You’ve successfully created an awesome WordPress website: it’s fast, functional, and bringing in customers. But six months down the road, you wake up to a hacked site, lost data, or broken features.  And your bill to fix it? Typically, 5- 10 times the cost of doing regular maintenance!

This is common to many website owners who consider WordPress maintenance an expense and not an investment to upgrade or fix their business. With over 43% of all websites built on WordPress, maintaining their websites will come into play and not just be “an option” for security, performance, and growth.

Let’s look at the true WordPress site maintenance cost to help you turn your WordPress maintenance payments from a confusing expense to your best investment in your business.

WordPress Maintenance?

WordPress maintenance is the process by which a website stays updated, secured, and functioning properly. Think of it like maintaining your car—you regularly change the oil, rotate the tires, and check your brakes to prevent breakdowns. 

WordPress maintenance services include checking for a core software update, checking plugins/themes for compatibility, monitoring the website security, and optimizing the performance. 

For instance, a plugin update can cost nothing, but if you don’t update and it causes a website security breach or aggravates the website experience, the remediation cost could be thousands! Taking care of this maintenance will keep your website a strong and reliable tool for your business and not a liability.

The Hosting Foundation

Your choice of hosting will have a great influence on the need and the cost of maintenance. Shared hosting ($3-8/month) can be considered a cheap option, but it lacks the security features and fanfare of performance optimization that come with the higher-priced plans. 

On the other hand, managed WordPress hosting ($25-100/month) comes with a lot of perks like automatic backup, security monitoring, and update management, which could significantly lower your maintenance workload. 

For example, a local bakery using managed hosting might be paying $40/month but is actually saving $500, which is the cost of hack recovery. A survey conducted reveals that the websites of managed hosting have experienced 60% fewer security issues and 45% faster loading times.

Essential Security Measures

There is no room for compromise when it comes to website security. WordPress has stated that an average of 90,000 attacks are being made against WordPress sites every minute across the world. 

The most basic level of security maintenance would typically consist of an SSL certificate, a security plugin, and malware scanning. 

Now, let’s take the example of a small e-commerce store: investing $150/year in a security plugin might save the store from a $5,000 data breach. Conducting regular security audits ($100-300 per audit) is another way to prevent vulnerabilities, as hackers will always be the first to know when they are no longer there. 

Backup and Recovery Solutions

Regular backups serve as your safeguard against losing data. You can use free backup plugins, but if you can afford a premium solution, you will have cloud backup storage and the convenience of a one-click restoration process. 

A real estate agency put this to the test and paid for it when their site crashed in the busy season. With no backups saved in the previous 30 days, they lost out on $8,000 in potential real estate leads. 

According to TRUELIST, as many as 94% of companies that suffer a major data loss do not recover. 51% of companies that experience a data loss close within two years of the incident, and 43% never reopen after shutting down. But businesses with proper backups usually restore in hours and not days.

Core Updates and Compatibility Management

WordPress has core updates every 3 months. Plugins and themes will typically have updates weekly or as needed. Although the updates themselves are free, testing (temp staging space, if you are in a digital product project) and technical ability are required to ensure your update will not break your website. Many businesses allocate $50-150/month just for managing the updates. 

As an example, a medical clinic had to pay $2,000 in emergency development fees when one untested plugin update broke the functionality of their booking system; they could have simply paid $75 a month on maintenance.  

Performance Optimization 

Your site speed directly affects conversions and search engine optimization. Pages with load times of 1-3 seconds experienced a 32% increase in bounce rates versus pages with a one-second load time. 

The maintenance you will want to include for performance includes, but is not limited to, image optimization ($20-50/per year for tools on your own), caching solutions ($0-100/per year), and cleaning up your database. 

For instance, an online magazine that spent $800 a year on installing performance maintenance increased its ad revenue by 25% per year simply because more users were retained. 

Content and Database Management 

Routine content updates and database optimization are major components in holding your website together. Regularly removing spam comments, updating your CMS, and optimizing your databases are part of content maintenance. Some tasks can be automated, like updates, but most require a human touch. 

A tourism company paid an external provider $100 per month to update its web content. After six months of consistent relevant content updates, their SEO rankings increased by 40%. 

Proactive Monitoring and Uptime Assurance 

If you want to maintain credibility—and indeed revenue—the uptime of your website cannot be overlooked. Proactive monitoring of uptime, performance, and functionality occurs round-the-clock and will allow you to catch an outage before users do. 

An example for consideration would be an online pharmacy that lost $15,000 in sales during a 12-hour outage that may have been prevented had they invested $25/month in a monitoring service that would have alerted them to their problems with their server.  

Hence, the continuous vigilance of a proactive third party ensures your business is accessible to customers and safeguards against missed sales and damages to business reputation due to outages. 

WordPress Maintenance Cost Breakdown Table

Final Thoughts 

Learning about the costs associated with the maintenance of a WordPress site is not only about planning the budget; it is also about acknowledging the protection of your online presence as a value. Each aspect of the maintenance that ranges from securing your site against external threats, tuning the performance of the site plays a crucial role in the website’s lifespan and success.

Although it may appear as an extra cost, maintenance that is done proactively is a strategic move that actually saves you from costly repairs, loss of revenue, and a bad reputation in the market. In other words, by giving priority to regular maintenance, you are not only taking care of the website but also protecting a very important business asset that brings in new customers and keeps the old ones happy since they have developed trust in you. 

Would you like to have stress-free WordPress maintenance as your investment? Contact Khired Digital now for a personalized plan that keeps your website safe, fast, and completely optimized.

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