Website maintenance cost is around $100 a month for updates and backups, rising to several hundred for managed hosting, monitoring and development support, excluding GST. You need a plan if you can’t apply updates and test backups yourself, or your site takes bookings or payments. Bigfoot Web Solutions provides website maintenance in Melbourne, hosting included, with no lock-in.
The gap between a cheap maintenance plan and an expensive one is mostly in what it includes, such as the hosting, someone watching the site between updates, and time each month for changes. The figures below are our read of the Australian market in 2026, from the plans and quotes we see, not one provider’s price list. They exclude GST, which adds 10%.
How much does website maintenance cost?
Most small businesses in Australia pay from around $100 a month to several hundred to keep a website maintained. Where a plan sits in that range depends on what it covers, so the prices below follow what a plan includes.
Updates and backups cost around $100 a month. That covers WordPress core, theme and plugin updates, regular backups and a security scan, with hosting billed separately by your host.
A plan with hosting included typically costs $200 to $400 a month. Plans at this level usually add uptime monitoring and a monthly report on the site’s health.
A plan with development time typically costs $500 a month or more. A few hours of changes each month come with the fee, which suits a site the business runs on, with bookings, payments or steady traffic.
What separates plans at the same price is the work behind the fee: updates checked after they’re applied, off-site backups and test restores. Hosting is the other difference. A plan that leaves it out means a second monthly bill from your host, which our guide to what a website costs after launch covers alongside domains and licences.
What a website maintenance plan covers
What website maintenance includes depends on the plan, but most plans are built from the same parts and differ in how many of them they include.
Software kept current. WordPress core, the theme and every plugin updated, with the site checked after each update.
Backups stored off-site. Regular copies of the site kept away from the server they back up, so one failure can’t take both.
Security monitoring. Malware scans and a firewall, with alerts going to whoever looks after the site.
Uptime monitoring. A check around the clock that the site is online, so an outage is caught before customers find it.
A monthly report. What was done, what changed, and what needs a decision from you.
Hosting and development time. Some plans include the hosting in the fee, and the larger ones set aside an hour or more each month for changes to text, images or plugins.
When you can look after a website yourself
Not every site needs a plan. A brochure site with a few pages and a short list of plugins can be looked after by an owner who’s comfortable applying updates and restoring a backup to check it works.
A site that takes bookings or payments is different. Every hour it’s broken or offline costs sales, so treat a plan as insurance rather than an optional extra.
What WordPress maintenance costs
WordPress itself is free, but unlike Wix or Squarespace, whose subscriptions include the hosting and software updates, it leaves both to you or to someone you pay. What a WordPress maintenance plan pays for is that work: applying and checking updates, keeping backups and, often, the hosting.
Premium themes and plugins add their own licences, most renewing yearly. Let one lapse and its updates can stop: Elementor Pro, a common page builder, can’t be updated once its subscription runs out. Each plugin also adds to WordPress site maintenance cost, because it’s another set of updates to apply and check. Patchstack’s 2026 security report counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins, themes and core during 2025, about 31 a day, and 91% of them were in plugins.
What regular updates protect
Updates carry security fixes. WordPress’s own documentation tells site owners to keep plugins and themes on their latest versions to keep a site secure, and the same goes for PHP, the programming language WordPress runs on, which comes with the hosting.
PHP versions get security fixes for a set period, then stop. PHP’s support schedule ends security fixes for PHP 8.2 on 31 December 2026, and warns that anyone still on an unsupported version may be exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities. A site on PHP 8.1 or older is on one already.
A hacked site costs more to recover than to maintain, and the cost doesn’t stop at the clean-up. Google Search can label it This site may be hacked in its results, and hacked pages can be dropped from those results until the site is clean again.
Our website maintenance services in Melbourne include Australian hosting on every plan, daily off-site backups and updates checked after they’re applied, with no lock-in. Every account stays in your name, emails are answered within one business day, and you speak with the person doing the work.
Website maintenance cost comes down to what a plan covers and what your website does for your business. Book a 30-minute call and Bigfoot Web Solutions will look at your site with you, and you’ll find out what needs fixing before anything ongoing begins.