Pricing guide · 5 min read
Website maintenance cost in India in 2027: what you should actually pay
Monthly and yearly maintenance costs by type of site, what a fair plan includes, and the warning signs of a plan that only exists on paper.
Websites rarely break on launch day. They break about eighteen months later, when a plugin nobody updated gets exploited, or the hosting renewal email lands in the inbox of someone who left the company in March, or the contact form quietly stops sending enquiries and nobody notices for three weeks because, well, it’s been quiet lately.
Maintenance is the dull part of owning a website, and that’s exactly why it gets skipped. In this guide I’ll cover what it should cost in India in 2027, what a proper plan actually includes, and how to spot a plan that only exists on paper.
Typical maintenance costs in 2027
| Type of site | Per month | Per year (annual plan) |
|---|---|---|
| Small static or brochure site | ₹1,500 – ₹4,000 | ₹15,000 – ₹40,000 |
| WordPress business website | ₹3,000 – ₹10,000 | ₹30,000 – ₹1,00,000 |
| Online store (WooCommerce or Shopify) | ₹8,000 – ₹25,000 | ₹80,000 – ₹2,50,000 |
| Web application or portal | ₹25,000 – ₹1,00,000+ | Usually quoted as a support contract |
The usual rule of thumb is 15 to 20% of the original build cost each year. I find it handy as a sanity check. Paid ₹1.5 lakh for a WordPress site and someone wants ₹1.2 lakh a year to maintain it? Ask what you’re getting for that. If they want ₹6,000 a year, ask what they’re leaving out.
What a real maintenance plan includes
- Updates to WordPress, themes, plugins and server software, tested on a staging copy before they go anywhere near the live site.
- Backups every day, kept somewhere other than the website’s own server, and restored as a test every few months at least. Until you’ve restored one, you don’t really know it works.
- Uptime monitoring that alerts an actual person when the site goes down.
- Security: a firewall, malware scanning, login protection, and quick patching when a vulnerability is announced.
- Form and checkout checks, so enquiries and orders really do arrive.
- Performance checks against Google’s Core Web Vitals. Sites slow down as content and plugins pile up.
- Renewals: domain, hosting and SSL tracked so nothing expires by accident.
- A few hours of small changes each month, like text edits, new images or a new team member on the About page.
- A short monthly report saying what was done.
What is usually extra
New pages or features, redesigns, SEO campaigns, content writing, paid advertising and big content migrations. None of that is maintenance. And a plan that promises “everything” for a small monthly fee will end up doing none of it well.
Retainer, annual contract or pay as you go?
Monthly retainer
Predictable, and easy to adjust. It suits sites that change often or take payments.
Annual maintenance contract (AMC)
Often cheaper than twelve monthly payments, and popular with businesses that budget once a year. Just make sure the contract spells out response times and what counts as an emergency.
Pay as you go
Fine for a very simple site that hardly changes. For WordPress or ecommerce I’d avoid it, because security updates can’t sit around waiting for someone to raise a ticket.
Signs your plan only exists on paper
- You never get a report of what was done.
- Your WordPress dashboard shows plugins that are months out of date.
- Nobody can tell you where the backups live, or when one was last restored.
- The site went down and you heard about it from a customer.
- Small edits take two weeks and three reminders.
If two or more of those sound familiar, you’re probably paying for a promise.
Can you maintain it yourself?
For a small site, partly. Someone on your team who’s comfortable with the admin panel can handle content edits and keep an eye on updates. What I’d still hand to a professional is security patching, off-server backups, and anything that touches the server or the database. Those are the jobs where one mistake takes the site down or leaks customer data.
If you do go it alone, do at least this much. Turn on automatic backups to an outside location. Enable two-factor login for every admin account. Delete plugins you don’t use. And once a week, send yourself a test enquiry through your own contact form.
Why maintenance matters more in 2027
- Data breaches now come with deadlines. Under India’s DPDP Rules, fully in force from May 2027, a personal data breach has to be reported to the Data Protection Board within 72 hours, and security logs should be kept for at least a year. That’s hard to manage if nobody is watching the site. Our DPDP checklist covers the rest of what’s required.
- Old software gets left behind. Hosts regularly retire older PHP versions, and plugins drop support for them. A site that isn’t kept current will eventually break, and it tends to pick a bad moment.
- Speed affects rankings. A site that passed Core Web Vitals at launch can drift into the red within a year of unmanaged changes.
Choosing someone to look after your site
Before you sign anything, ask for four things: a sample monthly report, the backup and restore process in writing, their response time when the site is down, and a clear answer on who holds the admin logins. That last answer should always include you. And if your site sits on a platform that makes maintenance expensive, have a read of WordPress vs Next.js before your next rebuild, because the platform you pick sets your maintenance bill for years.
At Razegreen, care plans are optional and never tied to the build. We look after hosting in your name, updates, backups we actually test, monitoring and small changes, and you get a short report every month. The details are on our website development services page, and our website cost guide shows where maintenance fits in the total cost of owning a site.
