The Goodland blog

What website maintenance should cost (and what we do for $42/mo)

Goodland Web Co. · Goleta, CA · August 2026

What "maintenance" actually covers

Strip away the jargon and a website needs six things to stay healthy:

• Hosting that keeps it fast and online;
• A security certificate (the padlock) that never lapses;
• Backups, so a bad day is recoverable;
• Monitoring, so someone notices before your customers do;
• Technical updates that keep everything current and secure;
• Content edits — new hours, new photos, new prices, that one typo.

The first five are invisible when done well. The sixth is where most owners get stuck, because it's the one that needs doing every month and the one nobody wants to log into a website builder for.

What the market charges

Prices vary wildly because the packaging varies wildly:

• Freelancers typically bill $75–150/hour. Fair for big work; painful when a two-line hours change costs a minimum billing increment and a week of waiting.
• Agency care plans commonly run $150–500/month. Much of that buys capacity a five-page local site never uses.
• DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace) charge $20–50/month and hand the maintenance to you. The subscription is cheap; your evenings are not.
• "Free" (doing nothing) costs the most: expired certificates scare customers away, stale hours generate one-star reviews, and a hacked site takes weeks to clean up.

What it should cost a small business

For a local business with a well-built site, we think fair is $30–60 a month, all-in — hosting and security included, real content edits included, no hourly meter running. Anything above that should buy growth work (SEO, strategy, analytics), not table stakes.

What we do for $42/mo

Our Care plan is $30/month plus $12/month hosting. For that, we run the website so you never have to:

• Fast, secure hosting with daily backups, SSL, and uptime monitoring;
• One edit a month, done for you — up to 5 photo swaps and around 500 words of text. Send us the change; we make it. You never touch a website builder.
• Edits publish on our regular cycle, the 1st and the 15th of each month;
• Critical corrections are always free — wrong phone number, wrong hours, broken links, or anything that's our error gets fixed promptly at no charge;
• A yearly analytics report, so you know what the site is doing for you;
• 28% off add-ons and one-off work;
• A rate lock: your monthly rate won't increase for at least three years.

Need more than the included edit? Extra edits are $34.99 each at the regular rate. In a hurry, an urgent edit ($250) goes live within 48 hours — and plan discounts apply to both.

The other two plans

• Host — $15/mo. Hosting only: backups, SSL, monitoring. Every edit is à la carte. Right for sites that rarely change.
• Grow — $65/mo + $10 hosting. Two bigger edits a month (up to 10 photos, ~1,500 words each), twice-a-year SEO optimization, a yearly one-on-one strategy session, and 43% off extras. Right for businesses actively pushing for more customers.

The part that matters most

Whatever you pay, insist on two things. First, you own the site — code, design, and content — and can take it anywhere, anytime. Second, the person maintaining it answers a request with a finished change, not an invoice estimate. Those two terms are in our written terms; ask any provider to put them in theirs.