A website is your doorway to online business. If the site isn’t working, slow, or hacked, you’re missing out. A website that isn’t maintained will work about as good as a car that never gets an oil change.The cost to maintain a website is worth every penny.
Maintenance costs are all over the board and often make no sense at all. One company will offer the exact same services as another yet charge 10x more.If you have web-oriented, in-house IT staff, they should be monitoring the website on a regular basis and keeping up with expirations and updates. If you don’t have an IT resource, you have a few options:
Hire an IT consultant or Web Agency that can remotely monitor your website and make any updates for you. This consultant should have access to your hosting account and all your add-ons, plugins and extension licenses.
Contract with an automatic updating service that will automate your website updates. These services are effective if your website doesn’t have too many customizations. If your website is heavily customized, then making a simple upgrade can cause a ripple effect and bring the whole website down.
Ignore it and hope that your website will be safe from expirations, hackers and malware. Ride that pony till it drops.
Following points to be considered as prime foctors which adds to cost.
Hosting is a basic recurring cost. Depending on the complexity of your website and how much bandwidth you are using, your website hosting costs could range from $10 a month to $100+ a month for a small to mid-size business website.
Domain Name: your domain name (or URL or website address) cost can start at about $15 a year.
SSL: Google is now giving preferential ranking to businesses with SSL licenses. We now build it into all our websites for extra security. These can start at $50 a year.
Backups: Website backups are cheap insurance, no matter the size of your website. If you get hacked or infected with malware, you could have to completely rebuild your website. Backup services start at $5 a month and go up depending on the size, frequency, and type of backup you need.
Content Updates:
Most businesses have an ongoing need to update website content, like; product or service information, staff bios, news, etc. Modern website frameworks, like WordPress, have built-in content management Systems (CMS) that allow non-tech users to manage content. We find that most businesses are so busy running the day-to-day that their website content is continually being back-burnered. A Web Agency that knows your business can help by scheduling content edits and providing a communication process to allow for quick response to client requests. Costs for this service depend on the number of hours your business requires. For example, we have some clients that we bill under $500 a year because their content updates are so minimal. Other clients require 40 hours or more of content work every month.
SEO maintenance
SEO keywords and meta tags are not as critical as they used to be. There is more emphasis these days on PPC Ad services like Google Adwords. That being said, all your content should be properly tagged and new content should be tagged using current SEO best-practices. Once the content has be optimized for search engines, there is little reason to go back to it and re-SEO it. Your marketing resource or Web Agency should keep an eye on the analytics to determine if any further SEO work needs to be done to legacy content.
Source: How much does it cost to maintain a website? – Quora
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