Website Maintenance Fees: What They Cover

Maintenance packages are among the most vaguely sold items in website services. Two packages with the same name can differ in price several times over and contain completely different work. Here we describe a maintenance package as a standard list so you can put quotes side by side.

To give you a sense of scale: Kodyva's monthly maintenance packages range from 2,500 to 7,500 TL depending on scope. For online stores or sites needing frequent updates, you will also see higher prices on the market.

What a maintenance package should include

Every item in a good package is defined by frequency or amount:

• Backups: How often (daily or weekly), how many days are kept, are they stored somewhere other than the server? Is restoring free?
• Software updates: How often are platform, plugin and theme updates done, is a backup taken first, is the site checked afterwards?
• Security monitoring: Malware scans, watching for suspicious login attempts, tracking SSL certificate expiry.
• Uptime monitoring: When the site goes down, who notices and how quickly? Automated monitoring tools can alert quickly.
• Content changes: How many hours or requests per month? Text, image and price updates fall here.
• Response time: How fast is the response for emergencies and for normal requests?
• Monthly report: A short summary of work done.

If a quote only says regular maintenance and technical support, ask about each item. If you can't get a clear answer to whether backups are taken, treat it as a warning sign.

Monthly, yearly or hourly?

The monthly package is the most common model. Defined work for a fixed fee. It makes your budget predictable and means the site gets looked at regularly.

Yearly payment sometimes comes with a discount. It makes sense if you are sure you will work with the agency long term. With a new agency, paying monthly for a few months first is safer.

The hourly model can suit businesses whose site rarely changes and who handle their own updates. Hourly rates vary by agency and work; ask for the hourly rate and the minimum billed time in the quote. The catch with hourly is that nobody looks at the site regularly. Updates can pile up for months.

What packages don't include

Most disputes start here. Maintenance packages usually don't cover:

• Designing new pages or adding new sections
• New features (booking system, new form, integration)
• A design refresh
• SEO work and content writing
• Hosting, domain and paid plugin licence fees
• Fixing errors you caused (a page deleted by mistake, a broken setting)

In some packages, the last item can be handled by restoring from backup. Make sure it is in the contract.

What skipping maintenance can cost

A WordPress site that isn't updated getting infected through a hole in an old plugin is a scenario we see often. Visitors may get redirected to other sites, Google may show a warning in search results, the hosting provider may suspend the account. Cleanup and reinstallation can cost more than several months of maintenance fees. Lost traffic and reputation come on top.

A site with no backup vanishing completely after a server failure also happens. We explained why maintenance is needed in a separate article, and our annual cost article shows how to factor maintenance into the yearly total.

Kodyva's maintenance package covers regular backups, security and performance checks, small content and image updates, and priority technical support; the details are settled at the quote stage. We suggest asking every firm that quotes you to fill in the list above. The empty rows show on their own what each package really offers.