We have a maintenance department looking after sites from single-page brochures to large multi-page builds. The plan scales; the monitoring and backup discipline does not change.
Website maintenance keeps your site updated, backed up, secure, and fixed when it breaks — on a flat monthly plan instead of emergency invoices. Our plans are built for small-business and WordPress sites, every plan is month-to-month, and your site, hosting, and backups stay in your name the whole time. Industry-wide, real maintenance plans run roughly $50–$1,500/month depending on what the site does; your exact flat rate comes back the same business day you ask.
The plans
Three plans, one flat monthly rate each — quoted in writing the same business day, no “custom quote” wall, no meter. Pick by how much your site does, not by how nervous a sales page made you. (For market calibration: basic-tier plans across the industry run about $50–$300/month, lead-generating sites $300–$800, and ecommerce $500–$1,500.)
| Basic | Pro | Ecommerce | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Brochure sites that need to stay healthy | Sites that generate leads and change monthly | Stores where downtime is lost revenue |
| Core, plugin & theme updates | Monthly | Weekly | Weekly + staging tests before deploy |
| Backups | Weekly, off-site | Daily, off-site | Daily + pre-change snapshots |
| Security & uptime monitoring | Included | Included | Included, with priority alerts |
| Content edits & small fixes | — | Monthly hours included | Expanded monthly hours included |
| Speed & broken-link checks | Quarterly | Monthly | Monthly |
| Response time | Same business day | Same business day | Same business day, priority queue |
Cancel in one email. Every plan is month-to-month, and your final backup is yours to download on the way out — no export fee, no hostage files.
WordPress maintenance services
Most of the sites we maintain run WordPress, and most maintenance disasters we’re hired to undo are WordPress-specific: a plugin auto-update that broke checkout, a theme abandoned by its developer, a hack that got in through software eleven versions behind. WordPress maintenance on our plans means updates are applied deliberately — tested, sequenced, and reversible via the pre-change snapshot — not left to auto-update roulette. If your site runs on Squarespace or Wix, you genuinely need less of this; we’ll say so rather than sell you a plan.
What’s included in website maintenance vs hosting
Hosting is the server your site lives on; maintenance is the labor that keeps the site itself healthy. Hosting companies keep the server running — they don’t update your plugins, fix your forms, restore your content after a bad update, or notice that your contact page has been erroring for three weeks. That gap between “the server is up” and “the site works” is exactly what a maintenance plan covers. We’ll work with the hosting you have, or recommend better hosting in your account, never ours.
How the first month works — taking over any site safely
Every plan starts the same way, whoever built the site and however long it’s been unattended:
- Access and inventory. We locate and document every login — hosting, domain registrar, WordPress admin, plugin licenses — into your password manager. If a previous developer holds any of them, recovering access is part of the setup, not a billable surprise.
- Snapshot before touching. A full verified backup — files and database — stored off-site, restore-tested. Nothing gets updated until the undo button provably works.
- The health pass. Software versions, security scan, speed reading, form tests, broken-link sweep. Everything found goes into the state-of-the-site summary: one page, plain English, no jargon penalty for having neglected the site.
- The catch-up plan. If the site is badly behind, we sequence the catch-up updates over the first weeks — tested, not dumped — and tell you if anything needs project-level work beyond the plan before we do it.
From month two onward, the plan runs on its published cadence and you get a short monthly note: what was updated, what was caught, what’s worth watching.
Maintenance for small-business websites
If nobody at your company “owns” the website, you’re our typical client. The pattern we see: the site was built two or three years ago, the person who built it moved on, and now nobody knows the logins, the last backup date, or whether the forms still send. The first month of every plan fixes that specifically — we document logins into your password manager, verify a real backup exists and restores, test every form, and hand you a one-page state-of-the-site summary in plain English.
Maintenance and your rankings
Maintenance isn’t SEO, but neglect is anti-SEO: hacked sites get flagged and deindexed, slow sites bleed rankings as speed metrics decay, and broken pages erode the crawl trust that took months to earn. A maintained site protects whatever search position you’ve built — which is why every plan includes the speed and broken-link checks, and why our small business SEO services clients are on a maintenance plan by default. Growth work on an unmaintained site is pouring into a leaking bucket.
Shopify maintenance
Shopify handles its own core software, so “maintenance” there means something narrower: theme updates without losing customizations, app audits (most stores pay for apps they stopped using), speed checks, and small fixes. It’s included in the Ecommerce plan, and it pairs with our Shopify SEO services for stores that also want to grow, not just stay online.
What “maintained” actually prevents — the four expensive failures
A maintenance plan is insurance priced against four specific disasters, so here’s the actuarial table in plain English. The hack: most small-site compromises come through outdated software, and recovery — cleanup, blacklist removal, reputation repair — routinely costs more than years of maintenance. The silent break: a form that stopped sending, a checkout erroring on one browser; nobody complains, revenue just quietly stops. Monitoring plus monthly form tests exist for exactly this. The lost site: no backup, a failed update, a hosting account nobody can access — the site is simply gone, and it’s the most common rescue call we get. The slow rot: speed decaying update by update until rankings and conversions sag. None of these announce themselves; that’s the entire argument for a plan over a panic.
Site down? Emergency and rescue work
We take rescue jobs — hacked sites, white screens, “the developer disappeared” — as fixed-quote projects, whether or not you ever join a plan. Honest note: rescue almost always costs more than a year of maintenance would have. We’ll quote the fix straight, and you’re free to take the fixed site elsewhere; most people who’ve been through a rescue choose a plan afterward without being asked.
You own every account. Always.
Your website, domain, hosting, Google Ads, Analytics, Search Console, and Business Profile are set up in accounts you own, in your name, with you as admin. We work inside them with our own logins. If we ever part ways, you change one password and everything stays exactly where it belongs: with you.
The exit terms, in one sentence
Everything we sell is month-to-month: email us before your next billing date, pay nothing further, and keep everything we built — that is the entire cancellation policy.
You talk to the people doing the work
No handoff to a junior account manager. The person you meet on the first call is the person who works on your account, and you hear back the same business day.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need maintenance if my site “never changes”?
The site’s content may never change; its software changes constantly underneath it — WordPress core, plugins, and PHP all ship updates on their own schedules, and the security holes those updates patch get published for attackers to read. A “frozen” site is actually an aging one. The Basic tier exists precisely for never-changes sites: keep it patched, backed up, and monitored, nothing more.
How much does website maintenance cost?
Across the industry in 2026: roughly $50–$300/month for basic keep-it-healthy plans, $300–$800 for sites that generate leads and change monthly, and $500–$1,500 for ecommerce — the spread reflects how much real labor (updates, testing, fix hours) each tier includes. Our flat rate for your site comes back the same business day, in writing.
What is the average cost of website maintenance for a small business?
There’s no trustworthy single average, because plans differ so much in what they include — “maintenance” can mean anything from automated updates to a retainer with real development hours. The honest way to compare quotes: ask each provider what happens weekly, what happens monthly, how backups are tested, and how many hours of actual fixes are included — then compare prices per answer, not per month.
What happens if I cancel?
You email us, the plan ends at the close of the billing month, and you keep everything: the site, the hosting account, the documented logins, and a downloadable copy of your latest backup. Nothing we do is designed to make leaving hard.
Can you maintain a site you didn’t build?
Yes — most sites on our plans were built by someone else. The first month’s state-of-the-site review exists precisely to take over unknown sites safely: we snapshot everything before touching anything.
Is website maintenance worth it, honestly?
For a WordPress site that takes leads or payments: almost always — one prevented failure pays for years of the plan. For a simple site on a closed platform like Squarespace, where the platform handles updates: often not, and we’ll say so. The honest test is what an hour of downtime or a lost lead costs you; if the answer is “not much,” the Basic tier or nothing may genuinely be right.
Pick a plan above, or send us your URL and we’ll tell you — same business day — which tier your site actually needs, including if the answer is the cheapest one.
Need the site rebuilt before it’s worth maintaining? Start with our web design services in Queens.