Website maintenance: what is included and what it costs

What website maintenance is and how it differs from hosting

Website maintenance is regular technical work that keeps a site running, secure and recoverable. Hosting is server rental: it does not update WordPress or plugins. A developer's warranty covers the developer's mistakes, while maintenance covers everything that changes around the site.

On the market "website administration" often means only content updates. So ask the provider what they mean by it: editing texts, technical updates or both.

What website maintenance should include

The basic list:

• WordPress, theme and plugin updates, tested before the live site
• backups stored off the same server
• security: login protection, malware scanning, an SSL certificate
• uptime and form monitoring
• PHP version tracking and small content changes

Backups follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two different media, one in another location. A backup nobody has tried to restore is only an assumption. Ask when a restore was last tested.

How much website maintenance costs

As of October 2026, the cheapest public maintenance plans in Lithuania start at €35/mo. Plans with guaranteed response times and on-call support cost from €800/mo. Most business sites sit between these extremes.

The price depends on included hours, response time, backup frequency, WooCommerce and payment integrations. Our WordPress and WooCommerce maintenance starts at €40/mo, the final price depends on the site's complexity. Work outside the plan costs €40/h.

What happens to a site without maintenance

According to Patchstack, 11,334 new vulnerabilities were found in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025: 91% in plugins, 9% in themes and just 6 in core. Almost half had no patch when they were disclosed. The risk is not WordPress core but plugins nobody updates.

In the fourth quarter of 2025 alone Wordfence blocked 13.8 billion password-guessing attacks. The second risk is slower: PHP 8.2 security fixes end on 31 December 2026. Hosts raise the PHP version, and an unmaintained site often breaks afterwards.

How to choose a maintenance provider: what to check in the contract

Before signing, check:

• the response time when the site is down
• how many work hours are included and what happens to unused ones
• how often backups are made, where they are stored and for how long
• whether updates are tested before the live site
• the contract term and notice period
• what is not included, listed specifically

The domain, hosting and admin account should be registered in your name, and the provider should get a separate user. Then you can change providers without negotiating over passwords.

Monthly plan or hourly work

Hourly work suits a brochure site you rarely change, but then updates are left to you or to nobody. A monthly plan suits a site that brings enquiries or sales: an online store, a site with forms and payments.

If a site has not been maintained for a long time, start with a €200 audit to see where to begin. If it is too old to fix, we cover that in the article on when to update an old WordPress site. Get in touch.