In short: website maintenance in the Netherlands costs €50 to €150 per month for a small site, €100 to €300 for a small-business website, €250 to €750 for an online store and €300 to €1,500 or more for a web application with an SLA in 2026. That should cover updates, backups, monitoring, security, speed and support with an agreed response time. Budget 10 to 20% of the build cost per year.
Price table: maintenance by type of website
| Type of site | What is involved | Guide price per month 2026 (excl. VAT) | Support response time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small site (1–5 pages, static or WordPress) | Updates, backup, uptime check, small copy changes | €50 – 150 | 2–5 business days |
| Small-business website (5–20 pages, CMS, forms) | Plus security scans, speed check, monthly report, 1–2 hours of changes | €100 – 300 | 1–2 business days |
| Online store (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento) | Plus payment and integration tests, app updates, peak monitoring | €250 – 750 | 4–8 business hours |
| Web application or portal (Node.js, custom) | Plus dependencies, database, logging, incident response, staging | €300 – 1,500 | 2–4 business hours, 24/7 for enterprise |
| Further development (growth retainer) | Fixed days or sprints per month for new features | €1,000 – 7,000 | within the sprint |
An agency offering 'maintenance' for €25 per month does 1 thing: switch on automatic updates. That is hosting with an extra line on the invoice, not maintenance.
What a maintenance contract must include
Check every contract against these 8 points. If 1 is missing, you are paying for half a service.
- Updates. CMS, plugins, themes, frameworks and dependencies, monthly or more often, tested on a staging environment before they go live.
- Backups. Daily, stored outside your hosting environment, kept for 30 days, with a restore test at least once a quarter. A backup that has never been restored does not exist.
- Monitoring. Uptime check every minute, error alerts to the maintainer (not to you), alerts on SSL expiry and domain renewal.
- Security. Firewall (WAF), malware scanning, two-factor authentication on all accounts, security headers and a response to critical vulnerabilities within 24 to 48 hours.
- Speed. Monthly Core Web Vitals check, image optimization, database cleanup, cache settings. A site slows down by itself.
- Support SLA. Agreed response and resolution times, channel (email, portal, phone) and what happens outside business hours.
- Small changes. 1 to 4 hours per month for copy, images, forms or a new page on an existing template.
- Reporting. A monthly overview: what was updated, how much downtime, which attacks were blocked, how speed is holding up.
For an online store add tests of the checkout and the integrations; for a web application add a staging environment, logging and an incident procedure.
What it costs if you skip it
Maintenance feels like a cost, until something goes wrong:
- Hack or malware. According to Patchstack, almost 8,000 new vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes were reported in 2024, 96% of them in plugins. Cleaning up a hacked site costs €750 to €3,000, plus reputational damage and a report to the Dutch Data Protection Authority if personal data was exposed.
- Downtime. A real estate agent with 20 enquiries a day loses 40 leads in 2 days of downtime. An online store with €3,000 in daily revenue loses that revenue outright.
- Ranking loss. Google penalizes slow and hacked sites. Climbing back takes 3 to 6 months.
- Expired SSL or domain. A 'not secure' browser warning, or a site that vanishes because the domain was not renewed, happens more often than you think.
- Expensive rebuild. A site that has not been updated for 3 years often cannot be updated safely anymore and has to be rebuilt: €5,000 to €15,000 instead of €1,500 a year in maintenance.
Then there is legislation. NIS2 and the Dutch Cyber Security Act impose requirements on patch policy, backups and incident reporting for medium and large companies in important sectors, and those requirements trickle down the supply chain to their vendors. What that means for SMEs is covered in NIS2 and the Cyber Security Act.
Maintaining WordPress versus custom Node.js
The type of site determines how much work maintenance is:
- WordPress. It runs about 43% of all websites, which makes it the most popular target. Every plugin is an attack surface. Budget 2 to 4 hours per month for updates, tests and checks on a site with 15 to 25 plugins. Maintenance costs more here, but changes are cheap because any developer can handle it.
- Custom Node.js or Next.js. No plugins, a smaller attack surface and often a static front end that is almost impossible to hack. There are dependencies (npm packages) that need monthly updates and a Node.js version that must be replaced every 2.5 years under the LTS schedule. Budget 1 to 3 hours per month for a site, 4 to 12 hours for an application with a database and integrations.
- Shopify. The platform maintains itself; you maintain the theme, apps and integrations. Less work, but app updates can break your theme.
In short: WordPress needs more routine maintenance, custom code needs more expertise per hour. The choice is worked out in Next.js vs WordPress.
SLA levels explained
An SLA (service level agreement) defines what you can expect. The 3 numbers that matter:
- Response time. How quickly someone picks up and acknowledges your ticket. Typical: 2 business days (basic), 8 business hours (pro), 4 business hours (enterprise), 1 hour on 24/7 contracts.
- Resolution time. How quickly an outage is fixed. It varies by priority: site down (P1) within 4 to 8 hours, broken form (P2) within 1 to 2 business days, cosmetic (P3) in the next maintenance round.
- Availability. 99.9% uptime means at most 43 minutes of downtime per month; 99.5% means 3.6 hours. Ask how it is measured and what the compensation is when it is missed.
For a small-business site an SLA with a response within 1 to 2 business days and P1 resolution within 8 hours is more than enough. Only pay for 24/7 if you earn revenue at night or run an application customers need every day. Managed cloud and hosting from €95 per month per environment belongs in the same picture: maintenance without solid hosting is mopping with the tap running.
Maintenance plus development: the growth retainer
A site that stays the same for 3 years loses ground. Most service businesses we work with combine maintenance with a fixed number of hours or days of development per month: a new service page, a landing page for a campaign, A/B tests on the contact page, a CRM integration.
In practice it looks like this:
- Care (from €95 per month): updates, backups, monitoring, security, response within 2 business days.
- Care Pro (from €249 per month): plus speed and SEO check, 2 hours of changes, response within 8 business hours.
- Care Enterprise (from €495 per month): plus staging, integration tests, priority, response within 4 business hours. For applications with an extended SLA from €950 per month.
- Continuous (from €3,950 per month): an ongoing stream of design, development and optimization, maintenance included.
A retainer is cheaper than one-off jobs (which cost €95 to €130 per hour) and guarantees there is someone who knows your site. Monthly cancellation after 3 months is a reasonable norm; 12-month contracts with silent renewal are not.
RABZI estimate: website maintenance from RABZI costs €95 per month (Care), €249 per month (Care Pro) or €495 per month (Care Enterprise), with response times of 2 business days, 8 business hours and 4 business hours respectively. All plans can be cancelled monthly after 3 months. See maintenance, support and SLA or the full pricing.
Frequently asked questions
How much does website maintenance cost per month? In 2026 you pay €50 to €150 per month for a small site, €100 to €300 for a small-business website, €250 to €750 for an online store and €300 to €1,500 for a web application with an SLA. Hosting is usually not included; that adds €10 to €100 per month.
How much does a website cost per year in total? Budget 10 to 20% of the build cost per year for maintenance, hosting and licenses. A €6,000 site therefore costs €600 to €1,200 a year to keep running, a €20,000 online store easily €3,000 to €5,000. Further development comes on top of that.
Can I maintain my website myself? For a small WordPress site you can: run updates, check backups and test the site. Budget 2 to 4 hours per month and accept the risk that an update breaks something without you noticing. Once revenue or customer data depends on the site, outsourcing is almost always cheaper than 1 incident.
What is the difference between hosting and maintenance? Hosting is the server your site runs on, with power, storage and network. Maintenance is the work of keeping the site secure, fast and working: updates, backups, monitoring, security and support. Some hosts offer both; ask exactly which tasks are included and who performs them.
Conclusion
Website maintenance costs €50 to €300 per month for most sites and €300 to €1,500 for online stores and applications in 2026, or 10 to 20% of the build cost per year. Do not pay for 'automatic updates'; pay for a contract with updates on staging, tested backups, monitoring, security, speed and an SLA with concrete response times. Want to know what maintenance would cost for your site, or a second opinion on your current contract? Book an intro call and you will have a proposal within 2 business days.