Website maintenance for a standard business WordPress site in the Netherlands often costs roughly €50 to €150 per month. For a webshop, custom site or revenue-critical platform, €150 to €500 or more is more realistic. These are market indications, not an official tariff. The useful question is therefore not just the monthly fee, but which risks and recovery work it covers.
A €39 package and a €299 contract can both be appropriate. The first may suit a small brochure site with few changes; the second may suit a shop where downtime immediately costs orders. Compare scope, response times and exclusions before comparing price.
Hosting, maintenance and development are different costs
| Cost | Purpose | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Keep the website available | Server, storage, traffic and TLS certificate |
| Technical maintenance | Prevent and repair faults and vulnerabilities | Updates, backups, monitoring and compatibility tests |
| Development | Change content or functionality | A new page, integration, form or design change |
Ask explicitly whether hosting and small changes are included in the maintenance fee. “Unlimited support” sometimes means unlimited questions, not unlimited changes.
The minimum maintenance package
A professional baseline for a business WordPress site should include at least:
- updates to WordPress, the theme and plug-ins;
- a current inventory of active licences and dependencies;
- automated backups outside the production environment;
- monitoring of availability and failed processes;
- checks of forms and business-critical actions;
- security and error-log reviews;
- periodic checks for broken internal links and 404s;
- an incident, recovery and escalation procedure.
WordPress recommends keeping core, themes and plug-ins current and having a recent backup before updates. Pressing an update button is not a maintenance process by itself. Someone must verify that the site still works afterwards and know how to restore the previous version.
A backup only counts after a recovery test
A green “backup completed” tick proves that a process created a file. It does not prove that the database, uploads, configuration and secrets are complete, or that anyone can restore them within the promised time.
The Dutch National Cyber Security Centre recommends actually restoring backups in a recovery test. Record two values:
- RPO — how much data may you lose? A weekly backup may be too coarse for a site that changes every day.
- RTO — how quickly must the site work again? “We have a backup” says nothing about recovery within an hour or two working days.
Ask when the last restore was tested, how long it took and who has access when the regular administrator is unavailable.
How to compare a maintenance contract
Score each point 0, 1 or 2: missing, partly described or concretely agreed.
| Check | Question for the supplier |
|---|---|
| Updates | How quickly are critical updates assessed, and are changes tested? |
| Backup | Where is the copy stored, how long is it retained and when was restoration tested? |
| Monitoring | What is measured beyond “the homepage returns HTTP 200”? |
| Response time | Is this time to first response or time to actual recovery? |
| Incidents | Who communicates, investigates and restores after a security incident? |
| Licences | In whose name are theme and plug-in licences, and what happens on cancellation? |
| Exclusions | Are malware recovery, content faults, integrations and urgent work included? |
| Reporting | Do you receive evidence of updates, tests, faults and actions? |
| Exit | Do you receive a complete export, accounts, documentation and final backup? |
A contract scoring below 10 out of 18 is not automatically poor, but it needs explanation. A light package may fit a low-risk site. Vague commitments are harder to defend for a webshop or client portal.
Maintain it yourself or outsource it?
Self-maintenance is reasonable when the site is simple, a technical owner is named and recovery can be tested. Include internal time and incident availability, not just licence costs.
Outsourcing is more logical when:
- the site consistently produces enquiries or revenue;
- it processes personal data, payments or customer accounts;
- several plug-ins or external integrations depend on each other;
- nobody internally owns updates and recovery;
- out-of-hours downtime has serious consequences.
A static site without a CMS often needs fewer updates, but monitoring, domain management, dependencies and content freshness do not disappear entirely.
Calculate maintenance from the cost of downtime
Use this simple comparison: annual maintenance cost < incident likelihood × recovery cost and lost value. It is not an actuarial calculation. It forces you to state what one day offline, a missed form or a lost database is actually worth.
A maintenance package is not insurance against every problem; it buys preparation, detection and agreed recovery capacity. Also read what a website costs to build and when WordPress is the right choice.
Sources and date checked
- WordPress: plug-in and theme auto-updates
- WordPress: periodic website maintenance
- NCSC: how do I test a backup?
Price indications checked on 24 August 2026. Recheck current suppliers and contract terms before signing an agreement.