Website maintenance: prices, plans and what a contract covers
What moves the price of a maintenance contract, what it should cover, and why websites slow down (especially on Shopify).
The short answer
The price of maintenance depends on what the contract covers: fixes, updates, improvements, guaranteed response time and included hours. A plan limited to backups costs less than one that fixes bugs: the two are hard to compare. Sonho offers three options: a base plan (bug fixes, keeping the site running smoothly), a monthly support plan to keep improving the site, or per-ticket billing on a list of requests quoted upfront.
What does website maintenance include?
Behind the word "maintenance", providers bundle three very different things. Mixing them up is the number one cause of quotes nobody can read, so it helps to separate them before talking prices.
Corrective maintenance fixes what breaks: a form that stops sending, a page throwing an error, a payment that fails. Preventive maintenance keeps things from breaking: software and plugin updates, regular backups, security and uptime monitoring. Evolutive maintenance, finally, grows the site: new pages, new features, new integrations.
A serious contract spells out which of the three are covered, and within what limits. Many entry-level plans only cover the preventive part: the day a bug shows up, the fix is billed on top.
How much does website maintenance cost?
Each provider builds its own plan. The price depends first on the type of site. The table below shows what each type of contract usually covers.
For the same type of site, the price varies with the guaranteed response time, the number of hours included and whether bug fixes are covered. A plan that only covers backups is hard to compare with one that includes fixes.
| Type of contract | What's typically included |
|---|---|
| Simple custom website | Updates, backups, monitoring, small fixes |
| SMB website | Same + bug fixes, email support, monthly report |
| E-commerce store | Same + monitoring of payments, plugins and traffic spikes |
| Block of hours with a Shopify agency | Dedicated development hours: improvements, integrations, custom sections |
Maintaining a Shopify store: what changes
Most articles about maintenance is written for WordPress: caching, hosting provider, plugins to update every week. On Shopify, that whole layer doesn't exist: hosting, the server, the security certificate and platform backups are handled by Shopify, included in the subscription.
Maintaining a Shopify store is therefore about something else: the theme (the code that piles up with every change), the apps (their compatibility, their cumulative cost, what they leave behind) and the content (product pages, collections, images). The item-by-item detail, with the contract lines that do nothing on Shopify, is in our guide to Shopify store maintenance.
That's also why a well-run migration pays off over time: a store that starts clean costs less to maintain afterwards. If you're coming from WooCommerce or PrestaShop, read our guide on migrating to Shopify without losing your search rankings. The support Sonho provides after a store goes live is described on the Shopify store page.
Is a maintenance contract mandatory?
No. No rule requires a monthly contract, and for a recent, well-built custom website, paying every month "just in case" isn't always justified. The simplest alternative is per-ticket billing: you list your requests, the provider quotes them, you approve, they handle it.
Sonho offers all three: a base maintenance plan that guarantees bug fixes and a site that runs smoothly, a monthly support plan for those who want to keep improving their site (new pages, new features), and tickets for one-off needs. On the sites we hand-code in Next.js, there are no plugins to update and no plugin vulnerabilities to watch: preventive maintenance shrinks accordingly.
Before signing a contract, ask three questions: what happens if a critical bug hits on a Friday evening (response time in writing)? Are unused hours rolled over or lost? And what exactly does the plan cover: fixes only, or improvements too?
Why is my website slow?
The causes of slowness depend almost entirely on the platform. On WordPress, the usual suspects are real: saturated shared hosting, a one-size-fits-all theme that loads everything on every page, and dozens of plugins each adding their own code.
On Shopify, that advice is useless: you can't switch hosting providers or install a caching module. What slows a Shopify store down is the apps stacked up over the years, code from uninstalled apps left in the theme, a theme bloated with unused features, and oversized images.
On a custom hand-coded website, speed is decided at build time: the site carries no plugins and no page builder, only the code it needs. That's why these sites stay fast over time with very little upkeep.
My Shopify store is slow: the 4 usual culprits
When we audit a slow Shopify store, we find almost always the same four causes, in this order.
- Stacked apps. Each app loads its own scripts on every page, even the ones where it serves no purpose. First step: remove the ones you no longer use.
- Dead code from uninstalled apps. Uninstalling an app doesn't always remove the code it injected into the theme. An older store ends up carrying code from long-gone apps, which keeps loading on every visit.
- The bloated theme. A premium "all-in-one" theme, customized by three successive providers, ends up loading features nobody uses. Cleaning up the theme, or rebuilding it on a healthy base, often gains more than everything else combined.
- Heavy images. Product photos often go online at full resolution, straight from the shoot. Compressing them and serving them at the right size remains the cheapest improvement you can make.
What are Core Web Vitals, and why does Google look at them?
Core Web Vitals are the three metrics Google uses to assess your visitors' real experience. LCP measures how long the largest visible element takes to display (usually your main image): aim for under 2.5 seconds, the threshold Google publishes on web.dev. INP measures the delay between a click and the page's reaction: a site that "lags" when you open a menu has a poor INP. CLS measures layout shifts, when a button moves just as you were about to click it.
Google factors them into its rankings because they measure what the user experiences. A site can be beautiful and have poor Core Web Vitals; the reverse is rarer.
You can measure them yourself, for free, on PageSpeed Insights. If all three indicators are green, there's no point paying to "speed up" your site: your budget is better spent elsewhere.
How much is a slow website costing you?
This is the figure maintenance contracts forget to put a number on: the cost of doing nothing. A site nobody watches gets heavier over time: an app added for a promotion stays installed, a tracking script comes with every new tool, photos go online without being compressed. Each addition slows the pages down a little, especially on mobile.
To measure it on your site, run your main pages through PageSpeed Insights every three months and note the mobile score. In Google Analytics, also compare the conversion rate on mobile and on desktop: a gap that widens from one quarter to the next often points to pages that have become slow.
To set a maintenance budget, start from that figure: what a site that degrades with nobody watching costs you each month.
What is NOT maintenance
A visual redesign, a new section, an additional sales page, a structural change: all of that is evolution: design and development work, budgeted separately, with a quote. A provider who squeezes a redesign into a monthly maintenance plan will cut corners somewhere: on quality, or on deadlines.
The distinction protects both sides. You know what your plan covers, and the provider doesn't dilute a three-week project into support hours. To gauge the budget for a new site or a redesign, our guide how much does a website cost breaks down the line items of a quote.
If you're unsure which option fits your site (base plan, monthly support or a simple list of tickets), write to us and we will send a precise quote for your site.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does website maintenance cost per month?
- The price depends on the type of site and on what the plan covers. A simple custom website mostly needs updates, backups and monitoring. An online store adds monitoring of payments, apps and traffic spikes. A block of hours with an agency also pays for improvements. Before comparing two prices, check what's covered (corrective, preventive, evolutive), the response time written into the contract and what happens to unused hours: two plans at the same price can cover very different things. At Sonho, the base plan, monthly support or per-ticket billing are priced after a conversation about your site.
- Who handles my website's updates?
- It depends on the platform. On WordPress, it's up to you or your provider to update the core software and every plugin, regularly, or risk security holes. On Shopify, the platform updates itself; what's left is the theme and the apps. On a custom hand-coded Next.js site, there are no third-party plugins to maintain: updates are rare and planned.
- Does a Shopify store need maintenance?
- Yes, though the work differs from WordPress maintenance. Hosting, security and backups are handled by Shopify. The theme, however, accumulates code with every change, apps pile up and some leave scripts behind after uninstalling. Without upkeep, a store slows down gradually. A review of the theme and apps once or twice a year is often enough to keep a store fast.
- What happens if I do no maintenance at all?
- On WordPress, the main risk is security: plugins that are never updated end up exposing known vulnerabilities, and sites get hacked in automated waves. On Shopify, the risk is more a slow decline: apps piling up, pages slowing down, conversion slipping month after month.
- Does maintenance include content changes?
- With many providers, yes, and it's billed: changing a photo or a text eats into the plan's hours. At Sonho, you edit your content yourself from your own interface, without calling us and without being billed. Maintenance then only covers what touches the code: bugs, keeping things running, and improvements if you've chosen the monthly support plan.
