WordPress Maintenance Pricing in 2026: What It Costs and What You Get

The price tiers in 2026

From a senior freelance developer who actually reviews logs and takes calls when something breaks:

• €79 – €99/month — Basic plan. Up to 5 plugins, single language, brochure-style site. Weekly updates, daily backups, uptime monitoring, monthly malware scan, 1 hour/month of micro-changes.
• €149 – €199/month — Pro plan. Up to 15 plugins, 1-2 languages, active blog or basic WooCommerce. Everything in basic + 3 hours/month of micro-changes, priority support, quarterly performance audit.
• €299 – €399/month — Advanced plan. WooCommerce with 50+ products, multilingual setups (WPML/Polylang), membership/LMS, complex plugin stacks. Everything above + 6 hours/month of changes, on-call SMS for emergencies outside business hours, monthly call to review the site's health.
• Below €30/month — automated, no human review. Updates run overnight from a script. No staging tests. Breaks are noticed when a customer complains. Avoid for any site where downtime costs money.

What is actually included in a €79/month plan

If a provider charges this and the list below is not in the contract, that's a red flag:

• Weekly plugin, theme and core updates. Tested on staging before pushing to production.
• Daily backups stored off-site. Monthly restore test to verify the backup actually works.
• 24/7 uptime monitoring. SMS alert if the site responds with error or takes longer than 5 seconds.
• Monthly malware and vulnerability scan. Specific to the plugin stack you run.
• Hardening of wp-admin and file permissions. 2FA enabled where possible.
• 1 hour/month of micro-changes: edit a text, swap a photo, add a banner. Anything fast.
• Email support with response under 24h on business days.
• Monthly summary email with what was actually done. Specific, not template.

What "bad maintenance" looks like

If you suspect your current maintenance is junk, check these:

• WordPress core 2+ versions behind. Current is 6.9.x. If you're on 6.6 or earlier, your maintenance is asleep at the wheel.
• Plugins not updated for 6+ months. Check the Updates page in wp-admin. If there are 10 pending updates, somebody is not doing their job.
• No staging environment. Updates pushed straight to production. Sooner or later something breaks during business hours.
• No recent backup. Try to get a backup from your provider. If they take more than 24h or send you something from a month ago, you have no real backup.
• Generic monthly report nobody reads. Same template every month, no specifics about your site, no mention of issues found.
• No alert when the site goes down. Test it: ask the provider for the last uptime alert they got. If they shrug, monitoring isn't real.

Can I do this myself?

Honest answer: depends on the site.

• Brochure site, 3-5 plugins, no e-commerce: Yes, if you commit 2-3 hours/month. Use UpdraftPlus for backups, Wordfence for security, UptimeRobot for monitoring. Free or cheap.
• WooCommerce or membership site: No. The risk of breaking a checkout or a paid-member access on a Friday afternoon outweighs the cost saving. Pay a pro.
• Multilingual site (WPML/Polylang): No. These plugins have specific update orders and conflict with caching. You need someone who knows the stack.
• Site that generates real revenue (>€1,000/month): No. The pro plan pays for itself the first time it prevents a 4-hour outage.

How to pick a provider

Five questions to ask before signing up:

1. "Show me the last monthly report you sent another client." If they send you a sanitized template, you're getting a template. Real providers have specifics.
2. "Where are backups stored and how often do you test restoring?" Off-site (S3, Backblaze, Google Drive) and monthly test minimum. "Same server" backups are not real backups.
3. "What happens if the site goes down at 11pm on a Saturday?" Basic plan: alert + response Monday morning. Pro plan: someone responds within 2 hours. Advanced: SMS to a human now.
4. "Do you charge cancellation fees?" Should be zero. Month-to-month, cancel anytime. If they trap you in 12 months, run.
5. "How much new feature work is included vs separately billed?" Maintenance plans cover micro-changes. New plugins, new sections, new features should be quoted separately to keep incentives aligned.

Why I price plans the way I do

I run my WordPress maintenance for a real reason: I have clients I've maintained for 5+ years (Belén Calafell since 2019, Club de Pesas since 2020). What changed in that time:

• WordPress went from 4.x to 6.9.x. Multiple major version jumps.
• PHP went from 7.2 to 8.4.
• Plugin landscape shifted: half the plugins active in 2019 are abandoned today.
• WooCommerce evolved through 5 major versions.

Sites that get reviewed monthly and updated quarterly survive these transitions. Sites on autopilot maintenance break catastrophically every 18 months and cost €1,500-€3,000 to rescue. The €79-€299/month plan is much cheaper than the rescue.

If you want a real plan with real human review, see my WordPress maintenance service. Free initial audit: I look at your site, tell you what's wrong, and you decide whether to hire me or fix it yourself.

Frequently asked questions