How much does small business website maintenance cost?
Care is $250/month and Managed is $850/month. Neither one has a setup fee on an existing site. If I am building the site too, Pro bundles the maintenance and the search work at $399/month with a one-time $2,500 build fee.
What do your website maintenance plans include?
Care covers hosting, SSL, backups, updates, uptime and security monitoring, and up to 2 small content edits a month. No strategy, no reporting, no calls.
Managed adds monthly content and page updates, Google Business Profile management and review generation, local SEO maintenance and rank tracking, a monthly one-page numbers email, and a quarterly in-person visit.
What is the difference between Care and Managed?
Care keeps the site alive and safe. Managed puts a person to work on it. If your site is fine and you just need somebody responsible holding the keys, Care is honest and enough. If you want the site to gain ground on Google, that is Managed.
I will not sell Care as a growth plan, because it is not one.
Will you maintain a website you did not build?
Usually yes, on Care. I take a look first to make sure the site is in a state worth maintaining and that I can actually get proper access to the hosting, domain, and registrar.
If it is broken, hacked, or the last developer left it tangled, start with Website Rescue instead. Putting a monthly plan on a broken site just bills you every month for a problem nobody fixed.
Do you handle monthly website maintenance for WordPress sites?
Yes, and it is more work than the sites I build. WordPress has a core, a theme, a database, and usually a dozen plugins, and every one of them needs updates that can break something else. If you're doing it yourself in the meantime, how to speed up WordPress and, for stores specifically, how to speed up WooCommerce cover the fixes that actually move the needle.
The sites I build are static HTML. No plugins to patch, no database, no login page for anyone to attack. Same plan price either way, but a static site is genuinely quieter to keep.
How often do you update the website?
Content updates happen same day or next business day when you send them. Security and performance checks happen monthly. Automated monitoring watches the site around the clock and alerts me if it goes down, usually before you notice.
Can I just pay for hosting and skip the rest?
You can buy hosting anywhere for a few dollars a month. That is not maintenance, it is a server. Nobody is renewing the certificate, testing the backups, applying updates, or answering the phone when the form stops sending.
If cheap hosting plus your own attention is genuinely the right call for your budget, take the checklist and run it yourself. I would rather you do that than pay me for something you do not need.
Do I need maintenance if my site is simple?
Yes. Even a simple site needs hosting, SSL, domain renewals, and someone to call when you need a change. The good news is that simpler sites need less active firefighting than complex WordPress sites, so more of the monthly goes toward keeping things running instead of putting out fires.
Can I cancel?
Yes. Month to month on a simple service agreement, no long-term lock-in. Cancel anytime with 30 days notice.
What is not covered by a maintenance plan?
Redesigns, new pages built from scratch every month, new features like booking or a cart, and the operations work around ads, product feeds, and conversion tracking. Those are projects or a bigger monthly tier. See what is not maintenance above, or the retainer tiers.
