Website maintenance in Spokane, priced before we start

For a small business website, ongoing maintenance commonly runs somewhere between $50 and $300 a month depending on the size of the site and what’s included. Ecommerce sites sit higher because there’s more to break and more urgency when it does. Hourly work locally tends to fall between $75 and $150 an hour. We quote per site rather than publishing a flat rate, because a five-page brochure site and a 200-product store are not the same job and one monthly figure for both would be wrong for one of you.

Pay for the work the site actually needs, not for a tier name. A small site that changes rarely might justify $50 to $100 a month, or nothing at all with occasional paid jobs instead. A busy site with a store, bookings or regular content changes justifies more because more is being done. The test is whether you could name what happened last month, if you can’t, you’re paying for reassurance rather than work.

Roughly $75 to $150 an hour for an agency or an experienced freelancer in this market, with offshore rates going considerably lower and specialist development work going higher. Hourly is a fair structure for occasional jobs. It works against you when the work is regular, because you end up paying premium rates for routine updates that a fixed scope would cover for less.

There isn’t a single one, and anybody quoting a national average is flattening a very wide range. Realistically: $50 to $150 a month covers updates, monitoring and light edits on a small brochure site; $150 to $500 a month is normal for a larger site or one with ecommerce; and enterprise arrangements go well past that. What changes the number is site size, platform complexity, and how fast you need someone to respond.

Every website needs updates. Not every website needs a monthly plan. WordPress core and plugin patches arrive constantly and ignoring them is how sites get compromised, so that part is not optional. Whether it needs to be a recurring arrangement depends on the site, a static brochure site can be handled with periodic paid jobs, while anything taking payments or bookings should be on a schedule.

Updates monthly at minimum, and within days for a security patch on something you’re running. A functional check (forms submitting, links resolving, speed holding up) is worth doing monthly. A deeper review of content, rankings and structure is a once or twice a year job. Sites with ecommerce or user accounts should be looked at more often than that, because the cost of a fault is immediate.

Routine monthly work on a small site is typically one to three hours: run the updates on staging, check the key pages, review the scans, write the report. Content edits are usually minutes each. Bug fixes vary, an obvious break is often under an hour, and something intermittent can take considerably longer to reproduce than it does to fix.

It can be, and for budgeting purposes a fixed monthly figure with a defined scope is usually easier to live with. What makes it fixed is the scope, not the label: if the agreement says what’s covered and what isn’t, the number holds. If the scope is vague, the cost isn’t fixed at all. It just looks fixed until the first request that falls outside it.

Because it’s software, and software doesn’t sit still. WordPress ships updates, plugins ship updates, browsers change, PHP versions get retired, and each of those can break something that worked yesterday. On top of that, websites are constantly probed by automated attacks looking for known holes. The cost isn’t the maintenance. It’s that a website is a live system, and every live system needs someone accountable for it.

You have to maintain it. You don’t necessarily have to pay someone else to. Running updates, taking backups and checking your forms are all things a reasonably confident owner can do, and if you’ll actually do them, do them. Most people don’t, not through incapacity, but because it’s nobody’s job until something breaks. Paying for it is really paying for it to be someone’s job.

Yes, and there are three usual options. A freelancer is cheapest and carries the risk that they’re unavailable when you need them. An agency costs more and has cover when one person is away. A managed-IT firm handles your whole network and treats the website as one item among many, which suits some businesses and leaves website-specific work shallow for others. For a small business whose website generates leads, the website specialist is usually the right fit.

Whoever you make responsible, the business owner, an in-house marketer, a freelancer, or the agency that built it. The failure mode is that everyone assumes it’s someone else. It is genuinely common for a business to discover a site has had no updates for two years because the person who used to handle it left, and nobody inherited the task.

Managed-IT firms usually price per user or per device across your whole network, often $100 to $200 per user per month, with the website folded in as a minor item. If your main concern is the website itself rather than laptops and email, that’s an expensive way to buy it and the website work tends to be shallow. Website-specific maintenance is cheaper and deeper for the thing you’re actually worried about.