What does WordPress maintenance cost?

A WordPress site is never finished. Behind the scenes updates for the core, your theme and your plugins appear almost every week, and every update you skip is a small gap where spam, malware or a breakdown can slip through. Maintenance is the quiet, invisible work that keeps your site secure, fast and online. Below you will read what it involves, what it costs and how often it needs to happen.

What does WordPress maintenance include?

Good maintenance is more than pressing the update button now and then. These are the parts that belong in it as standard:

• Updates to core, theme and plugins, tested before they go live so your site does not suddenly break.
• Daily back-ups, so there is always a fresh copy ready to restore.
• Security and malware protection, with daily scans that catch infections early.
• Uptime monitoring, so I know when your site goes offline, often before you notice.
• Spam filtering on forms and comments, so your inbox stays clean.
• Speed, with periodic checks on load time and cleaning up ballast in the database.

Want to see how this works in practice? On the website support page you can read how I handle this for business owners.

What does WordPress maintenance cost per month?

The price depends on the size of your site and whether you want hosting included. In the market you see monthly amounts between roughly 25 and 100 euro. At Your Virtual Assistant.eu I keep it simple and transparent:

You can also run the maintenance on your existing hosting; hosting is therefore optional. The full explanation and ordering is on the hosting and maintenance page.

How often should WordPress be updated?

Core and plugins are best updated weekly, or right away when an important update appears. Back-ups run daily, so if something goes wrong you lose at most a day and not weeks. Why that frequency matters: many updates specifically close security holes. Wait too long and the gap stays open, and automated bots often find it within days. Updating too late is the most common cause of hacked WordPress sites I come across.

Want to know more about outsourcing in general? Then read what a virtual assistant costs.

Do it yourself or outsource?

Doing your own maintenance is perfectly fine if you have the time and the knowledge for it. The real question is what your risk is when it goes wrong. An update that causes a conflict can take your site down at a moment that does not suit you, and an outdated plugin is an open door for malware. Outsourcing mostly buys you peace of mind: someone who keeps an eye on it, tests before anything goes live and is ready when something does break. For most business owners that certainty easily outweighs the 60 euro per month.