Website Maintenance Cost in Europe: Monthly Prices
Website maintenance cost in Europe, line by line: hosting, domain, SSL and plugin prices in EUR, what paid plans charge, and what they should include.
Website maintenance cost for a small business site starts at about €2 a month excl. VAT in hard costs if you run it yourself on budget hosting, and reaches roughly €35 to €50 a month on managed WordPress hosting with a couple of premium plugins. Paying someone to do the work is a different price level: pricing guides ranking on Google Ireland for this search give ranges of about €35 to €500 or more a month, depending on the size and type of site. The hosting, domain and plugin prices below come from the providers’ own price pages, seen on 23 October 2026.
This guide covers the running costs of a site that already exists: hosting, renewals, updates, backups, security and small changes. What it costs to build the site in the first place is covered in what it costs to build a website in Europe.
In short
- The fixed costs are small: shared hosting from €1.60 a month, a domain from €4.90 a year and a free SSL certificate cover the basics (excl. VAT).
- Managed WordPress hosting with backups and automatic plugin updates lists at €18 to €35 a month.
- Most of the cost of maintenance is labour: applying updates, checking that nothing broke and restoring a backup when something did.
- Plugins carry most of the security risk. Patchstack counted 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, and 91% of them were in plugins.
- Our own plans start at €190/mo excl. VAT, and that price covers the website itself as well as its upkeep.
How much does it cost to maintain a website monthly?
The cash cost depends on who does the work. If you maintain the site yourself, you pay for hosting, the domain and any paid plugins, and the rest is your time. If someone else does it, you also pay for their hours.
| Setup | What you pay for | Monthly cost (excl. VAT) |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself, budget hosting | Hetzner Webhosting S (€1.60/mo) and a domain from €4.90/yr. SSL from Let’s Encrypt at no cost | About €2 |
| Do it yourself, premium plugins | Hetzner Webhosting M (€4.12/mo), domain, Yoast SEO Premium (€118.80/yr) and WP Rocket for one site (€4.16/mo, billed yearly) | About €19 |
| Managed WordPress hosting | Raidboxes “Fully Managed” (€35/mo list price, includes plugin and theme updates) plus a domain add-on from €1.50/mo | From about €37 |
| Paid maintenance service | A developer or agency applies updates, monitors the site and makes small changes | About €35 to €500+ (market guides, see below) |
Hetzner’s web hosting page lists Webhosting S to XL at €1.60 to €16.72 a month excl. VAT, with no minimum term, and notes that “Web hosting packages do not include a domain”. Raidboxes’ price page lists its Mini, Starter and Fully Managed plans at €18, €24 and €35 a month on monthly billing, “subject to 19% VAT”, with a 50% discount for new customers until 30 December 2026.
The SSL certificate no longer has to cost anything. Let’s Encrypt describes itself as “a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority”, and Hetzner lists SSL encryption among the safety features of its hosting packages. Plugin prices are from Yoast’s product page (€118.80 a year ex VAT, with the currency set to EUR) and WP Rocket’s pricing page (€4.16 a month billed yearly; “Taxes may apply depending on your country of residence”).
Per year, that comes to about €24 on budget hosting and about €440 on managed hosting, plus any plugin licences, which are sold yearly. A paid service at €35 to €500 a month comes to about €420 to €6,000 a year. The table leaves out time. Applying updates, testing afterwards and sorting out plugin conflicts take hours, and those hours are what you pay for in a maintenance plan.
Do websites need monthly maintenance?
A site built on a CMS like WordPress does, because the software underneath it keeps changing whether you touch the site or not.
WordPress only supports its latest version. Its security page says that “only the latest version of WordPress is officially supported”. Older branches get backported fixes as a courtesy, and in 2025 the Security Team stopped them for versions 4.1 to 4.6.
Plugins don’t update themselves by default. WordPress’s upgrading guide says existing installations get minor core updates automatically, but plugins and themes only “in special cases”. You can switch on auto-updates plugin by plugin, and WordPress advises making sure you can roll back first.
Most of the vulnerabilities are in plugins. Patchstack’s State of WordPress Security in 2026 counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025: 91% in plugins, 9% in themes and six in core. It found that 46% had no fix from the developer by the time they were made public, and that heavily exploited vulnerabilities were first exploited a weighted median of five hours after they were made public. Patchstack sells WordPress security services, so treat this as vendor data.
The server software has end dates too. The PHP project’s supported versions page shows security support for PHP 8.2 ending on 31 December 2026. A site still on 8.2 needs its theme and plugins tested on a newer version before then.
Certificate lifetimes are getting shorter. Let’s Encrypt is cutting its default certificate lifetime to 64 days on 10 February 2027 and to 45 days on 16 February 2028, and says manual renewal “is not recommended”. The CA/Browser Forum, which sets the rules for certificate issuers, adopted a schedule that cuts the maximum validity from 398 days to 47 days by March 2029, so a certificate renewed by hand once a year will no longer work.
A static site with no CMS or plugins needs much less of this, but the domain, the certificate and the content still need someone.
What should a website maintenance package include?
Whether you buy a package or do it yourself, these are the tasks that keep a site running.
| Task | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Core, plugin and theme updates | Plugins carried 91% of new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025 (Patchstack) and aren’t auto-updated by default |
| Backups, with a tested restore | WordPress’s own guide says to back up before updating and to “Verify the backups you created are there and usable” |
| Hosting and PHP version | PHP 8.2 security support ends on 31 December 2026 |
| SSL and domain renewals | Let’s Encrypt certificates drop to 64 days in 2027 and 45 days in 2028 |
| Small content changes | Opening hours, prices and staff pages go out of date faster than the code does |
| Consent and analytics checks | Third-party scripts change, and the cookie banner has to keep matching what the site loads |
Check whether a plan covers the last row, because it is easy to leave out. Running cookieless, GDPR-compliant analytics removes part of that work, and we explain how cookie consent affects technical SEO separately.
A low-priced package shouldn’t be expected to cover redesigns, new features, content writing or an SEO campaign. Those are projects or separate retainers; if you’re weighing an SEO offer too, see what ongoing SEO retainers cost in Europe.
How much does it cost to pay someone to maintain a website?
Expect roughly €35 to €500 a month, depending on the site. That is the span of the ranges in the Irish pricing guides on the first page of Google on 23 October 2026, and it is close to the $50 to $500 a month that GoDaddy’s maintenance cost guide gives for small to medium business sites. GoDaddy puts online shops at $300 to $1,000 a month. The ranges are wide because “maintenance” can mean anything from a monthly update run to a standing allowance of developer hours.
The platform is the first thing that moves the price: a WordPress site with many plugins needs more update work than a static site or a hosted website builder. A shop adds to it, because payments and order flows make breakage expensive and testing after updates takes longer. Some plans include content edits or developer time each month, while others bill every change. Response time counts as well, since a promised fix within hours costs more than an answer within a few working days.
Our own plans work differently, because the website is part of the subscription. Essential costs €190/mo excl. VAT and includes a 5-page custom-designed site, EU hosting, maintenance, SSL and backups, and content edits on request. Growth costs €490/mo and adds on-page SEO with a monthly report, a blog and content engine, and performance tuning with priority support. Studio, at €3,900/mo, is an engineering subscription with custom app and feature development. Monthly plans can be cancelled at any time; see the pricing page and our website plans.
How much does it cost to set up and maintain a website?
Setting up is the larger one-off cost, and maintenance is the recurring one. Add both up over the years you expect to keep the site before comparing a one-time build with a subscription. Our one-time builds are Launch at €1,900 and Establish at €3,900 excl. VAT, and Establish includes 3 months of support. Build prices and models are compared in our cost guide for building a website.
Website maintenance in the EU: accessibility and data location
If you run an online shop, the European Accessibility Act, Directive (EU) 2019/882, applies to e-commerce services provided to consumers after 28 June 2025 (Article 2(2)(f)). Microenterprises providing services are exempt (Article 4(5)): businesses with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than €2 million (Article 3(23)). If your shop is covered, accessibility has to survive every theme update, new plugin and content change. National laws implement the directive, so check your own country’s version. Our webshop builds and the GDPR checklist for online shops cover the shop side.
If data location matters to you or your customers, ask which company hosts the site and in which country. The background is in EU hosting vs US cloud.
Questions to ask before you sign
- Whose account is the hosting in? If you can’t log in to it, moving away later will be hard.
- What did you update last month? A provider doing the work can send you a list.
- When did you last restore a backup? Until someone has restored it, you don’t know it works.
- What is included, and what is billed extra? Get it in writing.
- What happens if we cancel? You should keep your domain, content and data, and know how the handover works.
If you’d rather have the site, the hosting and the upkeep on one invoice, get in touch and we’ll tell you which plan fits.