Website care plan vs doing it yourself: which costs less?

A website care plan is cheaper than doing it yourself when your site brings in work and your own time is worth more than about $50 an hour. Doing it yourself costs less in cash but takes a few hours every month, plus the occasional emergency. If your site is a simple brochure on a hosted builder that rarely changes, DIY is usually the sensible choice; if it runs on WordPress and earns money, a plan usually pays for itself.

A fair comparison counts three things: the money, your hours, and the risk of something breaking when nobody is watching.

What "maintaining a website" actually involves

Most of the work is routine. On a typical WordPress site, the monthly list looks like this:

1. Update WordPress core, the theme and every plugin, then check that the site still works.
2. Confirm backups ran and that at least one recent copy is stored somewhere other than the server.
3. Watch uptime, so you hear about an outage before a customer does.
4. Renew the domain and keep the SSL certificate valid.
5. Scan for malware and review failed login attempts.
6. Make content changes: new prices, staff, opening hours, a new service page.
7. Check speed every few months and fix what slowed down.

None of these is hard on its own. The trouble is that updates occasionally break things, backups fail silently, and a plugin with a known security hole stays installed for months because nobody looked. Our website security checklist covers the security side in more detail.

Hosted builders such as Wix and Squarespace handle core updates, hosting and SSL for you, which removes most of the list. That is why the DIY case is much stronger on a builder than on WordPress.

What doing it yourself costs

The cash cost is low:

The time estimate assumes a small site with a modest number of plugins and an owner who already knows the admin area. The first few months take longer while you learn.

The cost that does not show up in that table is the bad month. A plugin update that breaks your contact form can go unnoticed for weeks. A hacked site can be flagged by browsers, lose search visibility and need a professional clean-up. If you do it yourself, you need a tested backup and a plan for who you will call when you cannot fix it.

What a care plan costs

Specialist WordPress care plans commonly run about $90 to $360 a month. Cheaper plans exist for small sites, and they usually trade away development time or response speed.

When you compare plans, check five things:

• Where backups are stored, how long they are kept, and whether restoring one is included.
• Whether updates are tested, or just clicked through.
• What happens when an update breaks something: is the fix included?
• How many minutes or hours of changes you get, and whether unused time rolls over.
• Who owns the hosting account and the domain. You should own the domain in your name whatever plan you choose.

For a fuller breakdown of the market, see our guide to website maintenance costs.

Side by side

If you do it yourself, set up these four safeguards

Doing it yourself works well when you treat it as a routine instead of a chore you get to when you remember. Before you rely on DIY, put these in place:

1. Automatic daily backups stored off the server, in a cloud storage account you control. Test a restore once, on a copy of the site, so you know it works.
2. A free uptime monitor that emails or texts you when the site goes down.
3. A fixed monthly slot in your calendar for updates. Update plugins one at a time on busy sites so you know which one caused a problem.
4. The name and number of a developer you can call in an emergency, agreed before you need them.

Our guide to website backups explains how often to back up and where to keep copies.

How to decide

Work out the number for your own business:

1. Estimate your monthly hours honestly. Include the time to read change logs and test the site after each update.
2. Put a price on that time. If an hour of your work is worth $75 and maintenance takes three hours, DIY costs you $225 a month before hosting.
3. Ask what one day of downtime costs. If the site books appointments or takes orders, add a rough figure for that risk.
4. Compare the total with the care plan price.

As a rough guide, three common situations come out like this:

• A one-page or brochure site on a builder, updated a few times a year. Do it yourself.
• A WordPress site that generates most of your inquiries, maintained by whoever has time. Get a care plan.
• An online store or booking site where an hour offline costs real money. Get a care plan with priority support and a staging site for testing changes.

If you are still choosing your platform, our comparison of managed WordPress hosting explains what a good host already handles for you.

Our care plans

We offer three fixed monthly plans, listed on our pricing page:

• Basic care, $49 a month: managed hosting with SSL, daily backups, software and plugin updates, uptime monitoring and 30 minutes of content edits.
• Business care, $129 a month: everything in Basic plus a CDN and performance tuning, malware scanning and a firewall, an hour of edits and a monthly health report.
• Priority care, $249 a month: everything in Business plus 3 hours of development, same business day response, a staging site and a quarterly speed and SEO check.

Plans renew monthly and you can cancel before the next billing date.

Your next step

This month, keep a simple log of every minute you spend on your website, including the time spent worrying about whether last week's update broke something. At the end of the month, multiply the hours by what your time is worth and compare it with a plan. If the plan wins, our website hosting and maintenance page explains how we take over an existing site.