Website Maintenance Costs Explained: Everything You Need to Know

Discover the real cost of maintaining a website. Learn about the factors that affect website maintenance costs and how to reduce expenses.

Savvy business owners online often succeed because they create an estimated budget for their next major business moves, especially when it comes to website building.

Yet we’ve discovered that many of these same business owners will miss out on a BIG part of what it takes to not just build a website, but maintain it.

That’s right: we’re talking about Operating Costs.

Now, it might seem strange that successful businesses online would forget about the cost of maintaining their website after it’s been built…

…but the truth is, estimating the operating costs of your business website isn’t a commonly talked about subject among non-technical audiences.

We’ve seen it with tons of businesses who specialize in online training or coaching, or who sell digital products and content online.

They don’t anticipate the long-term costs of owning their own website, and end up being surprised when their website costs them thousands more than they thought per month!

That’s why today we want to bring you through the ongoing costs of small business website maintenance so you know exactly what you’re getting into.

Two Simple Steps to Build Your Website Budget

We’ve already hinted that there are two main elements to building your website budget: website building costs and website maintenance costs, in that order.

HINT: Always keep an eye out for monthly website maintenance packages during the budget building process!

For website building, it’s a good idea to budget for a basic website build to get a better understanding of your MVP, or your minimum viable product.

That means establishing the costs for things like back and front-end development, user experience and user interface design, as well as the overall cost of building your website’s dashboard and/or admin panel.

To help you do that quickly, we’ve actually created a free website calculator you can use. We also recommend you check out our 3-part guide to learn exactly how much it costs to build your website.

Then, once you’ve researched the build costs, you can begin to estimate the cost of website maintenance.

Unfortunately, some of the main categories we talk about when we talk about website maintenance costs are not so clear–like the cost of not properly utilizing your website.

As you’ll learn in this article, that means seeking out a quick cost estimate for things like website security and website hosting.

In essence, you’re looking to understand the average cost to keep your website going over the next one, five, or ten years.

Thankfully, we’ve tried to do as much of the heavy lifting for you as possible.

In the article below you’ll discover the estimated costs of investing in necessary website maintenance services like:

1. Licensing & Plugins
2. 3rd Party Apps & Integrations
3. Content Delivery Network
4. Security
5. Website Hosting

Plus, we’ve gathered 10 optional costs you can ‘add-on’ if it’s within your website maintenance budget.

That way, you can more easily determine what is going to be worth the investment now, and what can wait until a little later down the line.

Let’s get started.

Five Core Website Maintenance Costs for Your Small Business

Whatever your website build, here are the 5 base costs you need to consider when it comes to website maintenance and management fees.

These are the elements your website requires to run well, stay secure, up-to-date, and user friendly from start to finish.

Depending on which options you choose, they are also going to determine your future growth as a training, coaching, or digital product business online!

1. Website Hosting

If you’ve never heard of website hosting, don’t worry. You’ve been busy being an expert in your field, and now it’s time for a crash course!

Basically, a website host is the server on which your website runs. These hosts are how your website is made available on the World Wide Web.

The service or business on which you are planning to host your website is therefore considered your website host.

These hosting services have familiar names such as WordPress and Wix, and if you’re running a website now, it’s likely you’re already familiar with how hosting works.

That’s why in this section we want to focus more on the server maintenance costs associated with hosting–not just the cost of hosting itself.

We’ll also look at different hosting service packages, and what to expect at the highest level of service. That way you can make sure you’re getting the best service for your dollars.

What types of website hosting services are out there?

We like to think about website hosting servers like an apartment building you just moved into.

As you were shopping around for the right place to live, you probably did your best to avoid bugs or bad landlords.

Yet when you moved in, you probably discovered just how much impact your neighbors have on your new home. It could be that too many people are using the laundry room, and you can’t get your washing done; or that the man with the cold in apartment 6 has somehow infected everyone on his floor with a cough that keeps you up at night!

In much the same way, your server can be impacted by the other sites hosted there. A lot of resources could be diverted from your site to another’s, while a virus on one end could mean a virus across the whole server.

Worse yet, investing in a low-cost website host can oftentimes affect your sales.

Say for example you’re doing a marketing campaign. Very quickly you could lose sales if your server can’t sustain the big influx of visitors coming to your site. Your site gets slow, and people bounce onto the next thing that catches their attention.

That’s why we really recommend investing in a good website hosting service in your budget bracket.

Knowing that hosting services can range anywhere from $5 to $3000+ per month, you may be wondering what hosting service is going to be best for you?

Let’s take a look at your basic, managed, and fully-managed website host options, and the costs associated with these below:

Basic Web Hosting Services

Choosing a basic web hosting service is like driving a manual car. You have to do more of the legwork once you start the engine on your website build.

Because these basic plans – which can cost you around three to five dollars a month – include only minimal security and no automated server updates, you are the one behind the wheel on those back-end tasks.

Plus, more people are likely sharing the same server infrastructure as you (remember the apartment building), which means your website speed will suffer overall.

That said, if only a basic website hosting service is within your budget, then you really want to dig into the fine print of what each service is offering. Several of these providers have automatic substantial non-refundable price increases after the first year.

Just know that you may end up paying more in the long run to ‘add-on’ security options later, when you could package them in one go by upgrading to at least a managed web hosting service.

Learn How to Reduce Bounce Rates On Your Website

Managed Web Hosting Services

When you opt into a managed hosting service, you’re already getting more bang for your buck than you would a basic, unattended hosting platform.

That’s because there are more variables for you to choose from when it comes to what you want to manage for yourself, and what you want the hosting provider to manage for you.

In this category, you’ll therefore benefit from advantages such as:

Managed web hosting services thus occupy a sort of ‘middle ground’ for the web hosting element of your business, and cost can range anywhere from $15 to about $75 dollars or more.

Some of them even include options to transfer your site from your current host to their platform!

For example, as of May 2023, SiteGround has plans that start at $15 per month for basic management, whereas their top tier ‘Go Geek’ plan sits around $40 per month.

WP Engine has a similar offering for their managed website service plan, starting at about $20 per month, while their own top-tier program is around $600 per month.

Whatever you choose, this tier of hosting is a great step up into taking the load off when it comes to the labor maintenance cost of hosting your website. You are ensuring basic website optimization is handled, and that you have troubleshooting support when you need it.

That being said, you’ll likely be expected to perform the actual resolution steps yourself while their support team guides you with chat instructions or documentation links.

You’ll need some minimal technical experience and an attention to details to avoid crashing your website while resolving more complex issues.

Note that with this tier, you may still experience periods of slower performance since you’re still sharing a server with tons of people. However, these issues will only occur during peak periods of usage.

Carefully review the terms as crucial limitations are frequently included. Here are excerpts from Siteground’s terms of service in May 2023 as it relates to backups and support services which put you on the hook for any issues:

“11.20. You are responsible to make backup copies of all your content uploaded, stored, published and displayed on or through our Service(s) in a location independent of ours, and will not use our Backup Services as your sole backup.”

 

“13.1.4. If you request technical support, you agree that we may have full access to your Services and/or Content. It is your obligation to perform and store a backup of your data and files prior to requesting technical support.”

 

“14.2. You agree that you will keep independent backup copies of your Content in addition to those we maintain. If you use our Backup Services, you acknowledge and agree that due to technical reasons a backup copy may not be available for restore upon your request.”

 

“14.5. […] In the event that you are not satisfied with the outcome of any Backup Restore, it shall be your obligation to restore your files and data from your own backup. If we provide data to you from a backup, it will be provided as raw data, and you may be required to reformat that data so that it reflects a prior configuration or use. […]”

We recommend you also pay close attention to the size of the backups you’re allowed–if you’re running a large website with a ton of moving elements, you may want to consider upgrading to a plan with a larger backup limit so you don’t risk losing pages on your site.

That’s where Fully-Managed Web Hosting Services like ours come in.

View Our Website Management Plans

Fully-Managed Web Hosting Services

When you get to the higher end of website hosting, you’ll start to see fully-managed services that include managed software updates, backups, security, and more!

These enterprise-grade hosting services can range from that $600 mark with WP Engine to several thousands per month with options like WordPress.com VIP.

However, you’ll want to read the fine print. For example, WP Engine’s $600 plan doesn’t include compressed images, content updates, page creation, or plugin installs, whereas our $347 plan does.

But what is it that really makes these types of investments worthwhile?

It’s the development perks and hands-on services.

What that means is you don’t have to work alone (or from scratch) on the website maintenance aspects of your business, such as eCommerce and payment transactions.

You can effectively take a ‘hands-free’ approach to your website’s sales software, and focus on developing the digital content, products, and training you want to sell. You’ll also find added perks with these plans that include:

If you plan to have a lot of content, you’re going to want to invest in the higher-tier managed plans as soon as possible, at anywhere between $100 to $600 per month.

When it comes to higher-demand sites like membership and course sites, consider that you need a host which will support concurrent users.

“Concurrent user capacity is important, as it relates to how many ‘PHP workers’ are assigned to manage your website requests. The difficult thing is not many hosts disclose their PHP workers–just note that we only use a minimum of 12 PHP workers per site which you will want for an eCommerce, course, membership or high-traffic site.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

This will give you the dedicated resources and development labor to not just get your site off the ground, but to keep it running as you focus on other aspects of your business. You can forget about slow site performance, even if there are a lot of other businesses using the server.

“If your business is not a hobby, I would definitely recommend just getting a dedicated managed website host where you’re not sharing with anyone else, you’re secure, and where you incur less risk of getting a virus or slow website speeds.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Keep in mind that when you talk to customer service reps for a fully-managed hosting plan, you’ll discover they may provide and configure software licenses to increase your site’s capabilities, such as enabling payment plan options on your website to help with membership course transactions in particular.

These fully-managed hosting providers can be really great if you plan to have big influxes of customers at one time, say, because you’ve just launched a promotion, a new membership tier, or a live course offering.

Fully-managed service plans like ours will ensure your website can handle the heat!

The Digital Navigator Web Hosting Services

Let’s take a moment to see what a fully-managed website plan looks like behind the scenes. That way you can be sure you’re getting exactly what you bargained for where website hosting and maintenance are concerned.

For example, we’ve done extensive tests at The Digital Navigator where we will send 35,000 visitors to a site, multiple times in a row, to ensure our clients’ platforms don’t crash (and they don’t!).

This is why we consider our service more of a fully-managed hosting and maintenance service, which combines all the variable elements of your website operations (and optimization) into one simple package deal.

You get the full benefit of page development add-ons too. Whereas most hosting providers won’t do changes to your site like publishing new pages, image modification, or content development, our services include this in our plan.

As a result, you get to work closely with a hosting provider and development provider through us for the front-end aspects of your site design, while we do the legwork of licensing and updates. We also:

How can this help?

Let’s say you currently have an all-star virtual assistant who is running several aspects of your business. They’re doing great…but they’re still only one person.

With a fully-managed website hosting service, you can have a whole team handling your updates, article publications, video uploads, and quality checks, simultaneously.

That means getting your workload finished more quickly, with a much more experienced crew working in tandem with your virtual assistant to relieve pressure and possible burnout.

Our white-glove service for instance includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), where you’ll have our team of writers and developers work together to extract your subject matter expertise and turn it into great content on your behalf.

Get Help with Small Business SEO

Plus, we handle all your troubleshooting, so you can contact us for near-instant fixes and move onto the next thing.

All our services are geared towards empowering you in your business, so you can forget about the frustrations of updates, errors, bugs, or other integrations! That includes:

Remember, these add-on website maintenance perks are included with the offerings made available through the basic hosting and managed hosting categories we describe above.

We offer the whole package deal for consistent, successful website maintenance. We even have office hours so that your team can come in, ask questions, and the answers they’re looking for in real time.

Plus we provide a whole host of resources and tutorials (even a few free masterclasses) to support you on your journey to growing your online business even more.

Why do we do this?

To stay competitive in the industry, and serve our clients using every tool available to us.

It’s true: other hosting and website maintenance services see the essential perks listed above as add-on development services–not as a part of the hosting plan.

In other words, they expect you to manage the development end for tasks that you could very well outsource to the right service provider for a lower, all-in-one fee.

Just think: you could be avoiding those excessive costs where you don’t need them by choosing a web hosting provider who cares about your budget just as much as you do!

How do I get an email account with my website?

We wrote an article recently about why you should keep your website and email hosting separate, where we talk about the benefits of using a third party for your email hosting operations.

These are email providers like Google Workspace, which costs something like seven to 15 dollars a month per user.

Just remember, while it may seem easier to go with the built-in, lower-cost option, it could end up costing you in the long run. We do recommend you read our article on the subject to understand our reasons why!

2. Licenses, Plugins & Themes

When it comes to the ongoing costs of maintaining your website, you want to think about software licensing, as well as licensing and updates for the plugins you add-on to your website.

A software license is a contract between a software developer and the entity (or user) applying the software to their operations. It not only protects the developer from any negative claims that may arise from its use, but also legally binds the terms of that use. These licenses include sections on installation, support, warranties, and liability.

Plugin and theme licenses are what you pay for when you want to install a certain plugin or theme on your website. Noting that some plugins offer free and paid versions, you’ll find that most plugin licenses include support and updates. However, while they may allow you to use them without renewing the license, eventually you will have compatibility issues so it’s best to keep up with those fees.

In a nutshell, how your site functions (or how you want it to function) will determine the plugins you want to use. These plugins will then ensure you’re getting the desired functionality from your site without having to invest in a bunch of custom coding.

That means it’s possible to pay $99 a year for a plugin license, for what amounts to about $5,000 in coding costs!

“I would say that, for a general website, you’re going to pay about $300 a year for licensing, including the theme that runs your site’s look and feel. If you run a basic eCommerce website on the other hand, licensing costs run at closer to $500 to $1000 per year.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Our advice? Understand the functionality you want, and then review the options between the free and paid plugins (and custom code). Evaluate the integrations, and see which plugins you may be able to live without.

Note here that, for the plans we provide, we have evaluated the most common website functionalities and picked the best maintained, and most compatible plugins so our clients don’t have to.

So how does this apply to you?

Whether you’ve opted into the managed or fully-managed web hosting service plan, you will receive continual updates for all of the software, themes, and plugins being used to ensure their compatibility and usability through your host, e.g. WordPress.

More often than not, each of these licensing types will give you the functionality you’re looking for while reducing the risk of getting hacked.

That’s because these licenses generally give you access to coding updates and support, which are extremely useful if you are running into issues with troubleshooting–especially for plugins.

How do I manage my plugin licenses and licensing?

Say, for instance, you’re having trouble with a plugin that would take you about 50 person-hours to fix. Wouldn’t it be nice to send off a support message to get your patch automatically updated, or to learn what steps to take to cut the process time in half?

Licensing agreements often make room for this kind of interaction, and if you have one, you don’t have to pay any extra fees to get the support you need.

That said, if you get yourself a fully-managed web hosting service, they will likely call those third party software and plugin providers on your behalf, saving you a ton of money and time, and helping to avoid a lot of back and forth between technical experts and your team.

That’s great news for digital product creators and online business owners, since plugin developers are notorious for being overly technical, and even denying certain support.

They’re kind of like an insurance company that way: not only will they require a ton of technical back and forth to get what they need to solve the problem, but they’ll also point the fingers at who’s to blame for the technical issue.

If the problem is not their issue, plugin developers can argue it’s not covered by their support staff and leave you high and dry. If it is their problem, you can see how that back and forth could easily take anywhere from five days to many months to resolve!

That’s why, if you’re looking for a really simple way to access the right plugins or themes for your business, fully-managed, monthly website maintenance service packages can go a long way.

However, it may be difficult to find a provider or service which provides these licenses for you–something we take pride in doing for our clients. We’re fairly unique in our industry for doing so!

We actually provide our clients with tons of included plugins to optimize their web operations, and they get it at a discounted price through our packaged plans.

We have designated developers who are focused on site maintenance and updates across over more than 70 sites, whereby they can update one plugin, and apply it to the rest of the sites before testing.

That’s right, these packaged plans come with testing which means that any updates will be optimized before they have the chance to affect your website operations.

Breaking that down even further, our team pushes back against plugin developer lag to determine exactly what needs to be done to fix code and functionality of your website.

Oftentimes the solution is as simple as an incompatibility issue with an existing plugin–for which we can replace the plugin, or code the patch ourselves.

All this is how we are able to achieve competitive rates, and can include them in our full-service website maintenance plans. Keep in mind these perks are usually NOT included in other ‘fully-managed’ hosting plans.

How much would it cost to maintain my own website, software, and plugin licensing?

If you ended up opting into a basic service plan, and need to coordinate licensing and updates yourself, you can estimate the cost of website maintenance as follows:

First, depending on how frequently you want to commit to updates, you should budget for a few hours of labor per month at your regular developer rates.

Note that a lot of developers charge anywhere from $100 to $200 an hour. That’s why I would be cautious of developers who come at a cheaper rate. Make sure you ask them about their process–especially their testing process.

If they’re not testing, then it’s possible that your site will experience security issues.

Here, it’s important to think again about security if you went with an unmanaged hosting plan.

If you, say, don’t have a firewall that protects your plugins from vulnerabilities, you’re going to have to do updates every day, which quickly eats up the majority of your website maintenance budget.

This intense update schedule can sometimes have business owners simply accept that they will have security gaps in their website, all without considering the true cost-benefit of closing them.

That’s why if you find a great team to support these daily or weekly maintenance updates that is also within your budget, you’ll be batting a thousand!

Chances are, you’ll end up saving way more by preventing security flaws than you will having to patch them up later down the line.

What plugins do I need to sell digital products and content online?

There are about eight plugin categories we think you need to fill to have the best possible user experience for your website, and for your team–even if you’re just a team of one! They include:

1. Security. I put security first because many business owners online think they can skip security. Yet in today’s online market, the risk of losing business days from your website being down, or of missing out on sales because your payment system was hacked is just not worth it. Especially when these are completely avoidable issues you can pay to make go away in advance! If you’re running a small business website and need help with security maintenance, we suggest planning for between $130 a year on the low end, or $500 a year for specialized security advantages. Keep in mind, however, that this is the software cost, and doesn’t include the labor needed to monitor the security software. The math is simple: add up the software cost as well as an estimate for five hours of development time per month.
2. Contact Forms. These are the forms you can embed into your website to collect contact information from site visitors. You can pay $0 for something like Contact Form 7, but it comes at the risk of losing all your form entries, since they don’t save these entries to a database. We recommend using the gold standard for contact forms, such as GravityForms at about $259 per year. While NinjaForms (for WP Forms) may seem like the better option at $599, we prefer GravityForms over and over again.
3. Analytics. As with your forms, you can find analytics options that cost $0, like Google Analytics–however these analytics can breach privacy laws in the US, among other flaws (like inaccurate data sampling). That’s why we always recommend going for Private Analytics–something we provide in our small business website maintenance plan.Analytics. As with your forms, you can find analytics options that cost $0, like Google Analytics–however these analytics can breach privacy laws in the US, among other flaws (like inaccurate data sampling). That’s why we always recommend going for Private Analytics–something we provide in our small business website maintenance plan.
4. Lead Capture. Using your email marketing system, you can take advantage of specialized lead capture tools, and optimize them as much as you can–particularly when you start with paid advertising or when you invest more in your organic traffic (SEO, social media, email etc.). We suggest you opt for plans that range from $300 a year, to $50 a month.
5. Payment. If you are a transactional business selling digital products or digital content online, you are going to want seamless payment functionalities with a little customization room. You can start for free, say, with a basic WooCommerce plugin, you can opt into a $300 per year plan which gives you a little flexibility for customization, or up to $1000 or more for a payment system with comprehensive features.We recommend comparing the plans for WP Simple Pay, Easy Digital Downloads, or other payment systems – which you can do using this recent article we wrote on the top 8 online payment options for your business. Just remember to think about how much it will cost for an external cart system as well! These can run at about an extra $100 to $200 (with SamCart, for example) per year.
6. Affiliate. We won’t get too deep into your affiliate options, as they will change depending on what solution you choose (that’s an article for another time), but we suggest budgeting around $600 to $1200 per year.
7. Course or Membership. Depending on the learning management system you choose (we recommend LearnDash!), prices can get pretty variable. While $1200 a year is the average for what you’ll pay to host course and membership content, you can find solutions ranging anywhere from $400 to $2400–just know that in most cases, the $400 option works just as well.And don’t forget, if you’re not looking to set-up course hosting on your own and just want to make courses, you may have to find an external developer to help; that is, if you don’t have a fully-managed hosting and maintenance service who can do that for you as a part of your plan.
8. Speed Optimization. We’ve already pointed out that speed can have a huge effect on your sales and website usability (see: How to Speed Up Your Website), which is why we say investing here is a must. Plan for anywhere from $60 to $500 per year for a speed optimization service, though if you’ve got a great host or website manager, you can ask them if they’ll offer you a deal for your website.

3. Third party apps and integrations

Some people get confused when we separate plugins from third-party integrations. That’s because they aren’t attached to your hosting platform, but instead are external applications that connect to your system.

These are integrations and apps like your email marketing software (ActiveCampaign or MailChimp), external LMS software (though we don’t recommend these), or even the web design software you maintain such as a landing page builder, etc.

Still, we recommend you be wary when it comes to adding third-party integrations (besides email, which should be separate) when you may already have everything you need as a plugin.

Why?

Here’s what our top technical expert (and founder) Pol Cousineau has to say on the subject:

“Sure, LMS software like Kajabi or Udemy are popular, and they do allow you to create online courses and membership areas. But when you try and connect those options to WordPress or your hosting platform, you may find yourself spending more money to integrate these features. As well, there are typically limitations to what you can integrate into your website from an external, third-party LMS, and you won’t be able to brand it like you want to.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

That said, if you are interested in engaging with third-party apps and integrations, you can easily budget for what that will cost ahead of time.

Here’s a little breakdown of the costs we found for the top integration options for your website, as of May 2023:

4. Security

When we talk about website security as a part of website maintenance costs, we’re referring to your backups, your firewall, your malware removal and protection.

These are the ultra-essential elements that act like the ‘save’ button on an important document. When they’re ‘on’, you can rest assured that all your assets are safe!

However, a lot of people think security can ‘wait until later’. That’s like saying you’ll deal with a shoplifter later, and then being surprised when they hit your store again!

That’s why we’re adamant that the ongoing security costs for your website are worthwhile. It’s a simple price to pay to keep your customers, content, and website safe and secure.

Learn How to Improve Website Security

Website Backups

First things first: your backup. As we already mentioned, if you’re working with a managed hosting service tier (or above), then you likely already have access to backups.

However, when you’re running a backup you want to make sure it’s outside of the server that you’re using for your host.

What that means is, if something happens on your hosted server, the backup is external to that. It won’t be affected by the same problems the server is experiencing. That way you can recover and deploy your website backup on another server (or on the same one).

If you’ve opted for a basic hosting plan and are handling and hosting your own website, we would therefore recommend putting aside about $20 a month. Then, if you grow in size – offering more articles and eCommerce courses – then you should plan for about $50 to $100 a month.

Keep in mind most prices are content-dependent, and will continue to grow. The more data you have, the more data you’ll have to backup, the more storage you’ll need for your security plan.

“At The Digital Navigator we provide 30 days of daily backups so that we can go to multiple versions in the event of needed updates or server issues. If you’re storing that all yourself, it’s going to be quite a bit in terms of storage–not to mention the cost of the license for the backup tool you’re utilizing.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Whatever the case may be, read the fine print of your backup security options. Learn whether you’re supposed to provide the external backup yourself, and how much storage you have available for backups.

Understand, too, that if your website is bigger than your backup capacity, then your backup may actually fail. That’s why we always recommend you run experiments with your backups (or have your developer do so) to understand more about backup recovery.

How much do I budget to do my own website backups?

We’d estimate around $200 to $300 for monthly labor for your developers to run recovery tests.

At the same time, you’ll pay somewhere between $50 to $150 annually in software costs. Keep in mind that on the low end you’re likely looking at a plugin that exists on your site server–not the best option. On the higher end is a server with external backup software, which is more in line with our recommendation.

As for storage, you’re looking at anywhere from $3 to $30 a month for storage, running anywhere from 5 GB to 50 GB.

PS: If you’re wondering how much storage you need for your website, know that most people require about 5GB of storage, while your average course creator with a lot of content will run about 15GB.

Firewalls

Firewalls are what prevent people (or programs) from attacking your website.

Remember, your website has value, and you want to protect it against service attacks that are trying to ‘open’ or ‘close’ different doors to your website.

Firewalls therefore protect against stolen payment information, or the blocking of certain countries or users from accessing your site.

There are multiple types of firewalls, like the one installed in WordPress. However, everytime WordPress comes to your defense, it does drain a little power from your website, using up resources and slowing down usability.

Instead we recommend trying a server-side firewall, which starts at about $25 a month, while comparing functionality to a more expensive service like Cloudflare. We also recommend using multiple firewalls (we do) to protect you.

Whatever you choose, the goal is to provide the external capabilities to protect your website, using external resources so your site isn’t affected by the firewall activity.

Malware Removal and Protection

More often than not, malware removal will be included as a part of your firewall service, or will offer it as an add-on for the service you’re getting.

We say, it’s well worth the protection. That way, if something happens and you get infected, you are less likely to have to pay a different fee for a fix.

If you don’t have a malware removal option with your firewall, then you can check out other providers who will clean your site for upwards of $300.

5. Content Delivery Network

We’ve talked about the importance of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in a previous article about increasing website conversions, which is just one benefit of using one.

What is a Content Delivery Network?

In non-technical terms, your content delivery network brings the server hosting your site ‘closer’ to your site visitor. It’s what gives your site a needed performance boost, and a ton of SEO advantages–not to mention increased compatibility with different browsers.

“When you don’t use a CDN, too many requests can clog up your server ‘lanes’ like a highway. If a website is over-saturated, everyone on the website will experience lag when your page loads.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

The cost of a CDN depends on whether you are doing it separately, or as a part of your hosting package. For example, we provide CDNs for our hosted clients, which helps us create multiple servers across the globes for ultra-simple international access.

This is especially important for businesses who are delivering big assets over a large distance.

Thankfully, a separate CDN is inexpensive, even if you’re looking for high quality. You can find one for as low as $10 a month, though these options might mean you have to do more work with configuration. We recommend spending about $25 a month or more for a top service.

How Much Does It Cost to Maintain My Website?

When you calculate the estimates we’ve given you above, your basic website maintenance costs will be anywhere between $1,500 and $9,000+ per year.

This is the absolute minimum you’ll spend to properly maintain the different elements of your eCommerce, digital product or training website…

…if you seek a website maintenance service other than The Digital Navigator!

That’s because our plans are designed to save you thousands of dollars a year in website maintenance fees!

Before moving on, take a moment now to consider how you feel about those costs compared to ours.

Make a plan for how much you’ll have to sell to achieve these costs per month. Is that doable for your current business?

If you’re not quite sure, or if (like some clients when they first meet us) you are panicking about what it’s going to cost, we recommend giving an expert a call.

You might know someone in your network, or you can book a consultation with any of our technical experts to ask more about how to make sure you’re investing your fund properly for website maintenance…especially if you’re a small business!

Otherwise, if you’re ready, let’s move forward to look at ten more costs we think you should consider into your ongoing website maintenance budget.

Even if you don’t choose all (or any of them), this list should provide you with a greater understanding of what the most successful online businesses are doing.

Nine Optional Website Maintenance Costs to Run Your Business Website

Up above we discussed the five most important costs of website maintenance for your business website.

Now, we are going to get into the costs that accrue based on what you’ll actually be doing with your website.

What we mean is, there are extra costs associated with the site maintenance you’ll be doing as a coach, mentor, trainer, shop operator or creator, including:

In theory, you could go without some of these costs–but whatever you do, you’ll want to ensure the choices that you make keep your site active.

You want to make sure you’re giving people a good reason to come back and revisit your site, again and again.

Let’s go through a few of the additional maintenance costs listed above (as well as a few more), to weigh the pros and cons for each.

1. Updating the page content and publishing new pages

Whether you’ve already created a ton of website content, or just a few assets, there is a cost benefit to refreshing the page content of your website on a regular basis.

This includes things like editing a blog post or image on your homepage, or publishing content for a new web page entirely.

Plus, depending on whether you want to hire someone to write, publish, and monitor your content for you, you can optimize the costs of creating content to sell online.

In the past we’ve explored how to create amazing landing pages, and how to create unique content for your website. We’ve even developed a free, downloadable checklist you can use to ensure the success of your landing pages.

Right now, we want to focus on the optimal spending strategy for content and page publications.

First off, know that most smaller sites will do one update a month to keep costs low. However, the more content you publish, the more updates you’ll need.

That’s because search engines like Google want to see that you’re keeping your website alive.

So, if you’re publishing more than 50 pages or articles per month, we recommend you do at least three to four updates to your website every month. For 30 or so pages, two monthly updates should be sufficient.

This can include publishing a new article, updating your about me page, among other small changes you can implement on a monthly schedule.

When it comes to social media and your email list, these added changes can give you the opportunity to send visitors back to your website. If it had just stayed the same, there would be no reason for them to revisit and engage.

What are the pros and cons of hiring a virtual assistant for content management?

When you opt to go with a virtual assistant (VA) for your content management, there are a few different costs to consider.

For example, you can look into outsourcing through different contractors across the globe for as little as $5 USD an hour, or you can go with American/Canadian rates that put you anywhere from $25 to $150 an hour.

Your VA rate is all going to depend on who you are working with, and there are advantages and disadvantages to every price point along the spectrum.

If you decide to go offshore for your VA, you want to make sure you know exactly what you need to accomplish, and that you’re able to explain it in a way that is clear and informative via distance.

We also recommend that you determine specific measurables for the success of that VA to determine what separates a good job from a great job. It provides you with a security measure to approve your VA’s work.

“What I’ve seen from hiring offshore is that most virtual assistants will perform updates and make visual changes on the frontend, but not the backend. Either that, or they won’t have compressed the images they’ve input on your site. This can add unnecessary weight to the code, and cause incompatibilities and/ or speed loss across multiple devices. These problems start to cost more as they accumulate–something we like to avoid by working with your virtual assistant. We not only give them full-scope access to our team at The Digital Navigator, but we can also provide tutorials, guides, and video recordings to ensure everything is running smoothly.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

What we do at The Digital Navigator is to provide full access to guides and tutorials to what we’re doing, so you know exactly what to expect from our work.

We also have an entire team of remote assistants, developers, and administrative staff that are consistently available to our clients and their team.

Depending on their needs, we take the wheel and ‘do it all’, or we train their team and collaborate on tasks and projects moving forward.

In combination, our available resources help you understand the entire process of ongoing website maintenance and hosting for small businesses. You can ask questions, there is live chat support, and a full-fledged customer service platform if you come into any issues.

Our higher tier service plans also give clients the option to do several routine duties a week. Our clients (or their teams) send us several requests per week, and we perform all updates on their behalf.

On the other hand, if they want to undertake some of the tasks on their own, we are still there to provide video (and even live) instructions for how we completed the task in the past.

This is actually how we empower some of our clients with a vision for professional development, instead of just website maintenance. Once they learn the process we’ve implemented, they can use their time with us for other queries, concerns, and update requests.

How much does it cost per month to create new page content for my digital business?

There are a few elements of page creation you’ll want to consider when estimating cost, including developer time and time for content creation. Here’s a simple breakdown plus some extra tips to help your budget process:

On top of these calculations, note that you have the option to hire a designer with experience in Figma or Adobe (or others) at about five to ten hours per month at anywhere from $20 to $150 per hour. If you have more complex pages or want that content optimization again, you’ll be looking at ten to 20 hours at around the same rate scale.

To save some money, you can purchase stock images for your blog assets. On the other hand, for really professional unique work, you can always hire your own professional photographer to create image or video content.

Otherwise, you can seek out a hosting and maintenance company like The Digital Navigator, who include website edits, writing, and publishing as a part of our monthly service plans.

Get Help with Content Marketing

2. Designing image assets for your site

We talked earlier about creating new updates and content on a monthly basis. In doing so, you’ll want to budget about $10 to $100 a month. If you are sourcing content yourself, keep in mind there is a labor cost to that as well.

When it comes to image creation specifically, you can simply buy images from DepositPhotos or any other stock images website.

You can also take original photography – which can really set your brand apart from others in the space, or choose to have your designer do image selection for you. However, this type of task tends to build up your design costs overall. That’s why there is a big cost benefit to doing image sourcing yourself.

Whatever the case may be, we recommend you use some of your own time to figure out the best process for designing your website assets–both when you’re just starting a new venture, and as you grow that venture along the way.

That means digging deep into what is a UI kit, and how to use a UI kit efficiently to make updates and redesign choices a breeze.

Believe it or not, you will end up saving a ton of time with website design and maintenance over the long run when you know all there is to know about designing your website pages, buttons, forms, and more.

Learn How to Create Your Own UI Kit

3. Digital content writing

Some people get confused here. Didn’t we already add up the cost for content creation above?

The difference is in the details–where before we were talking about page content, now we are talking about the content you write as a part of your marketing and SEO strategy.

These are the articles, blog posts, quizzes, podcasts, and other consumable content available through your site. Ideally you’ll want to be publishing two to three pieces of content on your website per month.

This is what is going to start you toward your process of getting higher rankings in search engine results.

Of course, not everyone has the time to produce that much content, so we recommend doing at least one 2000 word article every month for good results.

Whether you are hiring a writer for updated page content and consumable digital content, you will want to consider their rate as you budget for this element of ongoing website maintenance.

Let’s say for instance your writer is costing you $30 an hour, and it takes them 15 hours to write the 6000-word article you requested. That means a budget of $450 for that article, multiplying that by how many articles you want per month.

Remember, in most cases these rates will include search engine optimization and expert research into your topic–however if your writer does not offer SEO, then you may want to provide the search terms you want embedded in your content during the assignment phase.

If you aren’t all-too familiar with search engine optimization yourself, then we do have a few resources to help you out. First and foremost, you’ll want to get started with an understanding of what is SEO, and how it impacts your website’s visibility.

Then, you can begin learning how to design and implement great SEO strategies with your content to drive traffic, sales, and marketing efforts all in one go!

What if my writer doesn’t do Search Engine Optimization?

If you’ve found a great writer, they’ll be honest with you about how much they know about SEO optimization.

Some writers already have the tools in place to find out the top ranking search terms for your topic, and you can offload that to them for a bit of a higher rate.

However, you also have the option to choose an SEO tool like ahrefs or Semrush.

Note that while on average you’ll pay around $200 a month for full-scope SEO capabilities, some of the cheaper options you can find may be $20 a month or less (as of early 2023).

It really just depends on how much legwork you want to do manually, and whether you want to delegate SEO to a VA or writer already on your team. Here’s how we like to break it down in-house:

If there are too many variables here to consider, go ahead and generalize your estimate to 75 billed hours per month between your writer/editor and the SEO specialist or developer.

All that said, we believe choosing a package deal from content creation professionals can be most advantageous, especially if you’re already making upwards of $100K from website sales per year.

If you can find a team that does your maintenance, hosting and content creation like The Digital Navigator, we recommend you jump on the opportunity for huge cost savings, and a ton of avoided technical headaches. Just make sure you know what to expect at each price point.

For example, depending on the specializations of each agency, and the effort they take to know your business, you’ll quickly learn…

As you can see, depending on your content output, and the level of search engine optimization you want included in your writing systems, hiring a professional, or a team of professionals, can range anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000+ a month.

At The Digital Navigator, our higher-end packages (at around $3,500 a month) include all the SEO, linking, content planning, and more. We get our writers to interview you for your subject matter expertise, and then do the rest of the heavy lifting ourselves to make it accessible and SEO-friendly.

That way, our clients can concentrate more on creating the material that really makes them sales–like videos, courses, and more.

Learn How to Make More Money With Content

4. Deploying marketing campaigns

Marketing campaigns can either make or break your profit margin. This is the element of your business that will get customers to your website, and buying your courses and digital products.

As with the other optional add-ons in this list, we have a whole host of dedicated resources to help you build the best possible marketing funnel for each of your products. We’ve got funnel templates you can download, and an expert guide for how to market your digital content for more sales.

For now, let’s talk about what goes into a marketing campaign, and how much you should set aside for this integral part of your online business operations.

First, your website marketing will include creating sales pages and check-out pages for your products using limited time offers and coupons.

You’ll also be including promotional marketing through email and social media–each of which are very important elements of any marketing campaign.

In consideration of the importance of these services, we recommend budgeting about 10% of your annual revenue on marketing campaigns – and that’s just for general marketing.

Noting that a lot of our clients are content providers, meaning they have courses, online classes, and membership or coaching opportunities available, a lot of marketing campaigns will include extra funds for paid advertising during new masterclass releases.

For those types of business, we’ve seen huge returns when marketing budgets are as high as 40 to 50% of revenue.

This number may seem surprising, and even daunting, but we have a ton of quantifiable proof that shows this type of spending strategy has a HUGE payoff in the end. Just look at these three case studies where we saw…

As you can see, measured investments in your marketing campaigns can have infinite payoffs for your annual revenue. So much so that you won’t even see the expenditures on ads and marketing involved.

5. Opportunity cost

This is an often-overlooked element of ongoing website maintenance that we recommend you allocate part of your budget for. It is sort of like the ‘priceless’ component of doing business.

Essentially, businesses can maximize their revenue by outsourcing and delegation, meaning they can have more than one moving part going at once.

When instead businesses online choose to do all the work on their own, they are effectively cutting themselves off at the knees, reducing the strength of your initial website investments.

Of course, when you’re just getting started there are not a lot of extra funds going around to hire all these people. Yet you’re still spending a lot of valuable time not only learning to create, manage, publish, and market content, but also to learn all about the software and tools needed to do so.

What we predict is that – as you begin to realize how much work goes into building a successful digital product, coaching, training, or membership business – you’ll soon discover how much you’re over-spending on labor.

Instead, you could be making MORE money simply by outsourcing!

In short, as soon as you can afford to add another support service to your website maintenance total, do it!

It’ll save you a ton of time, money, and technical headaches in the long run…and if you find the right service, you’ll still be learning a lot as a business owner from your newly hired team.

6. Code updates

We talked a little bit about software updates above and how they can be integrated into your security plugins. Here, we are talking about the code that is utilized on the backend to keep your site running–this needs to be updated as well, particularly if you have integrated any custom code into your website.

For example, WordPress functions on a PHP codebase, which, when it gets updated, requires similar updates to custom code, plugins, teams, and functions to ensure they remain stable under this new environment.

Depending on the code base your host uses, you can usually check to see a schedule of when your current code will be updated. With PHP, you could for example google “PHP End of Life”, which will tell you that PHP code is updated about once a year.

What we recommend doing here is to ensure that custom code and other required updates are logged in an easy-to-use table or spreadsheet. Then, when the next code update happens, you can have your developer upgrade to the latest version to ensure the site is working properly using that information.

Remember, the risk of not updating your site is huge. If an element of your code doesn’t work, certain website elements won’t work or your site may crash entirely.

That’s why we say you should plan for about $500 a year to update the code library of your website, presuming you have minimal custom coding as it could otherwise run you in the thousands of dollars per year.

7. Domain registrar

Sometimes new business owners start with their domain registration right away, buying the domain they want before anything else in the business. This is the name that people will type in to seek out your website online, like thedigitalnavigator.com.

What some of these same businesses forget is that there is a registration fee to maintain ownership of that domain in the long term. The price of this registration fee is usually about 15 to 20 dollars a year, give or take–however you’ll find that some domains are much more expensive than that.

For example, a dot io address is likely to be more expensive than a dot ca or dot org web address, and may get up to $50 a year for registration (as of May 2023).

However, we also believe that investing in a more popular URL tag will support the accessibility and visibility of your site. Stick with what’s familiar to you, like a dot com address, and likely your clients will find it familiar too!

8. Transactional emails

Sure, sure, we’ve expressed how we feel about email marketing and how you can spend money wisely to get the most sales out of that marketing. Yet there is a certain type of email that you can automate once and never think about it again: transactional emails.

Transactional emails are the kind of emails that are automatically delivered to recipients when they have a lost password for example, or when they sign up to receive your newsletter. These emails get sent by the website, and you have little or no need to monitor their comings and goings.

Yet, we see a lot of people skip these emails when it comes to branding their website. It has us wondering why they would go through all the effort, when there are some great benefits to personalizing these transactional emails as well–particularly customer appreciation.

That said, we do still recommend you separate as many email streams from your website host as possible.

You want to keep your email host and your website host separate since these emails more often go to junk folders on the customer end. They’ll also get messed up or lose authority if your site goes down, particularly if you are on a shared server that gets hit with malware or a virus.

Whatever you choose, the costs of these transactional emails are variable. They depend on the amount of time you want to invest in customization, and the extent to which you will send transactional emails.

Just know that once they are in place and you’re happy with the results, the annual cost of making updates or changes is negligible to null!

All of our managed website performance plans at The Digital Navigator include transactional emails from a dedicated provider that exists outside the hosting server utilized for your site.

9. Data analysis and capture

Last on this short list of optional website maintenance costs for your coaching, training, or membership site is data analysis and capture.

Chances are, you’ve heard (and even learned) a ton about data analytics, yet as new regulations continue to advance the world of online privacy, it’s best to be prepared.

That means getting into an analytics service that maintains a private data network as opposed to public, i.e. The Digital Navigator private analytics platform vs. Google Analytics.

You may have to discuss with your team the cost benefits of using an analytics platform that protects your customers. Sure, Google Analytics is free, but you’ll face a ton of limitations using it in, say, Europe.

It may also be true that it’s just not in the budget yet; however, when it comes to risking private information, the cost of regulatory fines may outweigh what it would cost to host your analytics privately–this is in fact why we offer that private service at all.

Which isn’t to say data analytics services are a bank-breaker; it’s actually not that expensive to incorporate this functionality into your business operations online. (Think of it like customer research).

On the lower end of data analytics, you might pay something like $20 a month. However if you are running a digital product or content business online, we recommend looking for a system at around $100 to $200 per month, which will give you access to detailed analytics assessments and reporting.

In essence, the data helps you understand what people are doing with your website, while the analyst helps you determine what to do about it.

If you’re not exactly an expert at user research, we also recommend budgeting to have someone who can analyze your results and provide actionable feedback and recommendations about what to do with that data.

These recommendations can be critical to help you decide where you want to invest your precious capital for digital content and product creation, or whether you need to start thinking about a website revamp or new SEO strategy.

That’s actually what we do at The Digital Navigator–again, to make it easier for our clients to operate online as an all-in-one service data analytics platform. Our data analytics team works with clients on marketing campaigns and digital product building using the information gathered from user research.

If you do insist on doing the analysis yourself, then we would say to bone up on your user research knowledge for sites in your niche. If you prefer to delegate the task internally, plan for about 10 hours of data analytics work a month based on their salary or hourly rate.

Profitable Add-Ons for Your Online Business

To help you paint the picture of your budget options for the above-listed website maintenance fees, let’s compare these estimates with what you can get when you come online with The Digital Navigator:

Service Type	Average Cost	Advanced Cost	The Digital Navigator Avg. Cost
Licensing & Plugins	$220	$780	Included
Website Hosting	$75	$600	Included
Security	$78	$430	Included
Content Delivery Network	$10	$25	Included
3rd Party Apps & Integrations	$164	$990	Included
Data Analytics	$20	$1,500	Included
Content Creation	$500	$6,000	Variable
Site Content Updates	$500	$3,000+	Included
Code Updates	$40	$166	Included
Marketing Campaigns	$833**	$3,333***	Variable
Online Payment System	$166*	$833**	Included
Search Engine Optimization	$500	$1,500	Variable
TOTAL	$3,107	$19,157	$347

*Total represents 2% of average annual income at $100K

**Total represents 10% of average annual income at $100K

***Total represents 40% of average annual income at $100K

If you’re a small business, this can seem daunting at first, but we want to encourage you to invest now so you’re not fumbling around later.

Remember, we include almost all of these services in our inclusive plans, so you don’t have to manage each element separately and spend valuable time figuring it all out!

If, however, you’re a bigger business with a great product (or great products) in your wheelhouse, then you may want to consider a few more of these profitable investments for online businesses.

We won’t go in-depth here (that’s for a future article), but for now that means looking at things like:

So long as you do your research, and streamline operations where you can, you’ll continue to minimize the opportunity costs of running your website for pure profit and potential passive income!

Audit My Website for Improvement Recommendations

So, DIY or Small Business Website Maintenance Service?

At this point, you may be wondering whether your website is worth all the work.

This is especially true if you’re just starting out and only have a few solid clients under your belt.

Will all this investment really pay off in the end? Or am I gambling with an investment that I’m never going to get back?

We really understand what that feels like, which is why we want to conclude this article with the one opinion that lies at the heart of our entire operation:

That’s because you (and your team) will be spending less time with technical headaches, and more time communicating with experts who you are paying to solve all your problems online.

This can be a huge boon for non-technical people who just want to do what they love, and have someone else run the wheels of their website for them.

Having someone on your side who wants to make your life easier while operating online is a huge advantage for those moments when you may feel close to website burnout. For instance, we:

• Save our clients tons of time
• Perform all the technical (and non-technical!) tasks they don’t like to do
• Submit all plugin, theme, license, software, and security support cases on their behalf
• Provide resources like guides, videos, and tutorials to help with running the business
• Double-check published pages and content for quality assurance and optimization

It’s just overall a great way to optimize, design, create, and maintain your website from start to finish!

So, what’s your decision? Do you think you’ll DIY some of your services, or go with a maintenance service like The Digital Navigator?

We recommend you take some time to think about it, but want you to know that we’re always here to chat and can absolutely take a look at your website to give you insight on where you need to go next. We can even give you more insight on how to budget for your business vision!

Until then, we’re so excited that you’re continuing on your journey to making more money online, using your very own expertise. Our methods continue to prove that in this day and age, it’s still possible to pull in huge revenue from content and digital products online.

You just have to make sure you’re smart enough to plan, and are prepared to accept help from others along the way. We know you’ll do amazing things, whatever you choose!

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