What it really costs to keep a website healthy
A website is not finished when it launches. Software needs updating, the domain needs renewing, prices change, staff come and go, and every so often something breaks. The question is not whether a site needs upkeep. It is who does it, and how you pay for it.
The fixed bills
These arrive whether or not anyone touches the site:
- Domain: about $15 to $30 a year for a .ca or .com.
- Hosting: from very little for a lean site to $60 or more a month for a heavy platform.
- Business email: roughly $8 to $12 per person per month.
- Paid software: booking tools, premium plugins, form services, font licences. Small individually, and they add up.
Make a list of every one, with its renewal date and the card it is billed to. Expired cards are a surprisingly common way for a website to quietly go offline.
The upkeep work
Then there is the work itself:
- Updates. Sites built on systems like WordPress need regular software updates to stay secure.
- Backups. Automatic, stored somewhere else, and tested now and then.
- Checks. Forms that still deliver, pages that still load, a certificate that renews.
- Changes. New prices, new photos, a new service, a holiday notice, a staff member who left.
- Fixes. Something always breaks eventually: an update clashes, a browser changes, a connected service shuts down.
The cost of skipping upkeep rarely shows up as a bill. It shows up as a contact form that stopped working in March and nobody noticed until June.
Three ways to pay for it
Do it yourself
Free in dollars and costly in time. It works well when the site is simple, changes are rare, and someone on your team is comfortable with the tools. Put a monthly reminder in your calendar, because upkeep that depends on remembering does not happen.
Pay as you go
Call someone when you need a change or something breaks, and pay per job or by the hour. Good when changes are occasional and the site is not critical to daily operations. The catch is that nobody is watching in between, so problems are found by customers first.
For a site someone else built that has piled up bugs, errors or security worries, our one time Fix & Secure service starts at $349. We fix the problems, check its security and health, and tell you what we changed.
A care plan
A flat monthly price for hosting, updates and changes. It suits businesses whose site takes bookings, orders or enquiries every day, or who change things often enough that hourly billing becomes a reason not to ask.
Our care plan is $349 a month or $3,499 a year. It covers one website: hosting, backups, security updates, uptime monitoring, and unlimited requests and fixes with no hours to count. The first 90 days are included with every new build.
How to choose
Ask yourself three questions:
- How often do we change the site? Once or twice a year points to doing it yourself or paying as you go. Every month or more points to a plan.
- What happens if it breaks on a Saturday? If the answer is lost bookings or orders, you want someone watching.
- What is our time worth? An owner spending three evenings fighting an editor has paid for upkeep, just not in dollars.
Count the changes and fixes you needed last year and what each one cost, in money or hours. Add the fixed bills. Compare the total with a care plan for the same twelve months. Whichever is cheaper, you will at least know what your website really costs to run.
The minimum, whatever you choose
- Domain on auto renew, with a contact email someone reads.
- Automatic backups stored off the server.
- Software updated at least monthly.
- Your own contact form tested once a month: submit it and make sure the message arrives.
Tell us how your site is built and how often it changes. We will tell you plainly whether a care plan makes sense for you, or whether it does not. Call 647 846 6561 or email hello@bootstrappedstudios.com.
See the care plan