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WordPress maintenance cost calculator

What looking after your site yourself costs each month in time and tools, beside the price of a care plan.

Updates, checking backups, fixing what breaks, small changes. An honest guess is enough.

In US dollars: what you charge, or what you would pay someone to do your job for an hour.

In US dollars: paid backup, security and speed plugins, and monitoring. Divide a yearly price by twelve.

The estimate

Fill in your hours and what an hour is worth.

A care plan, each month

Essential
$39
Care
$79
Business
$149
Store
$249
SEO plan, 4 hours
$199
SEO plan, 8 hours
$379

How it is worked out

Your hours each month, times what an hour of your time is worth, plus what you pay for tools. That is what looking after the site yourself costs you in a month. Every figure is yours, and nothing you type is sent to us.

Counting the hours honestly

The hours are easy to underestimate, because the work comes in small pieces. Count the time for:

  • applying updates and looking at the site afterwards;
  • checking that backups ran, and now and then that one can be restored;
  • finding and fixing what an update or a new plugin broke;
  • small changes to pages, menus and forms;
  • dealing with spam, locked-out users and messages from your host.

The WordPress maintenance checklist lists the work by week, month, quarter and year, if you want to check your guess against it.

Reading the comparison

The prices beside your figure are our care plans for one site. They are not the same thing as your hours: each plan covers a set list of work, and the larger ones include a fixed amount of time for fixes and small edits. What each plan covers is on the maintenance page, and every price is on one page.

If your figure is lower than a plan, doing it yourself is the cheaper way, as long as it gets done every week. If it is higher, the difference is what handing the routine over would save you.

Common questions

What should I put for an hour of my time?
What you charge customers for an hour, if you bill by time. Otherwise, what it would cost to have someone do your own job for an hour. It is the value of the work you are not doing while you look after the site.
Does a care plan replace all of my hours?
Not all of them. A plan covers the routine: updates, backups, monitoring and security scanning, and on the larger plans a set amount of time for fixes and small edits. Writing content and deciding what the site should say stay with you.
I look after several sites. How do I use this?
Work it out for one site at a time. A care plan covers one site, so the comparison is fair only site by site.

Not sure which plan fits?

Tell us about the site. We reply with what we found and which plan, if any, we would suggest. The diagnosis is free.

Get a free diagnosis