Tarun Nagar 
A website is one of the crucial assets for businesses to bring in desired profit and success. So, simply developing a website is useless if it isn’t maintained properly. This is where web application maintenance comes into the picture. Timely website maintenance is required to keep it running smoothly and efficiently. Generally, yearly website maintenance costs around $1000 to $5,000, but ample factors affect the cost to maintain a website, and we have highlighted some of them in this blog.
So, if you are thinking to maintain a website and wondering, ‘How much does it cost to maintain a website in 2024?’ you can’t miss reading this blog. But, before we dive into the cost, let’s first get an insight into website maintenance.
Table of Contents
What Is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is the practice of keeping a website updated and running while monitoring the overall performance and health of a website. The web maintenance process involves regular website checking for bugs, errors, updates, and issues.
Well, website maintenance includes multiple tasks, such as updating security software, adding new content, eliminating errors, increasing traffic, and meeting users’ requirements. If done on time, proper website maintenance can benefit businesses in numerous ways.
Website Maintenance Benefits for Today’s Businesses
The following is the list of some major reasons mentioned by the custom website development company professionals who shed light on website maintenance benefits.
1. Better Security & Protection
Hackers continuously look for new ways to target websites with security holes and vulnerabilities in this advanced world. So, it is advisable to hire web developer who helps you with website maintenance, quickly discover the problems on your business website, and address them on time. Timely website maintenance will offer more security and protection to your business site while enhancing its speed and performance.
2. Improved User Experience
A business website should always meet the users’ expectations while offering them a seamless experience. Well, this can only be possible when you plan website maintenance accessed by a team of professionals who invest cost and time to develop a web application. This further results in better lead generation and increased conversion rates while improving user experience.
3. Increased Brand Promotion
A website performance eventually impacts how users see your website and judge the company’s image. Certain factors like plugins, themes, and content impact the websites speed and performance. All this can be possible when you focus on website maintenance and update it quickly to run it smoothly. As a result, there will be an increased brand promotion which proves to be advantageous to turn your local business into a well-established brand.
4. Decreased Cost
Your website development efforts will go waste if your business website does not contain any backup plan and gets hacked. In that case, you need to avail Laravel website development services or any other and spend more on website development.
This process further add more cost to your process. So, to avoid this, it is better to start website maintenance after a few months of development. This further decreases the cost to a great extent and, in turn, makes the process way affordable for all-scale businesses.
5. Consistent Content Upgradation
Updating the website’s content on a timely basis is very important to push visitors to come to your website again. As per angular web development services experts, none of the users’ prefers to read outdated content, hence leaves the website instantly.
So, keep on updating the web content consistently as it will make your website more fascinating and help your website rank higher. One of the best ways to fine-tune your content is web application maintenance.
These are some website maintenance perks that all-scale businesses can experience while maintaining their website from the beginning. Now that you are well-versed with the benefits of website maintenance, let’s explore some factors affecting the cost to maintain a website.
What Factors Affect The Cost To Maintain A Website?
The major website development cost includes a web hosting plan, SSL certificates, and renewal of domain names, as they are three crucial factors to keep a website online. Besides this, multiple things affect the web app maintenance cost to a great extent, such as –
1. Website Domain
Every website requires a representative domain name as it showcases the website’s address that visitors enter on Google. Once finalized, a domain name cannot be changed, so finding one that represents your business properly is crucial for business success.
Talking about the cost to maintain a website, it largely depends on three popular TLD categories that are –
- Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD)
- Country Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD)
- Sponsored Top-Level Domains (sTLD)
On average, a website domain privacy protection costs around $5/year and $1-$20/year for the registration.
2. SSL Certificate
An SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is a data transfer protocol that enables encrypted communication between the web browser and server. Buying an SSL certificate for lifetime costs around $11 and keeps on fluctuating depending on the number of domains and sub-domains it covers. So, if you want to save website maintenance costs in future, get a SSL certificate lifetime. This is one of the best ideas for small business owners.
3. Web Hosting
Web hosting is a type of service that enables business owners to publish the website once. Technically, hosting providers rent out space on physical servers so that business website owners can store their information on the web. An average cost of website hosting cost around $1.3 to $77/month, depending on the type of subscription.
For instance, if you choose a shorter subscription plan, you will have to pay more via payment gateway integration than choosing a plan for the long term.
4. Plugins
To expand the website’s features and functionalities, you’ll have to insert some plugins. The cost of plugins ranges from ‘Free to $49/month, depending on your website’s needs and requirements. To reduce the cost of website maintenance, POS web app and other professionals install free plugins so that clients need not pay more.
Still, if there is any requirement for some premium plugin during development, the professionals ask for it with their potential clients. So, this website maintenance cost factor can be easily controlled without affecting the website development process.
5. Content & Web Design
With the ever-rising business evolvement, you will have to make changes to your website as well. In this competitive world, it is mandatory to keep the website’s content updated; then, only you will be able to beat your competitors. Along with this, you need to ensure that your business website adheres to the latest trends.
A well-structured and updated website will look appealing and increase the value and readability of your website, which is undoubtedly a major aspect of the website’s success.
So, while developing a business website, it is better to craft quality content that is both SEO-friendly and user-friendly. In addition, initiating CMS web development from the beginning will result in less website maintenance costs and help you successfully run your business website without spending much.
6. Marketing Analytics & Strategy
Keeping an eye on marketing analytics is incredibly crucial for measuring the progress of your business. Besides keeping performance track, analytics will help you increase website traffic and manage a paid advertising campaign.
Unfortunately, this website maintenance factor costs up to $1,000 to $3,000 annually, depending on the type of marketing strategy you are implementing. For better results, you can hire dedicated developers who can help you with the same.
7. Data Backup
Website maintenance isn’t only about keeping track of technicalities; it is something more than that. Apart from focusing on website development, designing, plugins, themes, and more, keeping a strong data backup is essential. Imagine you have a well-structured website with no data backup at all. Instantly, your website got crashed, and all the data was lost. What will you do? Of course, you will have to start the website development all over again as there is no other option left.
To avoid such a situation, it is always advisable to prioritize website maintenance and keep a strong data backup. Whether you are availing services from a renowned Node.js web development company or any other, just ask the experts to offer a data backup option. It will definitely the web application maintenance cost in the future and help you run a website smoothly without any glitches.
Developing and maintaining a website isn’t a cakewalk, especially when you are new to the business world and do not have a team of professional web developers, designers, and testers.
Still, after this, most businesses are confused, and as a result, they keep on wondering, ‘Should I hire professionals for website maintenance or manage it on my own?’ So, to resolve this confusion, here we’ve mentioned the scenario of both hiring professionals’ vs in-house developers for website maintenance.
Outsource Vs In-House Developers: Which One To Choose For Website Maintenance?
This is one of the most common and ongoing debates, whether it is about website development or maintenance. So first, let us understand the cost of hiring dedicated developers for website maintenance.
Hiring Dedicated Developers For Website Maintenance
An average website maintenance cost of outsourcing lies around $100 to $500/month. This option saves a lot of time and effort that businesses can invest somewhere else. The dedicated developers also conduct timely updates, site security monitoring, and optimize performance, resulting in decreased cost and time to develop a web application. Besides this, businesses can experience more benefits of outsourcing their project rather than tackling everything alone.
In-House Developers For Website Maintenance
This approach is best suitable for businesses with a huge team of experienced web developers, designers, and testers. Maintaining a website isn’t a big deal, with multiple resources available in marketing if you possess years of experience.
But, for small-scale businesses, those who do not have a big team and are experienced, maintaining a website all alone isn’t a great deal at all. It not only costs them much but also wastes their time and efforts.
So, if you have a query about whether I should hire web developers for website maintenance or not, we would suggest you go for it, especially if you do not have a well-developed team. Investing once in web application maintenance will definitely benefit you in the long term.
How often Should Businesses Maintain Their Website?
There is no such rule for the tenure to maintain a website; however, businesses can conduct monthly website maintenance to ensure that it runs smoothly and efficiently. Doing so will help businesses verify that their website remains updated, error-free, and does not contain any security error. Ongoing, timely maintenance also gives you a chance to identify bugs early to prevent the negative impact on your website and increase its worth with time.
So, once your website development is completed, you can start with the maintenance after a few months to make sure it runs efficiently while helping your business grow. It doesn’t matter whether you hire Laravel developer, hire a CodeIgniter developer or any other, and ask them about the website maintenance charges. It will help you ensure how much maintenance is included in your web development services and how much additional charges you need to pay for maintaining your website.
Consequences of Not Maintaining a Business Website!
Many businesses still think that maintaining a website isn’t that important, and this is one of the most common misconceptions they have. However, avoiding web app maintenance lead to multiple problems, as highlighted below.
- Poor content
- Outdated website
- Low-quality web design
- Outdated technologies
- Bad SEO
- Insecure website
- Slow speed & performance
- Site outages
Final Words!
When it comes to website development and maintenance, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So, investing in regular website maintenance costs less than fixing the bulk of problems later. The majority of the business owners wonder, ‘How much does it cost to develop a website?’ but only a few of them ask, ‘How much does web application maintenance cost in 2024 and beyond?’ which is not right.
After reading this blog, we hope that businesses must have understood the importance of website maintenance in today’s competitive world. Now that the reasons and benefits are cleared, it is time to take a step ahead, hire web developers, and get started with website maintenance right away.
