What maintenance includes
- Security updates for the system and plugins, because vulnerabilities are published openly and exploited automatically.
- Backups that are occasionally restored, because a backup never tested is not a backup.
- Uptime and certificate monitoring, so you do not learn from a customer that the site is down.
- Small content edits: prices, opening hours, a new service, a new gallery.
- Periodic checks of speed and mobile errors.
Market ranges
For a small brochure site, maintenance usually runs from around twenty to fifty EUR a month, plus hosting. For a business site with several languages and regular edits, fifty to a hundred and fifty is more realistic. Stores are a separate matter, because alongside the system you maintain payments, shipping and the catalogue, so the plan is built to scope. The other model is a monthly plan covering build, hosting and support in one figure, described on the pricing page.
What happens to a site without maintenance
It does not break immediately, and that is the trap. First the system ages, then a plugin stops working with a new PHP version, then an error appears that nobody sees because nobody is watching. The most expensive scenario is a break-in through a known hole: the site starts serving somebody else pages, Google flags it as unsafe, and at that point you are not paying for a repair but for lost trust. Recovering from that routinely costs more than several years of maintenance.
When you do not need it
If the site is entirely static, with no content management system, no forms and no payments, there is nothing to update and hosting plus a domain is enough. That is a legitimate choice for small card sites. The moment there is a user login, a form or a payment, maintenance stops being optional.
We maintain sites we built and sites we did not, details here.