Website Maintenance Costs in Australia: What Upkeep Involves and What It Costs

Every website has two fixed bills: a domain name and somewhere to host the site. On top of those comes labour: applying software updates if the site has software that needs them, keeping backups, watching for problems, and changing the content when the business changes. That labour is where maintenance prices spread out.

What's The Damage?, an Australian cost-guide site that says it verified its figures in October 2026, puts care plans covering updates, backups, security and small edits at $50–$300 a month, and ad hoc work after launch at $80–$250 an hour. It estimates total running costs after launch at $75–$400 a month. For WordPress sites it suggests budgeting $100–$500 a month for hosting, licences and maintenance together.

For sites we build, hosting is $30 a month and covers hosting, security monitoring, backups, email support and unlimited text and image changes on your existing pages. A domain registered in your name is about $20 a year. That's about $380 a year, with no GST added. New pages or features are quoted before we start.

The domain

auDA, which runs the .au domain, lets you register or renew a .au name for one to five years, and renew up to 90 days before it expires. After expiry there's a 30-day grace period in which you can still renew, but auDA says your website and email stop working during that time. If it isn't renewed by the end of the 30 days, the name is removed from the registry and anyone can register it, first come, first served. You also have to keep meeting the eligibility rules to renew.

The ACSC suggests turning on auto-renewal, or at least making sure you're notified before expiry, and listing more than one person for renewal notices so a staff change doesn't leave nobody watching. Whoever builds your site, the domain should be registered in your name. We register yours in your name, for about $20 a year.

Hosting and HTTPS

Hosting is the cost of keeping the site online. HTTPS used to be a separate paid line, but Let's Encrypt, run by the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, issues trusted certificates at no cost to anyone who owns a domain, and its software can renew them automatically. If a quote for a small site includes a yearly charge for a basic certificate, it's fair to ask what it buys.

Business email

Email can be its own subscription, billed per person. Google's Australian price list, for example, shows a regular price of A$9.90 per user a month, before GST, for Google Workspace Business Starter. Whatever service you use, budget for each mailbox you need.

Two plans with the same monthly price can cover very different amounts of work. Most providers use one of these models, or a mix:

• Pay as you go. You're billed by the hour, at $80–$250 on What's The Damage?'s range, when you ask for something. It's the cheapest option for a site that rarely changes, run by an owner who handles updates and backups. The catch is that nobody is watching the site between jobs unless you are.
• A prepaid block of hours. You buy hours in advance and draw them down as you ask for changes. It suits a business with a steady trickle of edits. Ask whether unused hours roll over or expire.
• A monthly care plan. A fixed fee for updates, backups, monitoring and usually a set amount of editing time. It's the usual arrangement for WordPress and larger sites. Ask for a monthly log of what was done, so the fee is tied to work you can see.
• Maintenance included in hosting. One monthly fee covers keeping the site online and secure, plus routine changes. Ours works this way. It suits small sites that change now and then; the limit is that it covers your existing pages, and new pages or features are quoted separately.

None of these is the right answer for everyone. A business that publishes weekly and wants to do it in-house is better served by a platform with an editor and either a care plan or a disciplined owner. A business whose site changes a few times a year usually pays least with hosting that includes the changes.

Some maintenance is optional and some isn't. The jobs that aren't:

• renewing the domain before the grace period runs out;
• security updates, on any site that has software needing them;
• backups that someone has actually tried restoring from;
• someone noticing when the site goes down, is changed without permission, or a form stops working.

The jobs that can usually wait are redesigns, new features and monthly reports nobody reads. One job sits in between: keeping the details current. A site that nobody touches for two years still drifts out of date, with old hours, a former staff member or last year's prices, and a customer who acts on wrong information is harder to win back than one who never found you.

Maintenance also has a tax angle. The ATO's ruling on commercial websites, TR 2016/3, says the cost of maintaining a website is a revenue expense, and that periodic operating, registration, hosting and licensing fees are deductible over the period they relate to. Adding significant new functionality is treated as capital. How that applies to your business is a question for your accountant or tax agent, not for us.

For sites we build, hosting is $30 a month from launch. It covers hosting, security monitoring, backups, email support and unlimited text and image changes on your existing pages: a new price, changed hours, a different photo, a staff member added to the about section. New pages or features are quoted first, so you know the price before we start. There's no contract: you can cancel by email with no notice period and no exit fee, and if you leave, we'll give you a copy of your website files and help you move the site and domain to a new host.

We don't sell hosting on its own, and we don't host or maintain sites we didn't build. If your current site costs more to keep running than it's worth, we can rebuild it from the words and photos already on it, priced by page count at $399, $899 or $1,499. There's no deposit: we build the draft, you ask for as many changes as you like, and you pay once you approve it. Lockyer Valley Batteries described the result in a Google review: "Rebuilt two websites for our businesses and saved us a fortune on hosting etc. Nothing is ever a problem, will email back on a Saturday night if need be."

If the site is due for more than upkeep, our guide on whether to redesign or rebuild helps you decide which it needs.