• Enterprise websites: Major corporations with a large customer base and those with special requirements would choose this level of service.
  The cost runs between $5,150 and close to $10,000 per month, which includes advanced security, multiple domains, extended storage, and unlimited resources.
  

If your website falls under this category, you can increase the number of your customers by hiring a company that offers white-label SEO services.

What You Need to Build Your Website and Associated Costs

Once you’ve decided the purpose of your website, there are expenses that you’ll incur during production and after you go live. This is in addition to the bare-bones costs outlined above.

In this section, we’ll dive a little deeper into the expenses and why they’re necessary.

Domain Name Selection and Registration 🌐

You need a unique domain name, which means you’ll have to pay a registrar to reserve and register your domain. The price varies by registrar.

Domain name price: $10 – $20

Hosting Platforms 🗃️

Your hosting platform is where your website will live. The cost will depend upon what features you need, the type of hosting, and resources like processing power and storage.

Be aware that performance tests by web hosting experts HostingCanada.org indicate that discount hosting companies perform twice as slow as regular hosts.

Website Security 🛡️

Some security is included with your hosting plan, but you might pay extra for antivirus, ssl certificate, spam blockers, and backup/restore systems. Other countries may have additional security requirements.

Website security costs $0 – $100 monthly

Content Creation 📝

Unless you’re a professional writer or have a lot of time to generate fresh, unique content, you’ll want to outsource this job to a professional.

The cost will depend on whether your content is limited to basic services and homepages, product descriptions, or a full blog with regular posts.

Expect to pay $0.15 per word for a reliable, professional content writer.

Website Marketing Costs 📈

Marketing and promotion may well be your biggest expense, but you’ll get a nice ROI. This cost includes email campaigns and paid ads on Facebook or Google.

Website marketing costs $0 – $1,000 per month

Technical Support 🔧

The cost of tech support depends on your website, the degree of technical complexity, and your own skill level; absolute novices will need extra help.

Technical support cost: $0 – $300 per month, or $60 per hour for an independent technician.

Email Servers 📧

The cost of this element depends on whether your hosting plan offers custom email addresses as part of its basic service or as a premium feature.

Email servers cost: $0 – $5 per user each month

Website Updates 👨‍💻

This includes all of the back-end and technical functions of your website rather than the cosmetic bits like layout and general web design.

You’ll have to keep your software, apps, and plugins up-to-date, and make sure you’re using the latest version of WordPress or another content management system (CMS).

Many people hire a content manager or select a managed hosting plan to take care of these things and extras like content updates/editing and product updates.

Website updates cost: $0 – $190 per month

Website Design Updates 🖼️

You want to make sure that your website always looks fresh and modern. That means paying for website design updates from a professional graphic designer.

Web design updates cost: $0 – $1,600 per month, depending on the complexity of the website design.

Analytics, Tracking, and Reporting 📊

You can use Google’s very good free analytics, but you could incorporate additional tracking and reporting mechanisms for deeper insight or special analysis.

This will cost you $0 – $300 per month

How It Looks When You Put It All Together

The above figures provide an abstract depiction, but that doesn’t really put the whole website-building process into context. Here’s a realistic picture of the expenses for a basic, low-cost website for a small business.

You’re going to want a secure platform, which will cost about $14 per year, which breaks down to $1.16 per month and includes privacy protection.

A hosting cost that includes a custom email address that’s tied to your domain will add about $2.75 per month to the cost.

Next, you’ll need to account for updates and website maintenance, which you can do yourself if you have a smaller website with an average amount of traffic. Add about $50 – $75 per month to cover an average cost of four hours to cover graphic and web design updates.

The typical small business website won’t require much tech support. A simple brochure website with maybe a few service pages will cost about $60 per year if you handle routine website maintenance and upgrades yourself.

Many plans include web security as part of the service plans, and that includes extra spam protection for your comments section and contact forms.

Email services like MailChimp will allow you to take advantage of free email newsletters for subscriber lists of 2,000 or less.

You can get a fairly functional basic small business website for around $81 per month. The price goes up when you include marketing through email or paid ads on Google and social social media platforms like Facebook. Those could run as high as $1,000 per month.

Final Thoughts

Web building isn’t a one-and-done proposition. Not only are there up-front expenses, but you’ll also have to be diligent about web maintenance cost and upgrades. Some expenses are yearly, while others can be paid month-to-month.

Not maintaining your website or taking care of incidentals like secure hosting and updates will leave your website looking and performing badly.

That makes you look unprofessional. It also means a less-than-stellar user experience (UX) and low ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). To counter this make sure your website is up-to-date and SEO optimized.

There are also many other ways to promote your business by inbound marketing like using webinar software that could help you draw in new visitors and customers. But that won’t be enough if your website is not functional.