Websites do not stay built. The question is only whether the upkeep is planned and cheap, or unplanned and expensive.
The maintenance conversation usually starts after something breaks: the contact form that stopped delivering in March and nobody noticed until June, the SSL certificate that expired into a browser warning, the hack that turned the homepage into a pharmacy. Every one of those is cheaper to prevent than to fix, which is the entire economic case for maintenance.
Market rates in 2026 run roughly $30–60/month for bare hosting-plus-updates, $100–300/month for proper plans with content changes included, and steeply upward for e-commerce. The spread is what is included — so the real question is what a plan must cover to be worth anything.
Forms that stop sending, certificates that expire, plugins that conflict, backups that were never actually running. None announce themselves; all cost customers.
Hosting, SSL, daily backups, security patches, uptime monitoring — and the part owners actually feel: content edits done for you, fast.
Prices change, hours change, staff change. If updating the site means finding and paying someone each time, the site goes stale — that is how every outdated website got that way.
A website is software running on other software, all of it updating constantly. Platforms patch, plugins fall behind, browsers change the rules, and an untouched site drifts from 'done' to 'broken' without anyone deploying anything. The visible symptoms — slowing down, layout glitches, the form silence — arrive months after the causes.
The stale-content rot is worse for business: a menu with old prices, a service you stopped offering, last year's hours. Customers read outdated as possibly closed, and Google reads it as less relevant than the competitor updated last week.
Price the plan against the failure, not against zero: one lost lead a month from a dead form pays for most plans on its own, and a proper backup regime is the difference between a bad hour and rebuilding from screenshots. DIY is genuinely possible if the discipline is real — the checklist is not secret, it is just relentless.
Our care plans run Essential $49, Growth $99 and Managed Care $199 a month — hosting, SSL, daily backups, monitoring, security patches and content edits included, with the upper tiers adding analytics reporting, lead alerts and quarterly strategy. Email the change, it is done, usually same or next business day. That is the entire pitch: the site stays current because keeping it current is someone's actual job.
Straight answers. If yours is not here, call and ask.
If you will genuinely do the updates, test the forms monthly, verify the backups and watch the uptime — yes. The honest failure mode is not ability, it is that nobody inside a busy business does it consistently.
Our Essential plan is $49/month: hosting, SSL, daily backups, security updates, uptime monitoring and content edits by email. Growth $99 and Managed Care $199 add reporting, lead alerts, AI chat and strategy calls. Market-wide, expect $30–300/month depending on what is genuinely included.
Usually nothing, for a while — then a form dies quietly, or a plugin conflict scrambles the layout, or the certificate expires into a security warning. The gamble is not whether, it is when and how visibly.
No. Month to month, domain and site in your name, files handed over if you leave. A care plan should be something you keep because it is useful, not because you are trapped.
Tell us about the business and we'll come back with a fixed price and a timeline. No obligation, no sales pitch.