What website support costs, and what happens without it
- Basic support starts at around $30 a month.
- The core of it is not edits but updates, backups and monitoring.
- Recovering from a compromise costs several hundred dollars and takes weeks.
- The most expensive line item is not the cleanup but the downtime and the search fallout.
Support gets treated as optional — the site works, after all. Let us price the alternative.
What is included
| Item | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Core and plugin updates | Closes the vulnerabilities bots come in through |
| Off-site backups | The only thing that genuinely saves you in a real incident |
| Uptime monitoring | You find out about an outage before your customer does |
| Baseline security | Login rate limiting, two-factor authentication |
| Small changes | Update a price, add a banner, fix some copy |
The first three items are 80% of the value. Many people think the edits are the point, but they are the cheapest part.
What it costs
The base plan starts at $30 a month, roughly $360 a year. Compare that with the invoices that arrive without support:
- Recovery after a compromise — from $300 as a one-off, plus weeks clearing the traces out of search results.
- Enquiries lost to downtime. The site was down for three days before anyone noticed.
- Emergency weekend work at double rate, because the store is offline.
- A lost database. No backup means rebuilding the site from scratch.
Why “the site works fine” is poor reasoning
The site does work, right up until no plugin has been updated for a year. The problem is that vulnerabilities are published openly and bots sweep the web in bulk checking versions. Your site is not chosen personally — it is found by a version match.
We went through this on our own site: cleaning the files took a day, clearing the fallout from the search index took two years. There is a separate write-up about it.
When support is not needed
Honestly: if you have a static five-section landing page with no admin panel, no forms and no payments, a monthly plan is overkill. Update quarterly and keep a copy.
But the moment there is a catalogue, payments or a customer account, it stops being a website and becomes a working system. You do not leave those unattended.
Support from $30 a month: updates, daily off-site backups, monitoring, security and up to 2 hours of changes.