How much to charge for WordPress maintenance?

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Are you a freelance WordPress developer or agency providing WordPress website maintenance service? Not sure about how much to charge for your maintenance service?

How much should you charge for WordPress website and blog maintenance service?

I came across this question on a WordPress forum. The question is very basic, but quite intriguing. It can also be rephrased as: How much do you charge for website maintenance?

Here’s a quick checklist to consider when deciding on how much to charge for your WordPress service.

  • Scope of WordPress website maintenance
  • How many work hours anticipated per month? (Minimum 2 hours)
  • How much you bill per hour? ($25-$50)

One of the responses to the query shared own experience: “For most sites, we bill 2 hours a month. Its between $100–200 / month.”

If we take a cue from the statement above, you should be charging for a minimum of 2 hours, $25-100 per hour.

WordPress generally doesn’t break, unless you keep making changes to it. Sometimes, a change at the host level or your own settings (PHP, .htaccess, etc) can break the site. Otherwise, you simply have to keep the WordPress core and all the themes and plugins up-to-date.

As site maintenance might involve more hours when things break or need serious fixing, you might have to spend many hours.

Your charge should factor in any unexpected increase of work if the payment is a fixed monthly fee. You would still get paid the same amount even when you have to spend more hours.

To compensate for occasional increase in workload, charge 2X (two times) the anticipated work hours. The cushion will cover any unbilled time when you have to spend hours fixing it.

Make sure you include backups in the monthly maintenance. Back-up the website files and database via a WP plugin or hosting / cPanel.

If you are responsible for keeping the website secure, you want to prevent site from getting hacked. Security and regular back-ups will save you a lot of trouble.

Also, figure out if you need to upload and edit content too. Maybe, you will be asked to upload images, add a map or provide a PDF file for download on the site. Managing content is more time consuming than keeping the website in good health.