What a Website Actually Costs Per Year (Not Per Build)

Most owners know what their website cost to build. Far fewer know what it costs to keep. When people ask me about website cost per year, they usually expect one number: the monthly plan price times twelve. That’s part of it. The real yearly number is the plan, plus hosting, plus licences, plus the small fixes nobody puts on a quote.

Here’s how I’d add it up. I’ll use our own prices, so you see real figures instead of “it depends.”

Why the build price is the wrong number to budget for

A build is a one-off. You pay it once, and the site starts ageing the next day. WordPress core, your theme and your plugins all get updates. Security certificates renew. Hosting bills arrive. Someone has to check that the contact form still sends.

WordPress itself tells site owners to keep core, themes and plugins up to date (Updating WordPress, WordPress.org). That work doesn’t stop after launch, and it isn’t on the build invoice.

That’s why a site that looked cheap in year one can turn into the expensive one by year three. If you want the background on what that upkeep actually is, we explained backups, updates and uptime in plain terms.

The four parts of your website cost per year

These are the lines I’d put in a yearly budget.

1. The maintenance plan

This is the biggest line and the easiest one to see. Here’s what our three plans come to over a year:

• Basic Care: €100 (~$115) a month, so €1,200 (~$1,390) a year. Updates, bi-weekly backups, uptime and basic error monitoring, security hardening, and a monthly health check and report. No development time included.
• Pro Care: €250 (~$290) a month, so €3,000 (~$3,480) a year. Adds up to 2 hours of development work a month, weekly backups, staging-first updates and a dedicated account manager.
• Partner Care: €450 (~$520) a month, so €5,400 (~$6,260) a year. Adds up to 4 hours of development work a month, daily backups, same-business-day priority support, and we coordinate hosting, DNS and email for you.

If you want the full tier-by-tier list, our plans page breaks down the website maintenance cost line by line.

2. Hosting and the domain

Our care plans don’t include hosting. It’s an optional add-on, so for most owners it’s a separate bill. Hosting prices vary a lot by provider: WP Engine’s entry-level Essential plan starts at $28 a month, Kinsta’s entry-level Launch plan is $35 a month ($30 a month if you pay yearly), and SiteGround’s WordPress StartUp plan renews at €15.99 (~$19) a month after the first discounted term. (Prices as listed on 17 Sep 2026.)

Add the domain renewal too. Porkbun lists .com domains at $11.08 a year, and says that’s the renewal price too, not just a first-year rate. It’s small, but it’s easy to forget, and a lapsed domain takes the whole site offline.

If you’d rather have one bill for the site, hosting and upkeep together, that’s what our website-as-a-service plans are for: Starter €199 (~$230), Business €399 (~$465) and Enterprise €699 (~$810) a month.

3. Premium plugin licences

Page builders, caching plugins, translation plugins: plenty of sites run on paid plugins that renew every year. Owners tend to forget them until one expires and stops getting updates.

On Pro Care, the Pro Tech Stack is included: Elementor Pro, WP Rocket and Polylang Pro. Partner Care adds JetEngine and Piotnet Addons on top. If you pay for these yourself, they belong in the budget.

4. The fixes nobody itemizes

This is the line that surprises people. A new landing page. An extra field on a form. A plugin that stopped being developed and needs replacing. None of it is maintenance in the strict sense, but something like it comes up every year.

On Basic and Pro Care, extra development is €75 (~$85) an hour. Pro and Partner include some hours each month, and that changes the maths for a site that changes a lot.

A worked example

Say you run a five-page service business site. It’s stable, and you change something a few times a year.

• Basic Care for the year: €1,200 (~$1,390)
• Four hours of extra work across the year at €75 (~$85) an hour: €300 (~$350)
• Hosting and domain: from your provider’s invoices
• Plugin licences you pay for yourself: from your renewal emails

The plan plus the extra work comes to €1,500 (~$1,740) a year before hosting and licences. That’s the figure to compare quotes against, not the monthly price on its own.

Now say the site changes every month: new pages, campaign landing pages, regular edits. Two hours of extra work a month on Basic Care is €1,800 (~$2,090) a year. Add the plan and you’re at €3,000 (~$3,480). That’s exactly a year of Pro Care, which already includes those two hours, plus the plugin stack, weekly backups and staging-first updates. At that point Pro is the better deal.

The point isn’t to pick the cheapest plan. It’s to pick the one that matches how often your site actually changes.

Three budgeting mistakes I see often

• Budgeting the plan and nothing else. The plan is the biggest line, but it’s rarely the only one. Hosting, the domain and licences all renew on their own dates, usually when you’re not thinking about the website.
• Treating every change as free. A plan without development hours covers upkeep, not new work. If you ask for a new page every month, that’s either hourly work or a sign you need a bigger plan.
• Leaving renewals on a personal card. When a card expires, a hosting account or a plugin licence quietly lapses. Put every renewal in one list, with dates, and check it once a quarter.

What to ask before you compare quotes

Monthly prices are hard to compare, because every provider includes different things. Before you put two quotes side by side, ask each one:

1. What’s included, and what’s billed by the hour?
2. How often do backups run, and are they kept away from the hosting account?
3. Are updates tested before they go live?
4. Is hosting included? Are plugin licences?
5. What’s the response time if the site goes down?

Once you have those answers, you can turn each quote into a real website cost per year and compare like with like. Our guide to website maintenance packages walks through what a proper package should include, tier by tier.

Where the hidden cost really sits

Skipping upkeep doesn’t remove the cost. It moves it later, and usually makes it bigger.

Left alone for a year, small things stack up: a plugin two versions behind, a certificate nobody renewed, a backup that quietly stopped running. Then the fix is a bigger job, billed by the hour, at a time you didn’t choose.

Result

Your website cost per year is four lines, not one:

• the plan
• hosting and the domain
• premium plugin licences
• the extra work that comes up during the year

Add all four before you compare providers. The cheapest monthly price isn’t always the cheapest year.

If you’d like a second opinion on what your own site should cost to run, ask us for a free website audit. We’ll look at the site and tell you which plan fits, and whether you need one at all.