Website maintenance cost

For a small-business website in Australia, expect $90 to $180 a month for basic care, $180 to $380 for a standard business plan, and $380 to $980 or more if the website takes payments. The published Australian care plans we checked run $79 to $350 a month. Agencies billing by the hour run higher.

1. Basic care $90-$180/mo
2. Standard $180-$380/mo
3. Advanced / store $380-$980+/mo
4. One-off check $350-$1,500

Live prices agree with the bands. The cheapest published care plan we found is $79 a month, one provider's three plans are $98, $198 and $350 a month including GST, and another's sit at $169 to $199 a month plus GST. Location shifts the quote too: one guide puts Sydney pricing 15 to 25% above Brisbane for the same work.

Every figure on this page comes from a published Australian care-plan page or 2026 maintenance cost guide, retrieved July 2026 and re-checked on 1 September 2026. The source list is at the end of the page.

About $1,200 to $2,000 a year on one 2026 guide, or $1,200 to $3,000 on another, which works out at $100 to $250 a month. Complex or busy websites clear $5,000 a year. For a trade business with a standard website, the lower end of that is realistic.

That yearly figure buys the same four things a trade business actually needs: the software kept updated, a backup that lives somewhere else, someone checking the contact form still sends, and the edits you ask for when a price or a service changes. Hosting and the domain sit on top, and they are small: our tradie website cost guide puts a domain at $10 to $23 a year and hosting at $10 to $100 a month.

Because a WordPress website is built from a core system, a theme and a stack of plugins, and each one updates on its own schedule. Skip the updates and the website gets easier to break into and more likely to break outright. Managing that risk is the job care plans exist to do.

The risk is real. Updates exist because holes get found, and an out-of-date plugin is the classic way a website gets broken into. Updates can also clash: one plugin's new version falls out with another's, and the booking form quietly stops working on a Tuesday. The plan pays someone to catch both.

The alternative is paying retail for the emergency. Published Australian rates for urgent developer help run $350 to $500 an hour, and cleaning malware out of a hacked website costs $500 to $2,000 or more, which is more than a year of basic care. Against those numbers, $100-odd a month is sensible insurance.

When the business leans on the website. Basic care at $90 to $180 a month is cheap insurance next to emergency rates of $350 to $500 an hour, and it takes the work off your plate either way. Four signs a plan earns its keep:

• The website brings in enough work that a broken fortnight would cost you jobs
• Nothing would tell you if the contact form quietly stopped sending
• Details change most months: prices, team, services, hours, licence numbers
• Nobody in the business wants to own updates, backups, monitoring and testing

The question worth asking is not whether to pay it. It is what the money buys. A fee that only keeps the platform updated is buying back a risk the platform created. A fee that also checks the website is still bringing in work, and covers the changes you ask for, is buying work on your business.

At $150 a month that is $1,800 a year, and three years is $5,400, which sits inside what a custom build costs outright. Worth knowing if you are weighing a rebuild against another year of updates, and worth asking any provider which of the two you are on.

We build custom-coded websites for Australian trade businesses, so there is no WordPress underneath and no plugin stack to update. Maintenance is still included on every package, and it starts the day the website goes live. Every client is on it, because a website that brings in work needs someone looking at it. Here is what a month covers:

• It's up and it's fast: uptime monitoring plus speed and quality checks, so a problem gets found by us instead of by someone trying to book you.
• Nothing's broken: broken links chased down, and the code the website depends on checked for security updates.
• The enquiries are arriving: we cross-check the enquiries the website recorded against the ones that actually reached you. A form that quietly stops sending looks exactly like a quiet month.
• The details are current: prices, services, hours and licence numbers checked against what is true now, not what was true at launch.
• The month's edits: the changes you ask for.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Copy changes after launch are maintenance, so a new price, a reworded service or a fresh set of photos is exactly what it is there for. New suburb and service pages are a different job: that is SEO work and it is priced separately, because a page built to show up on Google needs research behind it rather than a spare half hour.

Clients own the website, the domain and every word on it. What the plan costs depends on the package, and you get the number on a call rather than working it out from a table. Maintenance is also only one line of the marketing budget: SEO for tradies covers getting found on Google, and the digital marketing for tradies guide shows where the rest of it works hardest.

~10 new clients a month Quick Mick's Plumbing, Blue Mountains NSW. On page one of Google for around 40 searches and taking roughly 10 new clients a month, with no ongoing ad spend. Read the Quick Mick's case study