Web maintenance: what it actually costs after launch

Almost no client asks about maintenance before signing. They ask about the development price, the delivery timeline, sometimes about hosting. Maintenance comes up as a conversation six months later, usually when something stops working.

The part nobody mentions is that a website is never really “finished”: WordPress needs regular core and plugin updates, an SSL certificate has to be renewed or automated, and the dependencies of a Vue or Nuxt project get outdated even if you don’t touch a single line of code. None of this is dramatic if it’s handled bit by bit. It becomes dramatic when two years go by untouched and everything has to be updated at once.

One client had a typical situation: the site had been running for a while with prices changed by hand on an old WordPress install, before we migrated everything to static generation sourced from the original sitemaps. That kind of maintenance, content rather than code, is the one most underestimated when quoting a project.

We charge for maintenance separately from development, and I explain it this way in the first meeting: development is building the house, maintenance is paying the community fees and fixing the boiler when it breaks. A client who doesn’t want to pay for maintenance isn’t saving money, they’re just postponing the cost and losing control over when they’ll have to pay it.

What has changed over the years is how much maintenance each type of site actually needs. A static site built with Astro, or the setup we built for that client, barely asks for anything: no database, no plugins, no admin panel to get hacked. A WordPress site with forms, ecommerce and fifteen plugins is a completely different story, and that’s what I tell anyone who asks me which of the two “is better” without any further context.

In the end, maintenance isn’t just another line on the budget — it’s the question that decides whether, three years from now, we’re still talking about your website, or about why it stopped working on a Monday morning.