Your hours, at your rate, against a fixed fee
DIY WordPress Upkeep Versus Paying Someone: The Numbers
Decide whether to maintain your WordPress site yourself or pay a monthly fee, using the arithmetic rather than the sales page. Your hours at your own rate, plus tooling licences, plus the cost of one bad release, set against the fee. The calculator returns the break-even point in hours per month, and for most single-site owners it falls between three and five.
Maintaining a WordPress site yourself costs roughly four to ten hours a month plus tooling, against $39 to $149 for a managed plan. The break-even is usually three to five hours of your own time, and the deciding factor is whether the work actually happens on the weeks you are busy.
What will this cost me?
Second and further sites are 20% off. Excludes the cost of one bad release.
30-day money-back guarantee · No setup fee · Cancel anytime
How the options compare
| Item | Self-managed | Managed plan |
|---|---|---|
| Time per month | 4-10 hours | Under 30 minutes reviewing reports |
| Tooling licences | $10-$40 per month | Included |
| Staging environment | Yours to build and refresh | Included |
| Response when something breaks | Whenever you are free | Contracted window |
| Cover during holiday or illness | None | Continuous |
| Cost of one bad release | Your afternoon, plus the downtime | Absorbed |
| Monthly cost | Your hours plus tooling | $39-$149 |
| Fails when | The week gets busy | The provider is poor |
The comparison people run is the wrong one
Self-managed maintenance is normally compared against a monthly fee, with the fee on one side and nothing on the other. That is not the comparison.
The real one is a fee against your hours at your own rate, plus tooling licences, plus the cost of one bad release a year, plus the value of the weeks the work does not happen.
Put a number on your own time and the arithmetic changes completely. Most people discover the break-even is three to five hours a month, and that they are currently spending either far more or far less than they believed.
The failure mode is not incompetence
Self-managed maintenance rarely fails because somebody cannot do it. It fails because it competes with everything else and loses on exactly the weeks it matters.
The pattern is consistent: three good months, then a busy fortnight, then two skipped cycles, then version drift making the next update large enough to feel risky – which makes it easier to defer again. Nothing here is a skill problem.
Which is why the honest question is not whether you can do the work. It is whether it happened last month.
What the fee is actually buying
Not the patching. The patching is twenty minutes and any competent owner can do it.
The fee buys the parts that are hard to sustain alone: staged updates on somebody else’s schedule, a restore tested monthly whether or not anyone remembered, cover during holidays and illness, and a named party accountable when a release goes wrong.
On a site that earns nothing, those have limited value. On a site that does, they are most of what maintenance means.
Handing the work over raises a second question this page does not answer: to one person or to a team. The cover, escalation and continuity differences are worked through in a freelancer versus an agency.
What to judge it on
- What is an hour of your time worth?Use what you bill or what you would pay somebody. Valuing your own hours at zero is the single most common error in this comparison and it makes self-managing look free.
- Does the work actually happen?Not could it - does it. Self-managed maintenance fails on the weeks that are busy, and those are the weeks it matters. Look at the last three months honestly.
- What does an hour of downtime cost?Revenue, enquiries, or reputation. A site where the answer is nothing has a genuinely different answer to this page than one where it is hundreds.
- Who covers the fortnight you are away?Self-managed maintenance has no cover. Updates stop, alerts go unread, and the backlog compounds while nobody is watching.
- Do you enjoy it?A real factor. Somebody who finds this work interesting does it reliably. Somebody who dreads it defers it, and deferral is what makes the next update riskier than the last.
The short answer
- Do it yourselfOne site, no transactions, and you genuinely enjoy the work. The tooling is inexpensive and the knowledge is worth having. Set the intervals down in writing, because that is the part that decays.
- Pay for itThe site earns money, or the honest answer to how many hours you spend is under two. Both cases end the same way, and the second is far more common than people expect.
- The middle routeHandle the daily reviewing yourself and buy the staged updates and the restore testing. That is where most of the time and nearly all of the risk sit.
Plans that include this
- Starter$39/monthor $390 a year — two months freeBlogs, portfolios and brochure sites
- UpdatesMonthly
- BackupsWeekly, 30-day retention
- Uptime5-minute checks
- Malware removalNot included
- Most chosenProfessional$79/monthor $790 a year — two months freeSmall businesses and lead-generation sites
- UpdatesWeekly + PHP version management
- BackupsDaily, 60-day retention
- Uptime1-minute checks
- Malware removalIncluded
- Business$149/monthor $1490 a year — two months freeStores, membership sites, anywhere downtime costs money
- UpdatesWeekly, tested on staging first
- BackupsDaily, 90-day, multi-location
- Uptime1-minute + 2-hour restore
- Malware removalIncluded
Questions people ask before calling
How much time does WordPress maintenance take?
Four to ten hours a month on a single site kept current, depending on plugin count and whether it sells anything. A site left for a year takes considerably longer, because deferred updates have to be applied and tested against each other.
Is a maintenance plan worth it for one small site?
Where it earns nothing and you enjoy the work, frequently not. Where it earns anything at all, the break-even arrives fast: three to five hours of your own time a month covers most plans.
What do I actually give up by doing it myself?
Cover and accountability. The work is learnable and the tooling is cheap. What cannot be self-supplied is somebody responsible on the weeks you are ill, away, or simply busy.
Can I start self-managed and switch later?
Yes, and most sites arrive that way. The switch costs more when it happens after a failure, because the first month becomes remediation rather than maintenance.
When it needs handing over
price and package on WordPress specialistsCompare three levels of ongoing WordPress care, priced per month and set out feature by feature so you can see exactly what each tier patches, backs…
More comparisons