How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost for a Small Business?

SiteGround's StartUp hosting plan costs $3.99 a month in its first year and renews at $17.99. GoDaddy sells a .com domain for one cent in year one, with a three-year purchase, then charges $22.99 a year. The price on a checkout page is often a year-one price. The maintenance cost is what you pay in year two.

How much does it cost to maintain a small business website?

Keeping a small business website running costs $204 to $350 a year for the platform itself, the biggest line on the bill. That is Wix's Light plan at $17 a month on annual billing, up to Kinsta's managed WordPress hosting at $350 a year. The domain and email are smaller lines, and WordPress adds plugin licences.

We read each price from the vendor's own page in September 2026. The low end is the cheapest option that still works for a business. The high end is the entry plan of a pricier vendor, not its top tier.

Line item	Website builder	Self-hosted WordPress	Price read, September 2026
Domain (.com)	Free first year, then renewal	Renewal	$18.48 a year at Namecheap, $22.99 at GoDaddy
Hosting and SSL	Included in the plan	Hosting plan, SSL included	Wix Light $17 a month, SiteGround StartUp $17.99 a month
Security	Run by the platform	Plugin or host feature	Wordfence Premium $149 a year
SEO tools	Built in	Plugin	Yoast SEO Premium $118.80 a year
Email	Add-on	Add-on or host mailbox	Google Workspace $7 per user a month

On a builder, you pay one company for most of this. On WordPress, you assemble it yourself and decide which parts to pay for. Our website management guide lists the tasks behind each line.

Why the first-year price is not the maintenance price

Hosting shows the widest gap between the first bill and the second. SiteGround advertises "SAVE 77%" on its StartUp plan: $3.99 a month, prepaid for 12 months, renewing at $17.99. Its GrowBig plan goes from $6.69 to $29.99 at renewal.

Domains follow the same pattern. Namecheap's .com page offers new customers a .com for $6.79 with a promo code, and lists the renewal at $18.48. GoDaddy's one-cent first year requires a three-year purchase, with each extra year at $22.99.

Google Workspace is the quieter case. Its pricing page showed Business Starter at $3.50 per user for three months, then $7. The fine print limits the introductory price to new customers and the first 20 users.

At the wholesale level, the .com price is set by Verisign, which runs the registry. In its first quarter 2026 earnings release, Verisign announced a rise in the annual .com fee to $10.97 from November 1, 2026. Cloudflare Registrar says it sells renewals at what registries and ICANN charge it, with no markup.

What do Wix, Squarespace and Shopify cost to keep running?

Wix, Squarespace and Shopify charge $17 to $29 a month for the entry plans most small businesses use, billed annually. Hosting and the SSL certificate come with the plan, so there is no separate hosting bill.

Paying monthly costs more. Squarespace's pricing page lists Basic at $19 a month billed annually, or $25 month to month. Shopify lists Basic at $29 a month billed yearly and $39 monthly. Wix displays yearly prices only on its main plans page.

Fees on sales matter more than the plan price for a shop:

• Squarespace Basic: 2% on online store sales, 0% on Core and above.
• Shopify Basic: card rates from 2.9% plus 30 cents, and a 2% fee if you use a third-party payment provider.

WordPress.com sits between a builder and self-hosting. Its Business plan costs $25 a month on annual billing, with hosting included and WordPress plugins allowed.

On annual billing, Wix Business costs $39 a month and Business Elite $159. Squarespace Plus is $49 and Advanced $99, with card rates falling from 2.9% to 2.5% plus 30 cents. Shopify Grow is $79 a month and Advanced $299. A growing store tends to move up for lower payment fees or more staff accounts.

On a builder, the upkeep left for you is content: new pages, product updates, photos and SEO fields. The vendor runs the servers and the software.

What does a self-hosted WordPress site cost?

WordPress runs 40.2% of all websites and 58.7% of those with a known content management system, according to W3Techs. WordPress software is free. You pay for hosting, and you choose which plugins to buy.

Hosting: shared or managed

Shared hosting is the cheaper tier. SiteGround's StartUp plan renews at $17.99 a month for one site, with free SSL, daily backups and managed updates included.

Managed WordPress hosting costs more and takes more work off your hands. Kinsta's Launch plan costs $35 a month, or $350 a year billed annually. It includes a firewall, free malware removal and 14 days of backups. WP Engine lists managed plans starting at $28 a month.

Backups

Both hosts in this post include daily backups, so the cost sits in the extras. SiteGround includes free daily backups on its three plans and adds on-demand backups from GrowBig up.

Kinsta keeps 14 days of daily backups on Launch. Its add-ons cost $20 a site a month for backups four times a day, $100 for hourly, and $2 a site a month to copy backups to AWS or Google Cloud Storage.

A shop that takes orders all day loses more in a day-old restore than a brochure site does. That is the case for paying for more frequent backups.

Plugins and security

Most small business sites need an SEO plugin and a security layer. Both have free versions:

• Yoast SEO Premium: $118.80 a year, billed annually, on top of a free version.
• Wordfence: free, Premium at $149 a year, or Care at $590 a year, where its team installs, configures and monitors the plugin.
• Sucuri: from $229 a year for one site, with unlimited malware and hack removals.

Paying more buys a faster response when something breaks. Wordfence Response costs $1,250 a year for 24/7 incident response with a one-hour response time. Sucuri's malware removal window shrinks from 30 hours on Basic to 12 hours on Pro at $339 and 6 hours on Business at $549.

The budgets in the chart are our own tally of the list prices above, each with one Workspace user and a .com at Namecheap's renewal price. On cheaper shared hosting, paid plugins take almost half the bill. The managed host costs more but includes security, so the two WordPress totals end up $15 apart.

What does paid help cost on top of the software?

Paid help is the line that can outgrow the software bill. The median US web developer or digital designer earned $47.85 an hour, or $99,520 a year, in May 2025, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Rates for this work vary by country and seniority. Our guide to the website manager hourly rate compares rates by country and experience level.

Do it yourself

• Software bill only, about $330 to $590 a year
• Your time on updates, backups and content
• Works on a builder with few changes
• Mistakes land on you

vs

Hire help

• Software bill plus hours
• Someone else patches, backs up and publishes
• Suits WordPress with plugins and a store
• Scope and response time set in advance

The split depends on how often the site changes. A five-page builder site with a phone number and opening hours changes a few times a year, and the owner can make those edits.

A WordPress store with weekly products, plugins and a blog needs someone checking it each week. The SEO budget is a separate line again.

1. 1
   MonthlyUpdate plugins, check backups restore, review form submissions
2. 2
   QuarterlyCheck page speed, fix broken links, refresh key pages
3. 3
   YearlyRenew domain and plans at the real price, review licences you no longer use

Broken links pile up as pages change. Our walkthrough on finding broken links with Python covers a free way to check.

Get website maintenance done with Seotal

Seotal matches small businesses with vetted freelance website managers from Asia, hourly at $15 to $30 with no minimum, or on a part-time retainer of $1,000 to $2,000 a month for 60 to 80 hours. There are no platform fees.

The website manager hiring page lists the tasks they cover, and the pricing page sets out the hourly, part-time and full-time options. Retainers carry a 3-month minimum, and a replacement is free in the first 30 days.

I'd start hourly for a builder site and consider a retainer once WordPress plugins, a store and weekly content are in the mix. You can browse website managers in the Philippines and Vietnam.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to pay for an SSL certificate?

Not for most small business sites. Wix, Squarespace and Shopify include SSL in their plans, and SiteGround includes free SSL on its hosting plans. A paid certificate matters only if a partner or compliance rule asks for a specific type.

Is it cheaper to move from WordPress to a website builder?

The software bill can drop, but a move costs time: pages, redirects and SEO settings have to be rebuilt. Price the move as a one-off project and compare it with two or three years of your current renewals.