What Does WordPress Maintenance Cost? Pricing in 2026

“What does maintenance cost?” is the question we hear most often once someone realises that an unattended WordPress site becomes a liability over time. The short answer: between 50 and 400 € per month at an agency – depending on what is actually in the contract. The better answer: it depends on what you genuinely need, and whether the price matches what is written inside.

This article lays out what WordPress maintenance costs on the market, what a solid contract should cover, and how Codeäffchen approaches it in practice.

What WordPress maintenance costs

The market divides roughly into three price brackets:

Basic maintenance (50 – 100 € net/month): Updates for core, plugins and themes, automated backups, no dedicated contact person for questions. Fine for a site where a few hours of downtime would not be critical.

Standard maintenance (100 – 250 € net/month): Staged updates, daily backups, security monitoring, uptime checks and a monthly report. This is the bracket that makes sense for most business websites.

Premium maintenance (250 – 400 € net/month): SLA with response times measured in hours, priority support, comprehensive monitoring, and the capacity to react immediately to incidents without a separate work order.

Our WordPress maintenance comes in three fixed plans at net prices:

Plan	Price	Focus
Basic	79 € / month	Updates, backups, monitoring
Standard	149 € / month	+ Staging, security, report
Premium	249 € / month	+ SLA, priority, extended scope

All plans are monthly-cancellable after an initial three-month term. Work outside the plan scope – such as fixing a plugin conflict or a quick adjustment – is billed by the hour at 100 € per hour.

For context: an unplanned incident can easily run to four or five figures. A single emergency callout typically costs more than a full year of the Basic plan.

What maintenance should include

Not all maintenance packages are equal. Focusing on price alone sometimes means buying nothing more than a monthly automated plugin update – something WordPress can do by itself, and something that still does not qualify as maintenance.

What sensible maintenance actually delivers – and what we do in every plan:

Updates – controlled, not blind. Core, plugins and themes are kept current. For critical updates, we use a staging environment to test before pushing to the live site – so a new plugin version does not go live untested.

Backups – daily, on German servers. Daily backups stored on servers in Germany. GDPR-compliant, with no data landing on servers outside the EU. And: backups that are never tested for restore are not really backups – we check this.

Security monitoring. We track known vulnerabilities in the plugins you run and respond to critical gaps without waiting for the next scheduled maintenance window.

Uptime monitoring. If the site goes down, we know before you do – not the other way around.

Monthly report. What was done, what was found, what is coming up. No black-box contract, but verifiable documentation.

What maintenance explicitly is not: new features, design changes, or major reworks. That is project work and handled under a separate brief.

For a deeper look at what is actually covered, read What WordPress maintenance covers.

Why maintenance is not optional

WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world – and therefore the most frequently attacked. Over 90 percent of compromised WordPress sites were breached via known, already-patched security vulnerabilities. The fix existed; the site was not updated. That is the gap maintenance closes.

The nuance: WordPress updates sometimes ship weekly, and not every update is risk-free. A careless plugin update can break a site in minutes. That is why controlled, staged updates matter more than fast automatic ones.

Beyond security: PHP versions become outdated. Themes grow incompatible. TLS certificates expire. Hosting environments change. A site running perfectly today can throw errors in three months if no one is watching.

Backups are the last safety net. Without a current, tested backup, a security incident costs not just time but potentially the entire website investment.

Flat-rate vs. hourly billing

Both models have merit. The question is which fits your situation.

Flat-rate plan: A fixed monthly amount for a defined scope. Predictable for you, structured for us. No billing friction, no surprises. The downside: anything beyond the scope is charged separately, and you pay the monthly rate even in quiet months.

Hourly billing: You pay only for what actually happens. Attractive on paper, but it requires you to track booked hours and accept unpredictable monthly costs. Suitable for sites with very low and irregular maintenance needs.

Our approach: flat rate for the core scope (updates, backups, monitoring, report), hourly rate for everything beyond that. A reliable baseline with flexibility for ad-hoc requests.

What to look for in a maintenance contract

Not all contracts are equal. Before signing, check these points:

What is specifically included? Updates alone do not make a maintenance contract. Verify that backups, monitoring and reports are explicitly listed – and at what frequency.

Where are the backups stored? For companies operating in the EU: backups on servers outside the EU can create GDPR issues. Our backups sit on German servers.

How are response times defined? Our Premium plan includes an SLA with response times measured in hours, not days. That distinction matters when your site is down during a sales call.

What is explicitly excluded? Good contracts are clear about this. New features, redesigns, content changes, or cleaning up after an attack that predates the contract – these are typical exclusions that often go unmentioned in cheaper agreements.

What is the minimum term? Annual contracts can look attractive on price but lock you in if you are unhappy. Our contracts run month-to-month after three months.

If you are weighing whether WordPress is the right system for your company at all, What a business website costs also breaks down the ongoing cost picture.