How much it costs to maintain a website per year
How much it really costs to maintain a website per year: domain, hosting, security, content, SEO, and support. Ranges by type of site and common mistakes when cutting costs.
The team behind Polimake. We explore the intersection of technology, creativity, and automation.
Maintaining a website costs quite a bit more than paying for a domain and hosting. A professional website needs active security, technical updates, backups, fresh content, measurement, support, and experience improvements. Neglecting any of these blocks is what turns a website into a deteriorated asset in less than a year.
This guide gives real cost ranges, explains which blocks tend to be underestimated, and where cutting costs ends up more expensive than what you save.
The seven cost blocks
1. Domain
Annual renewal. €10-50/year depending on the extension. A minimal cost, not where you save.
2. Hosting
From €5/month for a small site to €500/month or more for a platform with traffic. The practical rule: if your hosting costs less than €20/month and your business depends on the website, you are probably on fragile shared hosting.
3. SSL certificate, security, and backups
Many hosting plans include a basic certificate. For sites with logins, e-commerce, or sensitive forms, you should have active security (firewall, monitoring, anti-malware) and managed backups. An additional €15-100/month.
4. Technical updates
WordPress, plugins, framework dependencies, libraries. Not updating is an invitation to vulnerabilities. If your team does it: time. If you outsource it: €50-200/month depending on complexity.
5. Creating or updating content
The block most often ignored and the one that most affects SEO. A website with no new content withers. This includes blog posts, page updates, new cases, products. €200-2,000/month depending on volume.
6. SEO and analytics
Technical audits, on-page optimization, link building, ranking monitoring. A decent agency: €500-3,000/month. Done in-house: team time.
7. Design and conversion optimization
UX improvements, A/B tests, new landing pages. What keeps the website from aging visually and the conversion from declining. €200-1,500/month depending on ambition.
Ranges by type of site
- Simple landing page with no lead capture: €200-500/year (domain + hosting + minimal updates).
- Small corporate website: €1,000-3,000/year (includes basic content).
- Corporate website with an active blog: €5,000-15,000/year (content + SEO + updates).
- Medium e-commerce: €10,000-30,000/year (everything above + e-commerce security + conversion optimization).
- SaaS platform or digital media outlet: €30,000-100,000+/year (high security + high content + DevOps + constant optimization).
These ranges assume reasonable levels. You should trim them if your model doesn't require constant lead capture, and raise them if the website is your main sales channel.
Where you should NOT cut costs
- Hosting that's too cheap. If the website goes down on the highest-traffic days, the "savings" turn out extremely expensive.
- No managed backups. A failure + no backup = rebuild from scratch.
- No security updates. A hacked website costs more to recover than to maintain.
- No new content. SEO erodes; organic traffic falls steadily.
- No measurement. If you don't know what works, you optimize blind.
Where you can adjust
- Visual design: a clean, well-structured website competes with an overproduced one.
- Exotic features: what nobody uses isn't worth maintaining.
- Unnecessary plugins/dependencies: each one is an attack surface.
How it fits into creative operations
For an agency or in-house team, web maintenance is recurring content production on a fixed calendar: blog posts, page updates, new campaign landing pages, SEO materials. If that content lives in Drive, the briefs in Notion, the approvals in email, and the publishing somewhere else, the real cost skyrockets due to operational friction.
By centralizing the flow in a creative operations platform, the total cost of maintaining the website falls —not because the tasks are cheaper, but because the team stops losing hours coordinating.
In Polimake, the web content calendar lives in Studio, the pieces are produced in Studio, and the final assets enter Media to be reused in future pages and campaigns.
Related concepts
This piece is part of the Polimake glossary and of the cluster on creative operations. If you manage the website of an agency or product, also read content production at scale.