How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?

Security researchers at Patchstack logged 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem during 2025, a 42% jump on the year before. Almost half of them, 46%, had no fix available on the day they went public. Most will never touch your site. The ones that do need someone to notice and act, often within hours.

So how much does website maintenance cost? For a typical small business site in Bulgaria, plan on roughly €60 to €250 a month once hosting, the domain and professional care are added together. An online shop sits higher, at about €120 to €450. A pre-rendered custom site can come in under €100. The spread is wide because "maintenance" covers everything from renewing a domain to fixing a broken checkout on a Friday evening.

Below we break those numbers down by site type and by cost line, and look at the bill that arrives when nobody does the work. All prices are in euros and exclude Bulgaria's 20% VAT unless stated otherwise.

What maintenance costs in 2026, by type of site

These are the ranges we see across the Bulgarian market for sites looked after by a professional. Each figure is monthly and includes hosting, a share of the yearly domain and licence fees, and the care work itself.

• Brochure site on WordPress (5–10 pages, a contact form): €60–120 a month. Hosting runs €5–15, and a basic care plan covering updates, backups and monitoring adds €50–100.
• Corporate or multilingual site (a blog, several forms, a CRM or newsletter connection): €120–250 a month. More plugins and integrations mean more to test after every update, and hosting that holds up under real traffic costs €15–50.
• WooCommerce shop: €120–450 a month. Hosting ranges from €10 for a small catalogue to €150 for a busy store on managed hosting, and care work runs €100–300, because a failed update on a shop stops orders.
• Shopify store: from around €30 a month for the subscription, plus paid apps and transaction fees. Shopify patches the platform itself, so most of what you pay for is apps, theme fixes and content.
• Pre-rendered custom site (for example Next.js with a headless CMS): €40–120 a month. Hosting costs little because the pages are built in advance, and there is no plugin stack to patch, so most of the fee goes on monitoring, dependency updates and edits.
• Web application: budget 15–20% of the original build cost per year. Apps have servers, databases and third-party APIs, and all of them change underneath you.

Two things push a site to the top of its band: how many plugins or integrations it has, and how much of your revenue depends on it staying up. A plumber's site that breaks for a day loses a few calls. A shop that breaks during a Black Friday campaign can lose the month.

If those figures look high next to your build quote, set them against what the site cost to make. Our 2026 website cost breakdown puts a custom corporate site at €1,500–4,500. At €150 a month, three years of care costs about as much as the build did. That surprises most owners, and it is the reason to settle the maintenance question before you decide how the site gets built.

What a maintenance fee should actually cover

"Maintenance" is one of the vaguest words on a web invoice. Two quotes at €80 a month can describe very different amounts of work. A proper plan covers the jobs below, and the quote should name each one:

• Software updates. WordPress core, plugins and the theme on WordPress sites; framework and package updates on custom builds. Good providers test updates on a staging copy first and keep a way to roll back.
• Server software. Most hosting runs on PHP, and old PHP versions stop getting security fixes. PHP 8.2 reaches the end of its security support on 31 December 2026, so sites still on it, or on anything older, need an upgrade and a round of testing this year.
• Backups you can restore. Daily backups stored away from the server, plus a test restore now and then. Nobody knows whether a backup works until they try to restore from it.
• Uptime and security monitoring. An alert when the site goes down, a malware scan, and a firewall or login protection. Someone also has to act on the alert, and that is the part cheap plans leave out.
• Certificates and renewals. The SSL certificate, the domain and any paid licences, renewed before they lapse.
• Speed and function checks. A monthly look at Core Web Vitals, a test submission of every contact form and, for shops, a test order.
• A small allowance for edits. Usually one to three hours a month for text changes, new images or an extra page.
• A short report. What was updated, what broke, and what is coming up.

Content marketing, SEO campaigns and redesign work are separate services. Some providers bundle a little of each into a care plan; most price them on their own. If a plan includes unlimited edits, check what counts as an edit. Copy and images are routine. New features are development.

Response time matters as much as the task list. A plan that promises to look at a hacked site within five working days is a backup service with a nicer name. For a site that brings in enquiries, ask for a same-day response to outages and security incidents. For a shop, ask how quickly someone starts work on a broken checkout, weekends included.

The fixed costs: domain, hosting, certificates and licences

Part of the bill barely changes whoever does the work. Budget for these lines every year:

• Domain: €10–30 a year for a .bg or .com. Put it on auto-renew with a card that won't expire before the renewal date. Once the grace period runs out, somebody else can register a lapsed domain.
• Hosting: €5–15 a month for decent shared hosting, €15–50 for managed WordPress hosting with staging and daily backups, and more for a busy shop on its own server. Pre-rendered sites need very little server power, so a small monthly plan is usually enough.
• SSL certificate: free for most sites through Let's Encrypt and similar services. The cost to watch now is renewal. Let's Encrypt is cutting certificate lifetimes from 90 days to 45 by February 2028, so a certificate that somebody renews by hand will eventually lapse and greet visitors with a security warning. Renewal has to be automatic.
• Premium plugin and theme licences: typically €50–300 a year in total for a WordPress site, and more for a shop running paid extensions for payments, shipping or invoicing. Many premium plugins stop receiving updates once the licence expires.
• Business email: a monthly fee per mailbox if you use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. It sits outside the website but often ends up on the same invoice.

For a small brochure site these fixed costs come to roughly €150–500 a year. Everything else on the maintenance bill is labour.

Why WordPress sites cost more to look after

WordPress runs a large share of Bulgarian business sites, and for plenty of them it is a sensible choice. Of the common options, it also carries the heaviest maintenance load. The reason is plugins.

Patchstack's 2026 report found that 91% of the vulnerabilities discovered in 2025 were in plugins, with most of the rest in themes. WordPress core had only a handful. For the vulnerabilities attackers exploited most heavily, the median time from public disclosure to mass exploitation was five hours.

Five hours changes what maintenance has to mean. A plan that applies updates once a month leaves a gap of weeks. Patchstack also tested standard hosting security against known WordPress exploits, and it stopped only 12% of those attacks. "The host takes care of security" is not an assumption to build a budget on.

Sites that have been online for a few years tend to collect plugins that were installed for one campaign and then forgotten. Each one is still code that somebody has to update, or delete.

None of this makes WordPress the wrong platform. For Mega Market, a supermarket chain whose marketing team publishes weekly brochures and edits store hours several times a week, WordPress with WooCommerce was the right call because the team already knew it. The maintenance budget simply has to match the platform. If you want a lighter bill, the architecture is where the saving sits, and we compare the options in Next.js vs WordPress for business websites.

Retainer, hourly or all-in subscription

Once you know what the work involves, the next question is how to pay for it. Providers in Bulgaria use three models, and each suits a different kind of owner.

Monthly retainer

A fixed monthly fee for a defined list of tasks, usually with a small bank of hours for edits. You know the cost in advance, and the provider has a reason to prevent problems instead of billing you to fix them. The risk is paying for hours you never use, so check whether unused hours roll over and how quickly extra work gets done. Care retainers in Bulgaria commonly run €50–200 a month for a site and €100–300 for a shop.

Hourly, on request

You call when something needs doing and pay for the time. It looks cheapest, and for a site that hardly changes it can be. The catch is that nobody watches the site in between calls. Updates wait until something breaks, and urgent work is sometimes billed at a higher rate. Hourly suits owners who are comfortable running updates and backups themselves and only need a developer now and then.

All-in subscription

One monthly price covers the site, hosting, the domain, updates and edits. Our own Always-on plan at €100 a month works this way and includes a custom design, hosting, the domain and unlimited copy and image edits. You get one predictable line in the budget and no separate hosting or licence invoices. Before you sign any subscription, ours included, ask what happens to the site, the domain and the content if you cancel.

Whichever model you pick, get written answers to these questions before you sign:

• Which plugins or dependencies would you remove, and why?
• Where are the backups stored, and when did you last restore a site from one?
• Do you test updates on a staging copy before they reach the live site?
• What is included, and what is the hourly rate for everything else?
• Are the domain and hosting accounts registered in our company's name?

The last one costs nothing to arrange, and it is what lets you change providers later without a fight.

What skipping maintenance really costs

Maintenance is easy to cut because nothing visible happens when you stop paying for it. The bill comes later, and usually all at once:

• A hacked site. Removing malware, restoring from a clean backup and closing the hole typically costs several hundred euros with a professional, and more when there is no clean backup to go back to. If Google flags the site as dangerous, visitors see a warning page until it has been cleaned and reviewed.
• Leads that quietly stop. A plugin update breaks the contact form, or the email that forwards submissions. The site looks fine, and enquiries dry up for weeks before anyone notices.
• A forced rebuild. The host retires an old PHP version, the ten-year-old theme won't run on the new one, and the fix is a new site. A €100-a-month problem becomes a €2,000–4,000 project with a deadline attached.
• A lapsed domain or certificate. The site disappears, or browsers show a full-page security warning. Both are cheap to prevent and awkward to explain to customers.
• Exposed personal data. Contact forms and checkouts collect personal data, and under GDPR the business is responsible for protecting it. A breach can mean reporting to Bulgaria's Commission for Personal Data Protection within 72 hours, on top of the cleanup.

Set a year of basic care, around €700–1,400 for a brochure site, against any one of those events, and the sums aren't close.

How to pay less without cutting corners

You can bring the bill down. The saving comes from having less work to do. Skipping the work only moves the cost to a worse moment.

• Delete plugins you don't use. Fewer plugins means fewer updates to test and fewer holes to patch. Where you can, swap three single-purpose plugins for one well-maintained one.
• Pay for hosting that does some of the work. Managed hosting with automatic daily backups, a staging copy and server-level updates costs more than bargain shared hosting, and usually saves more than the difference in labour.
• Keep the low-risk jobs in-house. Text changes, blog posts and new photos are safe in the hands of a trained team member. Updates on a live shop belong on a staging copy first.
• Pay yearly. Most hosts and plugin vendors discount annual billing, and one renewal date is easier to track than twelve.
• Choose the architecture with maintenance in mind. A pre-rendered site with a hosted CMS has no plugins and no public admin login to patch, which is why its care costs sit at the bottom of the ranges above. It costs more to build, so it pays off on sites you plan to keep for several years.
• Match the plan to the site. A five-page site that changes twice a year doesn't need a shop-grade retainer. A shop taking orders every day shouldn't sit on a €30 plan somebody set up years ago.

Here is how that plays out over three years. Take two illustrative quotes for the same corporate site. A WordPress build at €3,000 with a heavy plugin stack and €200 a month of care comes to €10,200. A pre-rendered custom build at €4,500 with €90 a month of care comes to €7,740, so the pricier build ends year three €2,460 cheaper. Run the same sum for a five-page site that changes twice a year and WordPress usually wins. The answer depends on the site.

Online shops are a separate calculation, because downtime has a price per hour. If you run a store or are planning one, our e-commerce builds are scoped with the running cost worked out before launch.

The verdict

For most small Bulgarian businesses, website maintenance costs €60–250 a month all in, and online shops €120–450. That is real money, and it is worth paying on any site that brings in customers. The expensive route is paying nothing for two years and then paying for a cleanup or a rebuild.

Our view: settle maintenance before you pick a platform. A cheap WordPress build with a heavy plugin stack can cost more over three years than a pricier custom site that needs little care. Ask every provider for the build price and the three-year running cost side by side, and choose on the total.

Frequently asked questions

How much does website maintenance cost per month for a small business?

Around €60–120 a month for a simple WordPress brochure site with professional care, and €120–250 for a larger corporate or multilingual site. Those figures include hosting and a share of the domain and licence fees. A pre-rendered custom site can cost less, from about €40.

Is website maintenance really necessary?

For any site built on WordPress or another CMS with plugins, yes. Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, and the most heavily exploited ones came under attack within hours of disclosure. A site on a hosted platform such as Shopify or Wix needs less technical care, but its content, forms and integrations still need checking.

Can I maintain my website myself?

You can handle content edits and keep track of renewals without technical skills. Updating plugins, testing on staging, managing backups and responding to security alerts need someone who knows what to do when an update breaks the site. Many owners split the work: content in-house, technical care with a professional.

How much does WordPress maintenance cost?

A basic professional WordPress care plan in Bulgaria runs about €50–200 a month, not counting hosting. The price rises with the number of plugins, integrations and languages, and with how fast the provider commits to act on a security alert.

What does it cost to maintain an online store?

Plan for €120–450 a month on WooCommerce, covering hosting, care and extension licences. On Shopify the subscription starts at around €30 a month, with apps and transaction fees on top. Either way, budget separately for marketing, photography and ads. Those are growth costs, not maintenance.

How often should a website be updated?

Check for security updates at least weekly and apply critical fixes the day they appear. Test and apply routine updates every two to four weeks. Check speed and forms monthly, and review content, contact details and prices every quarter.

What happens to maintenance if I change agencies?

Nothing breaks if the accounts are in your name. The new provider needs admin access to the site, hosting and domain, a fresh backup, and a list of plugins with their licence keys. Ask the outgoing provider for all of it in writing before you pay the final invoice.

Are maintenance prices quoted with VAT?

Usually not. Most Bulgarian providers quote business services excluding VAT, so add 20% to see the real invoice amount; a VAT-registered company can normally reclaim it. Since 1 January 2026, prices are quoted in euros.