What website support includes and what it costs

Website support covers two kinds of work. Technical maintenance keeps the system alive: CMS and plugin updates, backups, protection against break-ins, checks on uptime and speed. Ongoing edits handle everything you ask us to change, from a new product to updated prices, a promo page or a repaired lead form. Both go into one contract, because on a live website they run side by side anyway.

Now about money. One-off requests are billed at $25 an hour, and you pay only for approved tasks. The technical plan costs $400 a month. That plan already includes 20 hours a month, and maintenance, edits and improvements all come out of those hours. When you need more, you take 40 hours a month for $800, or 80 hours a month for $1,600.

What happens to a website nobody looks after

A website lives in an environment that changes without your involvement. New CMS and plugin versions come out, the hosting company moves the server to a newer PHP release, a payment provider changes its API, a browser drops support for an old script. A site untouched for half a year usually still works. A site untouched for two years returns an error on the payment page one morning, and the owner learns about it from a customer over the phone.

The awkward part is that a failure is rarely visible. The site opens, the catalog is in place, the buttons respond. Only the lead form stays silent, because the host tightened its rules for sending mail. Ads keep running, the budget keeps draining, and inquiries stop arriving.

• A break-in through an outdated plugin. Most infections we have cleaned up started with a known hole whose fix had been published long before the incident. The site then sends spam and the host suspends the account.
• Lost inquiries. The form shows a success message while the emails reach nobody. It can run for months until somebody opens the mailbox and checks by hand.
• Falling search rankings. Errors in the code, slow loading and broken pages push a site down in results. Winning rankings back takes longer than holding on to them, and competitors may take your place in the meantime.
• No usable backup. When you need it most, it turns out the host keeps backups for only a week and the latest one already contains the problem.

We covered the work a site needs right after release in our article on the first 90 days after launch. Support begins there, when real traffic uncovers scenarios that never came up during testing.

What technical maintenance covers

None of this work shows on the site. No new blocks appear, and yet the site opens every morning, payments go through, and mail reaches the manager.

Updates to the CMS, the plugins and the PHP version

Updates go in as a batch on a schedule, and always on a staging copy first. A conflict between two plugins or with the theme is normal, and it is better caught on a copy than on a live store. After the update we walk the critical paths: catalog, cart, checkout, form submission, admin login. The PHP version needs separate attention, because many hosting companies retire old releases on their own schedule, and if nobody has prepared the site for the switch, you can wake up to an error page instead of your site. If the site runs on its own server, keeping that server updated and monitored is separate work, part of server administration. The same service covers servers for accounting software.

Backups that actually restore

A backup starts to mean something once you have tested a restore from it. We back up the files and the database on a schedule, store the backups off the server, and now and then restore a test copy of the site from the archive. The retention period matters as much as the frequency. If the trouble appeared three weeks ago, yesterday’s backup will not save you. Backups kept on the same server as the site disappear along with it.

Security and response to a break-in

The baseline looks modest and still covers most of the risk: limits on login attempts, two-factor authentication for administrators, system files hidden from public access, request filtering at the server level, tracking of changed files. If a site is already infected, we scrub the code, change every password, find the entry point. If Google has flagged the site as hacked, after the cleanup we request a review in Search Console, and Google itself lifts the warning. On a plan that work comes out of your hours, and without a plan it is billed hourly.

Monitoring of uptime and speed

The site is checked automatically every few minutes, so in most cases we learn about downtime before you do. Alongside uptime we watch the expiry dates of the SSL certificate and the domain, errors in the logs, and server response time. Speed gets a separate look, because it degrades quietly under new banners, extra analytics scripts and heavy photos in the catalog. The reasons behind such delays are laid out in our article on why a website loads slowly and how to fix it. The measures that actually buy back seconds, and the ones that only look convincing, are compared in our article on website speed.

Edits, improvements and growth of the site

This is the most visible part of support. The site has to change along with the business. Tasks come from you or from your marketer. We estimate each one in hours and get to work.

• Content. New products and categories, a service description, an article for the blog, price and stock updates, seasonal banners, changed contact details.
• Small improvements. An extra field in a form, a new filter in the catalog, a review block on the home page, the wording of the order email.
• Connected services. Configuring the payment, delivery, email and marketplace feed modules already in place, and fixes when a provider changes its API. A new integration or data sync with an accounting system falls outside the plan.
• Analytics. Goal setup, events for forms and phone clicks, preparing pages for advertising campaigns.
• Technical fixes for search. Redirects after a change in structure, cleanup of duplicates. Page titles and descriptions for search queries are written as part of our search engine optimization service.

When a task outgrows support, we quote it as custom development. A customer portal, two-way sync with a CRM or a shipping calculator of your own will not fit inside a monthly block of hours.

How much website support costs

The price follows the amount of attention a site needs every month. Page count is secondary. A two-hundred-page corporate site that adds one news item a month needs fewer hours than a ten-page service site with weekly promotions and regular edits for ad campaigns.

On any plan, unused hours carry over to the next month and then expire. The hourly format looks cheapest while there are few tasks. Once the work adds up to 16 hours a month or more, a monthly plan comes out ahead on price, because an hour on a plan costs less, and on convenience, because our team already knows your project and keeps a copy of the site ready. We calculate the exact figure after a review, and the full scope is on the Project support and development page.

Which support format suits your website

Brochure site and corporate website

Changes here are infrequent, and the only requirement is that the site stays available and secure. The technical plan is enough for that, and the occasional edit, such as a new service or an updated price list, comes out of the 20 hours a month it already includes. A company that runs a regular blog has reason to look at the complete plan, which gives 40 hours a month instead of 20.

Online store

A store needs attention almost every day. The catalog changes, payment and delivery services update their APIs, and promotions follow one another. Hours of downtime during the season turn into lost revenue. The format depends on how many of these tasks you hand over to us. A store with a few tasks a month does fine with one-off fixes or the technical plan with 20 hours. If tasks come in every week, the complete plan with 40 hours fits, and the extended plan with 80 hours suits large catalogs with automated feeds.

Web applications and customer portals

On Laravel projects with user roles, personal dashboards and several integrations, support sits close to continuous development. You need a testing environment, version control and releases agreed in advance. When edits are needed every week, the complete plan with 40 hours is enough, and a large project or several services at once need the extended plan with 80 hours. Either way the team plans a sprint, you see the tasks and the dates, and incidents take priority.

A project inherited from a previous contractor

Before naming a price we run an audit of the code, the versions, the plugins, the backups and any traces of outside interference. The audit itself is estimated in hours up front and, depending on scope, comes out of the plan hours or is billed hourly. Sometimes it becomes clear that rebuilding the site costs less than keeping the current one alive, and we tell you so. For borderline cases, our article on when a website needs a redesign describes the line between improvements and a full rebuild.

What to put in the support contract

A monthly plan without written terms slides into a payment for something nobody can describe. Before you sign, get answers to a handful of questions that a reasonable contractor answers without pausing.

• Response time. How quickly the team picks up a task and what counts as an emergency. A site that is down and a button color change deserve different priority.
• Scope of work. What the fee includes and what gets quoted separately. Migration to a new host, a separate module or a redesign of a section usually fall outside the plan.
• Reporting. A monthly report with the list of tasks and the hours spent. Without it you cannot see where the paid hours went.
• Access and ownership. Hosting, domain, admin panel, repository and analytics registered in your name. The contractor works under a separate account that you can switch off at any time.
• Exit terms. Who hands over the backups, the documentation and the credentials if you change teams. This clause gets mentioned least often and saves the most trouble.

The same criteria help while you are still choosing a team. We wrote about checking a contractor in our article on how to choose a web agency.

Common mistakes business owners make

Across the sites we support, owners repeat the same mistakes. Here are the ones that cost the most.

• Support comes to mind only after something breaks. Emergency repair after a hack costs more than planned work, and while the site is down or sending spam, you lose inquiries and domain reputation.
• Updates are forbidden out of fear of breaking what works. After two years of this, a site is left with so many outdated components that a safe update becomes a project of its own.
• The contractor holds all the credentials. The domain is registered to a programmer who vanished long ago, the hosting is paid from his card, and nobody remembers the admin password. Getting your access back can take longer than building a new site.
• The plan is paid for and never used. The hours go to waste because nobody inside the company puts tasks into words. One responsible person on the business side is enough to make the block pay off.

If you are still planning the project and counting the full budget, start with our article on what determines the cost of website development, where support appears as part of the first-year costs.

Conclusions

Support means a defined set of tasks with measurable results. The site stays available, updated, protected and fast, and the fixes you ask for are done within agreed timelines rather than whenever someone is free. The right format depends on the project’s workload.

• A site with infrequent changes is covered by the technical plan, $400 a month.
• For a site that needs edits every week, the 20 hours of the technical plan are often not enough, and the larger plans fit better: 40 hours for $800, 80 hours for $1,600 a month.
• Isolated tasks with no commitment are billed at $25 an hour.
• Before signing, agree in writing on the response time, the scope, the reporting and the ownership of access.

Amidcode runs projects on WordPress, WooCommerce, OpenCart and Laravel. Over the years we have built more than two hundred websites, and we still look after some of them. Send us the address of your site. We will look at its condition and say which support format it needs.