You invest in a maintenance plan every month, and the site looks the same as the day it launched. That makes the website maintenance cost hard to judge. The work doesn't show, and two quotes for the same small site can look nothing alike.
The short answer: by our estimate, a small business site with a contact form runs about €35 to €170 a month once the domain, hosting, certificate and upkeep are added together. An online store costs more. Most of that money pays for someone's time, and one question about backups shows which quote includes it.
A maintenance quote can move for thousands of reasons. The ones that come up most for us are what the plan includes, how often the site changes, whether it sells online, and how far behind it's fallen.
Contents
- Fixed Bills Take Up the Smallest Share of the Website Maintenance Cost
- The Monthly Fee Pays for Tested Work
- Website Maintenance Plans Follow How Often the Site Changes
- Online Store Maintenance Price: What the Checkout Adds
- A Skipped Year Raises the Website Maintenance Cost
- Questions About Website Maintenance Cost
Fixed Bills Take Up the Smallest Share of the Website Maintenance Cost
Three bills keep a site online before anyone works on it: the domain, the hosting, and the SSL certificate that puts the padlock beside the address. For a small business site, we'd budget these ranges:
| Line on the bill | What we'd budget | Who bills it |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | €15 to €60 a year | The registrar |
| Hosting | €10 to €50 a month | The host, or the care plan |
| SSL certificate | €0 to €150 a year | The host, or the care plan |
| Updates, backups and monitoring | €25 to €100 a month | Whoever looks after the site |
A quote for your site can land outside these ranges. Hosting costs more as traffic grows and the server has more to run. A store with a catalog and a checkout needs a bigger server than five pages and a form do.
The certificate comes with the hosting on our plans. Elsewhere it can be free too: Let's Encrypt doesn't charge for its certificates, though some hosts add a small fee. A paid certificate can also confirm which company owns the site, but it encrypts the same way. The free one does the job for a small business site.
The domain works out to a few euros a month, and a missed renewal does more damage than any other line. A .bg domain costs €30 a year plus VAT if you buy it direct from the registry. You pay the renewal to the registrar, separately from any care plan, and the reminder goes to whoever registered the domain.
If nobody pays, the .bg registry suspends the domain 7 days after it expires, and after 40 days anyone can register it. When we build a site, we register the domain in the business's name and hand you the logins at launch.
The Monthly Fee Pays for Tested Work
The site stays the same, but what it runs on doesn't. Chrome now ships a new version every two weeks on desktop, Android and iOS, and any release can change the way a menu or form works.
The certificate behind the padlock has lasted 200 days at most since March 2026, and the limit drops to 47 days by 2029. At that pace, renewal has to run automatically.
Quotes differ most on updates, backups and monitoring, because that's where you pay for someone's time. A plan at €50 a month can mean an hour of tested work or nothing anyone could name.
The software under a site gets security fixes as holes are found in it. Attackers run scans across the whole internet looking for sites that haven't installed them. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre says anything facing the internet should be updated within 5 days.
Rushing an update has its own risk. An update installed straight onto the live site can stop the contact form sending without a single error message. The leads stop until somebody wonders why the inbox went quiet.
The hours go into testing. Each update runs first on a staging copy, a private copy of the site that visitors never see, and gets checked on phones and in several browsers before it goes on the live site. A backup gets the same treatment: until someone has restored it, it's only a file that might open.
Monitoring covers the time in between: when the site goes down, the alert goes to a developer. Without it, a site that's down stays down until someone happens to open it.
Our website maintenance services start with Essential at €49 a month: hosting, the certificate, 24/7 monitoring, tested updates, restored backups and an hour of edits.
That costs more than hosting alone, and the extra pays for the testing. One question separates two plans at the same price: when was the last backup restored, and where?
Website Maintenance Plans Follow How Often the Site Changes
The difference between the plans is the hours, and how many you need depends on how often the site changes. Essential comes with 1 hour of edits a month, Standard with 3, and Premium with 8 developer hours.
A plumber who changes prices twice a year won't use more than Essential's hour. Paying by the hour is the other way to buy that work. The catch is that nobody watches the site between jobs, and you get the price for a fix after something has already broken.
A clinic adding a service page each month needs the 3 hours on Standard, at €129 a month. Unused hours roll over to the next month from Standard up, and you get a monthly report on rankings, page speed and what we'll work on next.
Premium, at €349, is for a site that already gets visitors and should get more leads from them. Its 8 developer hours include SEO and conversion work on the pages with traffic but few leads, and our post on a website with traffic but no leads shows where those pages lose people.
Maintenance holds the rankings a site already has. Climbing for new searches takes separate SEO hours, and results tend to start showing after 60 to 90 days.
Those hours only pay off on a site people already find. If the site doesn't show up in search, that comes first, and our post on a website not showing up on Google explains why it happens.
Online Store Maintenance Price: What the Checkout Adds
A store can look fine and take no orders. The card provider changes its requirements and the store needs an update to keep up, or an update loses a checkout field. Neither shows an error on the page.
The first sign is orders dropping while the traffic stays the same. On all our plans, we test the checkout from cart to payment after each update.
The online store maintenance price rises with how much the store changes, whether that's new delivery rules, seasonal pages or a promotion with its own checkout logic. When a courier changes its rates, the delivery rules have to change too. Until they do, orders keep coming in at the old price, and you pay the difference out of your margin.
Each change needs its own test order. By our estimate, that's more work than Essential's one hour covers. A store belongs on Standard or Premium.
One more cost sits outside the plan and grows with sales. Card payments carry a fee on every order: Stripe charges 1.5% + €0.25 for a standard card from the European Economic Area on a Bulgarian account.
A Skipped Year Raises the Website Maintenance Cost
Skipping the plan saves you the upkeep, about €25 to €100 a month by our estimate, and pushes the cost to later, all in one bill. You still pay for hosting somewhere. The updates pile up, and every security update nobody installs is a hole attackers already know about.
A hacked site can end up with "This site may be hacked" beside its name in Google, and Google says a review for a site hacked with spam can take up to several weeks.
You lose leads for those weeks, and you pay for the cleanup by the hour on top: someone has to find a clean backup, close the hole and ask Google for a review.
If there's no tested backup, the fix starts from whatever survived.
The age of the site decides when a repair turns into a rebuild. PHP, a programming language many sites are built in, gives each version four years of fixes and then none. On PHP 8.2 the fixes stop on December 31, 2026, and older versions already get none.
A site several versions behind needs its code upgraded before new updates will install. Past a certain point, that upgrade costs as much as building the site again.
That's where our website redesign services come in. A redesign is priced on the same web design packages as a new site, starting at €1,500. Every old address redirects to its new page, and its Google ranking moves with it.
Questions About Website Maintenance Cost
Our plans cost €49, €129 or €349 a month, with hosting and the certificate included, and you pay month to month. When we build the site, the first month of care after launch is part of the package.
By our estimate, a store starts on Standard at €129 a month, while a brochure site fits on Essential at €49. Card fees come on top: a store taking €10,000 a month in card payments, with an average order of €50, pays Stripe about €200 a month at the standard EEA rate.
We check the contact forms and page speed once a month on every plan. A site that's down or a form that stopped sending goes to the front of the line. Premium also includes speed fixes for any page that drops below 90 on Google PageSpeed.
On our plans, €588, €1,548 or €4,188 a year, plus the domain renewal with the registrar.
