What to charge for WordPress maintenance as an agency

Most agencies price maintenance by picking a number that feels defensible, then discover two years later that their best clients are their least profitable ones.

Here is how to price it deliberately.

What the market actually pays

For a small business brochure site, in the US and UK:

• $30–60/month — automated, no human review, slow support
• $80–150/month — the mainstream: updates with checking, backups, security, some included time
• $150–300/month — faster response, more included hours, WooCommerce
• $300+/month — complex sites, ecommerce at volume, or maintenance bundled with strategy

Most small business sites land between $100 and $200, and clients are far less price-sensitive here than agencies assume. Maintenance is bought as insurance, and nobody shops hard for the cheapest insurance on something they depend on.

Build the price from your cost

Work out what a site actually costs you per month:

Your time: 30–60 minutes for a simple site, 1–2 hours for a shop. At your billable rate, that is $40–160.

Tooling: monitoring, backups, management dashboard. Typically $3–10 per site.

Support allowance: the included hours people actually use — usually far less than you allow, but price for the ones who use it all.

Or, if you outsource: $26–39 per site, fixed, with no interruption cost. Which is the real argument for white label.

Then apply a margin. Three times your cost is a normal target for a productised service, and if that feels high, remember you are also carrying the risk of being blamed when something breaks.

Tiering it so it sells

Three tiers, and design the middle one to win. Most clients choose the middle option when presented with three, which means the middle tier should be the one you most want to sell — not the cheapest and not the most expensive.

Differentiate on response time and included hours, not by withholding backups or security from the cheap tier. A plan without backups is not a cheaper plan, it is a worse product, and it will cost you when that client is the one who gets hacked.

A structure that works:

• Basic — everything essential, slowest response, minimal included time
• Standard — faster response, a couple of hours included. Make this the obvious choice.
• Pro — same-day response, more hours, WooCommerce cover

Why pricing too low is worse than losing the client

A $40 plan attracts clients who expect unlimited support for $40. You cannot afford to answer properly, so you answer slowly, and they are dissatisfied with something you are also losing money on.

Worse, a low price signals a low-value service. Clients who would happily pay $150 for something that sounds serious will hesitate at $40 for something that sounds like a subscription nobody thought about.

Charge enough to deliver it well. The client who leaves over $60 a month was going to be your least profitable and most demanding anyway.

Practical rules

Annual discount: two months free. Improves cash flow, reduces churn, and is easy to explain.

Per site, not per client. Multi-site clients get a discount — 20–30% on additional sites — but each site is priced.

Do not bundle hosting unless you genuinely want to be a host. It makes leaving harder, which sounds good and produces resentful clients.

Price increases: annually, small, announced. A 5–10% increase with two months' notice loses almost nobody. Holding a price for five years and then raising it 40% loses everyone.

Define included work with examples. "Small changes included" is where margin dies. Say what is in and what is quoted.

The maths that matters

Fifteen sites at $150 is $2,250 a month, $27,000 a year, recurring, that arrives whether or not you win a new project this quarter.

If it costs you $32 a site to deliver through white label, your cost is $480 and you keep $1,770 a month for work you are not doing. If you deliver it yourself, it costs you 10–15 hours a month.

Either is a good business. The bad version is the one where you do the work, do not charge for it, and carry the blame anyway.