How Much eCommerce Website Maintenance Cost?

What is Website Maintenance Cost?

A website requires regular website maintenance services such as updates, website checks, and bug fixes to keep it running securely and smoothly. Each maintenance plan is set differently depending on the website needs of a business. Without website maintenance services, you won’t be able to fix usability or security issues on your website. This will allow users to navigate and access your site smoothly. The cost to upkeep your website is known as website maintenance cost.

• It protects your website against bugs and downtime. Upgrading plugins or software and patching are crucial to the smooth functioning of a website.
• It improves the SEO performance of your website, which results in higher rankings on the search engines. This will drive more traffic and sales to your site.
• It optimizes your website and allows it to meet the core web vitals of Google. This metric measures the usability, visual stability, and speed of your website.
• It reduces the risk of website casualties and downtime, which can result in reduced traffic, a hostile business impression, and customers shifting to other brands.
• Also, out-of-date websites are more vulnerable to security threats and cyberattacks.

eCommerce Website Maintenance Cost

From sluggish performance to clunky functionality and website crashes, multiple issues can arise if you don’t maintain your website.

Here are the top factors that influence website maintenance costs:

1. Domain Renewal

For domain registration, it can cost you around $10-$100 per year, and for renewals, it can cost you around $10-$129/year. The domain name needs to be renewed each year, causing it to fall under the maintenance bucket. Often, the price that you pay upfront for registration is lower than the cost charged for annual renewal.

You can also add a domain privacy protection plan to your website maintenance service to get additional security. This feature protects the contact details and personal information of the domain name’s owner in the WHOIS database.

2 .Hosting Fees

Web hosting allows you to publish your website online. The website hosting fees depend on the hosting plan and provider. Choosing the right website hosting provider is essential as it influences the cost of maintaining your website. When choosing a hosting plan for your website, make sure to consider your long-term site hosting costs. Also, the total web hosting maintenance costs will depend on your selected subscription period. For instance, shorter subscription periods, such as monthly payments, can lead to higher total costs. You can choose from multiple hosting options such as cloud hosting, shared hosting, VPS hosting, WordPress hosting, and dedicated hosting. It can cost around $10-$500 per month or more.

3. SSL Certificate Renewal

Secure Sockets Layer is a data transfer protocol that facilitates encrypted communication between a browser and a server. Having an SSL certificate for your website will ensure better performance on popular search engines, higher security against cyber threats, and more robust data privacy. All eCommerce websites that deal with sensitive user information, such as credit card details and passwords, should opt for SSL certificates. The SSL certificate renewal cost will depend on the number of subdomains or domains they cover. It can cost around $0-$50/year or more for SSL certificate renewal, depending on the type of SSL certificate you choose for your website.

4. Security Measures and Backups

Don’t wait for a website maintenance service until you have a security breach. If you want your website to consistently perform better on search engines or minimize the risk of security breaches, opt for preventive measures. Regular security scans and other measures can scan deeply, identify vulnerabilities, and fix them immediately before they escalate. Also, it is essential to have an updated, full backup to ensure that you do not lose any critical data if your website crashes or any technical issue arises. Daily and weekly backups are ideal to protect your data and ensure that your business runs smoothly. For security measures and backup services, you can expect to pay $50-$200/year.

5. Ongoing Tech Support

Ongoing tech support makes a huge difference when faced with issues like broken contact forms, website crashes, or security breaches. Reliable tech support can fix tech-related website issues before they escalate and impact your customer experience and traffic. Here are some of the tech support forms that your website development company may provide:

• Live Chat: You can get quick assistance from the tech team via chat messages.
• Phone Service: You can talk to a professional from your tech team to get solutions for your website crashes, bugs, etc.
• Email Ticketing System: It uses an online tracking system and email for technical support requests.
• Knowledge Database: It comes in the form of guides and tutorials to help eCommerce business owners.

These support channels can be ideal for small eCommerce business owners running a small, simple website. But for more prominent eCommerce websites, personalized and immediate tech support should be opted for. It can cost you around $5-$300/month to get ongoing tech support for your website.

6. Website Enhancements

Website enhancements or design updates are essential to keep your website on par with your competitors. Whether you want to add new plugins, integrate APIs, improve the site navigation, or add new functionalities, the costs will be covered under website enhancements. For decent website enhancement work, it can cost you around $65/hour, and for more elaborate or advanced tech-related functionalities, the cost can go up to $500 or more.

7. System Upgrades

Keeping the platform, server, etc, up-to-date is essential for multiple reasons. From adding more custom integrations to improving the store speed, there may be various requirements for system upgrades. An upgraded system will reduce cart abandonment by improving user experience, enabling better third-party integrations, minimizing friction between searching for products and completing the order, etc. Major system upgrades may happen every 2-5 years and don’t have a fixed cost.

How Often is eCommerce Website Maintenance Required

There is no fixed schedule for website maintenance. Each maintenance procedure will have its timeline. Web hosting and domain names will require you to renew them annually. In contrast, SEO and marketing maintenance needs are to be met quarterly.

To be on the safe side and ensure that all aspects of your website are running smoothly, you can opt for a monthly website maintenance service. Routine website maintenance will minimize security breaches and technical errors. This will ensure that your users are able to access your website 24/7 without any technical glitches or performance issues.

Average Range Cost for Maintenance of eCommerce Website

Hiring a professional website maintenance provider who offers maintenance services to eCommerce website owners can save effort and time. Website maintenance companies will handle the technical and complex aspects of your website. They will perform regular software updates, conduct security audits, optimize performance, and prevent website crashes. You can choose from a fixed website maintenance plan or opt for a customized one, depending on your needs. On average, it can cost you around $50-$5000 per month or even more depending on project complexity, type of eCommerce website, and maintenance needs.

Tips to Reduce eCommerce Website Costs

Here are some of the ways to reduce your eCommerce website costs:

• Choose the right eCommerce platform, such as an open-source platform, to minimize the requirement for custom development and save on licensing fees.

• Optimizing images and media can reduce bounce rates, improve user experience, and allow your web pages to load fast.

• Implementing security measures such as SSL certificates, login page encryption, data backup, and constant monitoring can protect your business from data threats and security breaches.

• Automate routine website maintenance tasks such as security scans, updates, and backups to save time.

• Monitor website health and regularly update software to minimize the need for extensive maintenance. Also, opt for a preventive maintenance strategy that will track, schedule, and review your site’s technical operations.

• Invest in scalable solutions to ensure reduced downtime, enhanced performance even when faced with increased traffic, and increased flexibility for integrating new features and plugins into your website.

Conclusion

eCommerce websites come with features and functionalities such as payment systems, shipping, inventory management tools, etc, which makes it essential to hire reliable website maintenance service providers. Magento website maintenance service or website service for any other platform would include services like updating software, monitoring site performance, security scans, fixing broken links, content updates, etc. It can cost around $500-$5000 per month depending on the maintenance requirement of your website, such as domain renewal, SSL certificate, ongoing tech support, etc.