What does WordPress maintenance cost per month?

WordPress maintenance typically costs between 50 and 400 € per month depending on the scope. Basic plans covering updates and backups start at around 80 €. Contracts with staging tests and monitoring run from 100 to 250 €, and plans with a binding SLA from 250 to 400 €. Hourly maintenance is usually billed at 80 to 130 € per hour.

Is a WordPress maintenance contract worth it?

Yes – for most business websites. Without regular updates and backups, security risk rises sharply. A maintenance contract protects against downtime, hacking, and data loss, and is usually cheaper than an emergency cleanup after the fact. It also keeps your site technically current.

What is the difference between a flat-rate and hourly maintenance?

A flat-rate plan covers a defined scope at a fixed monthly price – predictable but less flexible. Hourly billing suits variable or unpredictable needs but requires you to track hours. Many agencies combine both: a flat rate for core tasks and an hourly rate for extras beyond the scope.

What should a WordPress maintenance contract always include?

At minimum: regular updates (core, plugins, themes), daily backups on secure servers, uptime monitoring, and a defined response time for incidents. Good contracts also state explicitly what is not included – such as new features or design changes.

What Does WordPress Maintenance Cost? 2026 Prices (99–349 €/mo)

In short: WordPress maintenance costs 50 to 400 € net per month depending on scope. Basic plans with updates and backups start around 50 €; dependable plans with tested backups, a dedicated contact and response times start around 100 €. Our own plans cost 99–349 € net/month, cancellable monthly after three months.

“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	99 € / month	Updates, backups with restore check, monitoring
Pro	219 € / month	+ Staging, form monitoring, security, report
Premium	349 € / month	+ SLA, visual regression, monthly log analysis

Short tasks on your managed web hosting environment – DNS, SSL, PHP version, host support – run on your plan’s free hours, with no separate add-on. Pro and Premium clients also get an emergency line that is reachable in the evenings and on weekends – outside service hours (Mon–Fri, 8 am–6 pm) without a fixed deadline; call-outs are billed at 150 € per hour.

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 120 € per hour. If you have several websites maintained, you pay 15 % less from the second site and 25 % less from the fourth.

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. Almost all known WordPress vulnerabilities sit in plugins and themes rather than core – Patchstack counted roughly 96 percent in plugins for 2024. And according to Sucuri’s Hacked Website Report, around four in ten compromised CMS sites were running outdated software at the time of infection. 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.