Should your agency maintain client sites, or outsource it?

Most agencies drift into maintenance rather than deciding on it. You build a site, the client emails six months later because something broke, you fix it, and now you maintain their site — without a contract, a price, or a place for it in anyone's week.

That drift is the actual problem. Whether you keep it or outsource it matters less than choosing deliberately.

What it really costs to keep in house

Per site, per month, done properly: 30 to 60 minutes. Updates, checking afterwards, backups verified, a report, and the occasional small request.

Fifteen sites is therefore eight to fifteen hours a month. At a billable rate of $80, that is $640–1,200 of capacity — spent on work that is usually unbilled, because it grew out of goodwill rather than a contract.

But the hours are not the expensive part. The interruption is. Maintenance work arrives unscheduled, in small pieces, on days you had planned for project work. A developer pulled out of a build to fix a plugin conflict loses far more than the twenty minutes the fix took.

The hidden liability

There is a second cost nobody prices: if a site you built gets hacked, the client blames you. Not the plugin author, not the host — you.

That is true whether or not you have a maintenance agreement, and whether or not they ever paid you to prevent it. If you are carrying the reputational risk anyway, you are better off being paid for it and doing it properly than carrying it for free.

When to keep it in house

• You have fewer than five client sites. The overhead of managing a supplier is not worth it yet.
• You already have a process that works, with someone whose job it explicitly is.
• The sites are complex or bespoke in ways a third party would struggle with.
• Maintenance is genuinely part of your product, not an afterthought.

When to outsource

• You have ten or more sites and no one person owns the work.
• It keeps interrupting project work. This is the most common real reason, and the best one.
• You want to sell care plans but have not, because you cannot staff the delivery.
• You are the only technical person and you would like a holiday.
• The work is being done inconsistently — some sites updated monthly, some not since launch. That is a liability, and it is extremely common.

What outsourcing actually looks like

White label means the provider works under your name. Your logo on the reports, your address on the emails, and they never contact your client. You keep the relationship, set your own price, and keep the margin.

The economics are straightforward: you pay $26–39 per site per month, you charge $100–200, and you keep the difference for work you are no longer doing. More on pricing here.

The number that decides it

Work out your true cost per site per month — hours spent, times your billable rate, plus the interruption cost you cannot quite measure but know is real.

If that number is above $40, outsourcing is cheaper on pure arithmetic before you count the capacity you get back.

For most agencies it lands between $40 and $80 per site, which is why this question usually has an answer once someone actually calculates it rather than estimating it.

Whatever you decide, decide it

Write down which sites you maintain, what you do, how often, and what you charge. Tell your clients. Charge for it or explicitly stop doing it.

An agency with fifteen sites on a proper care plan has a predictable revenue line that survives a quiet quarter for new projects. That is worth more than the margin itself — it is the thing that makes an agency less fragile.

If outsourcing is the answer, here is what that costs.