Website maintenance: what it includes and what it costs

The short answer, based on plans published by Romanian web agencies and verified in September 2026: website maintenance costs between $22 and $330 per month, and plans for a presentation website cluster in the $33 - $110 per month range. One-off work without a plan is billed at $16 to $55 per hour.

Our position first, so you know how we work from the start: at Digital U maintenance is optional for a presentation website and mandatory for an online store. A presentation website built by us starts at $650, and the first 2 minor changes after launch are free. Beyond those, the rate depends on what you ask for and you hear it upfront, not afterwards. The details are on the pricing page, and in a free 30-minute call we tell you whether your site actually needs a plan or just a single fix. The rest of this article is the market, with sources.

The gap between $22 and $330 per month does not come from some agencies updating plugins better than others. It comes from the fact that “maintenance” puts two different services under one word, and the price is decided almost entirely by the second one.

What website maintenance actually means

Website maintenance means two things that are usually sold together but have nothing to do with each other:

Technical upkeep. Updating the platform (most often WordPress), the plugins and the theme, backups, uptime monitoring, security scans, certificate renewal and compatibility with the server’s PHP version. It is work you never see and only notice when it is missing.

Hours for changes. You change a price, add a service page, put up a new team photo, move a banner. That is content work, done when you ask for it.

Almost every offer on the market differentiates itself on the second part: how many hours of changes the plan includes and how fast somebody answers. Technical upkeep is, broadly, the same list everywhere.

How much website maintenance costs: published prices

Our position first, then the plans published by Romanian agencies, verified in September 2026:

Source	Published price	What is included
Digital U (us)	first 2 minor changes free, then a rate agreed upfront	maintenance optional for a presentation site, mandatory for a store (pricing)
Mentenanta-WP	$22 / $33 / $43 per month	1, 1.5 and 2 hours of changes per month respectively; 6-month minimum
Webet	from $33 per month	monthly plan or per project
Contrast Design	from $33 per month	up to 10 pages added per month, minor code changes
Webart	$55 per month	content updates, security, backup, 24-hour response time
Adi Coscai	$55 / $165 per month	the $165 plan includes 2 hours of changes per month
Creații Digitale	$54 / $109 / $174 per month, plus VAT	2, 3 and 5 hours of work per month respectively
Bianca Ionel	$72 / $165 / $275 per month	1, 3 and 5 hours per month; response in 15 days, 7 days and 2-48 hours respectively
Novaweb	$76 per month	Basic WordPress maintenance plan
FXF Web Solution	$110 / $165 / $330 per month	monthly, weekly and daily updates respectively; no long-term contract
IT eXclusiv	from $275 per month	24-hour response time

Prices published locally in lei or euros are converted to US dollars at the September 2026 rate and rounded, so the whole article reads in one currency.

For work without a plan, the published hourly rates run from $16 to $33 per hour at Contrast Design, $44 per extra hour at Creații Digitale and $55 per hour at Adi Coscai and Bianca Ionel.

What you are really buying in a maintenance plan

A website maintenance plan is compared properly on three numbers, not on the list of services:

Hours of changes included. At Bianca Ionel, the difference between $72 and $275 per month is mainly the difference between one hour and five hours of work on the site. At Mentenanta-WP, the difference between plans is half an hour per month. If you change nothing on your site for months, you are paying for hours you never use.

Response time. The same agency, Bianca Ionel, states openly that a response to new requests takes 15 days on the base plan and between 2 and 48 hours on the most expensive one. It is an honest and rare thing to publish. Ask for that number on every offer, because a site that breaks on a Friday evening will not wait 15 days.

How often updates happen. FXF Web Solution separates its plans on exactly this: monthly updates at $110, weekly at $165, daily at $330 per month. It looks like a technical detail. It is not, and the next section explains why.

One calculation worth doing before you sign: at Adi Coscai, the $165 plan includes 2 hours, and an hour outside the plan costs $55. If you need about one hour a month on average, paying by the hour costs you less than the plan. A plan earns its price through technical upkeep and priority, not through the hours.

Not sure whether your site needs a plan or just a single fix? Tell us what platform it runs on in a free 30-minute call, or ask for a free audit. You find out what is outdated on your site and how urgent it is, even if you never work with us.

Why WordPress update frequency matters

Update frequency matters because attacks on WordPress sites now arrive within hours, not weeks. The State of WordPress Security in 2026 report published by Patchstack, based on 2025 data, shows:

• 11,334 new vulnerabilities found in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 42% more than in 2024.
• 91% of them were in plugins, 9% in themes and only 6 in WordPress core. The risk is not WordPress itself, it is every plugin installed on the site.
• 5 hours is the median time to mass exploitation for the most heavily targeted vulnerabilities, and roughly half of high-impact vulnerabilities are exploited within the first 24 hours.
• 46% of vulnerabilities had no patch yet from the plugin developer at the moment they were made public.

Put next to the table above, the result is uncomfortable: a plan that promises “monthly updates” closes a hole, in the worst case, almost a month later, while attackers move within hours. That does not make monthly plans useless. It means a site with many plugins needs either frequent updates, protection at firewall level, or fewer plugins.

The PHP version, the cost you never see in the offer

Besides plugins, a WordPress site depends on the PHP version on the server. According to the official PHP support calendar, checked on 21 September 2026, PHP 8.2 receives security patches only until 31 December 2026, and PHP 8.3 until 31 December 2027. WordPress officially recommends PHP 8.3 or newer.

In practice, over the coming months many sites built three or four years ago will need to move to a newer PHP version, and old plugins may not survive the move. It is exactly the kind of work a good maintenance plan announces in advance and a cheap one discovers when the site shows a blank white page.

Does a presentation website need maintenance?

Not always. Whether a presentation website needs maintenance depends on three things you can check yourself:

1. The platform. A WordPress site with 20 plugins needs constant upkeep. A site built on its own code, without third-party plugins, has far fewer parts that can break between two visits.
2. How often you change the content. If you edit something twice a year, paying by the hour is almost certainly cheaper than any plan.
3. What happens if the site is down for a day. For a presentation site, you lose a few enquiries. For an online store, you lose sales every hour, and maintenance stops being optional. We broke down what a store costs in how much an online store costs in 2026.

The simple rule: online store, or a WordPress site with many plugins, take a plan. A stable presentation site, rarely edited, built without many dependencies: fixes when needed, plus a backup that you hold yourself.

What you should hold, even if you pay for maintenance

A maintenance plan should not be the only thing keeping your site alive. Whoever looks after it, check that:

• The domain is in your name, not the agency’s.
• You have administrator access to the site and to the hosting account, even if you never use it.
• Backups are also stored off the server the site runs on. A backup on the same server disappears together with the server.
• You get a monthly report of what was updated. Many of the offers above include one; if yours does not, ask for it.
• You can leave at any time with everything, without a “handover” fee. FXF Web Solution states explicitly that it has no long-term contract, while Mentenanta-WP asks for a 6-month minimum. Both are fair, as long as you know upfront.

If the site is also slow, maintenance is a good moment to fix that too. We showed what a slow site costs every month in why a slow site loses customers.

What to ask before you sign a maintenance contract

1. How many hours of changes are included per month, and what happens to unused ones?
2. How fast do you respond, in writing, to an urgent problem?
3. How often do you update plugins, and what do you do when a vulnerability is published today?
4. Where are backups stored, and how fast can you restore the site?
5. What is the minimum contract period, and what do I get if I leave?

A clear answer to all five is worth more than any $20 monthly difference between two offers.

Frequently asked questions

What does website maintenance mean? Website maintenance means technical upkeep (updating the platform and plugins, backups, security, monitoring) plus a number of hours for content changes, usually sold together as a monthly plan. The price is driven mainly by the hours of changes included and by the response time.

How much does website maintenance cost? Between $22 and $330 per month, according to plans published by Romanian agencies in September 2026, from Mentenanta-WP ($22 per month, 1 hour of changes) to FXF Web Solution ($330 per month, daily updates). For a presentation website, most plans sit between $33 and $110 per month, and work without a plan costs $16 - $55 per hour.

What is included in a website maintenance plan? A website maintenance plan almost always includes platform and plugin updates, backups, security scans, uptime monitoring and a fixed number of hours of changes per month, between 1 and 5 hours in the published offers. What differs between offers is the hours included, the response time (from 24 hours to 15 days) and the update frequency.

How much does WordPress website maintenance cost? Maintenance for a WordPress presentation website starts at $22 per month at Mentenanta-WP and reaches $76 per month for Novaweb’s Basic plan, according to prices published in September 2026. Plans with weekly or daily updates, such as those from FXF Web Solution, cost $165 - $330 per month.

What is WordPress website management? WordPress website management is the content side of maintenance: adding and editing pages, copy, images and products, done by someone on your behalf. Most agencies sell it in the same plan as technical upkeep, as hours included per month, for example 2 hours in Adi Coscai’s $165 per month plan.

What should a website maintenance contract include? A website maintenance contract should state the hours of changes per month, the maximum response time to an urgent problem, the update frequency, where backups are stored, the minimum contract period and the terms under which you leave with everything. Published minimum periods range from none (FXF Web Solution) to 6 months (Mentenanta-WP).

How much does online store maintenance cost? Online store maintenance starts at $43 per month at Mentenanta-WP and reaches $330 per month for FXF Web Solution’s Enterprise plan, built for online stores, according to prices published in September 2026. For a store, maintenance is not optional, because every hour the site is down means lost sales.

Does a presentation website need maintenance? Not always: a presentation website built without many plugins and rarely edited can be kept up with hourly fixes, $16 - $55 per hour in the published offers. A WordPress site with many plugins does need frequent updates, because according to Patchstack’s 2026 report, 91% of WordPress vulnerabilities appear in plugins and the most heavily targeted ones are mass-exploited within a median of 5 hours.

Want to know what your own site needs, not a market range? Ask for a free audit and we tell you what is outdated and how urgent it is, or book a 30-minute call directly. If you are only now building your site, see also what a business website costs in 2026.