Most small service businesses in Canada pay about $50 to $200 per month for professional website maintenance, or roughly $600 to $2,400 a year, and many plans at that level include hosting. Sites with e-commerce, booking systems, or lots of plugins, and agency retainers with development hours, usually cost $250 to $500 or more per month. Doing it yourself costs less in cash but more in time.
Those are the numbers. The harder part is comparing quotes, because two plans with the same price can include very different work. One covers hosting, backups, updates, and an hour of edits. Another covers updates only and bills everything else by the hour.
This guide breaks down what website maintenance costs in Canada, what is usually included at each level, how maintenance differs from hosting, support, and one-time repairs, and what to ask before you sign. All figures are in Canadian dollars and exclude GST/HST. The market ranges reflect published pricing from Canadian maintenance providers that we reviewed in October 2026. They are a guide to what you will be quoted, not a formal survey.
How much does website maintenance cost per month in Canada?
Website maintenance in Canada typically runs from nothing in cash (if you do it yourself) to $500 or more per month for an agency retainer. Most small service-business sites land between $50 and $200 per month.
| Level | Typical monthly cost (CAD) | What is usually included | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | $0 plus tools and hosting | Whatever you do yourself: updates, backups, checks | Simple sites, owners comfortable in the admin panel |
| Basic care plan | $50 to $100 | Software and security updates, automated backups, uptime and SSL monitoring, often hosting, little or no editing time | Small sites that rarely change |
| Standard plan | $100 to $250 | Everything in basic, plus a few hours of content edits, performance checks, priority support, monthly reporting | Service businesses that rely on the site for leads |
| Advanced plan or agency retainer | $250 to $500+ | Faster response times, more development hours, staging tests, technical SEO, strategy reviews | Larger sites, e-commerce, booking or quoting tools |
The jump between levels is mostly about two things: how many hours of human work the plan includes, and how quickly someone responds when something breaks. The automated parts (backups, monitoring, scans) cost providers relatively little, so they appear even in cheap plans. Time does not scale the same way.
If you are new to the topic, our guide to what website maintenance includes and why it matters explains each task in plain language.
What is the difference between hosting, maintenance, support and repairs?
Hosting, maintenance, support, and repairs are four different things that often get bundled into one monthly fee. Knowing which is which is the fastest way to compare quotes fairly.
| Cost | What it is | How it is usually priced (CAD) |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | Your address, such as yourbusiness.ca | About $10 to $20 per year for a .ca domain |
| Hosting | The server that makes the site reachable | Monthly or yearly, often bundled into care plans |
| Maintenance | Scheduled work: updates, backups, monitoring, checks | Monthly plan |
| Support | Help when you ask: questions, small changes, troubleshooting | Hours included in a plan, or billed hourly |
| Repairs | One-time fixes: a hacked site, a broken layout, a failed update | Billed hourly or as a project |
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), which runs the .ca domain, puts a typical .ca domain at $10 to $20 per year.[1] Watch for low first-year prices that renew much higher.
Repairs are where budgets get surprised, because they fall outside most plans. For context on labour costs, the federal Job Bank lists a median wage of $40.69 an hour for web developers in the Calgary region.[2] That is an employee wage. Freelancers and agencies charge more per hour because their rate also covers overhead, tools, and unbilled time, so always get the out-of-scope hourly rate in writing before you need it.
What drives the cost of website maintenance?
The biggest cost drivers are the platform your site runs on, how much it changes, and how fast you need help when something goes wrong.
- Platform and plugin count. A WordPress site with twenty plugins needs far more attention than a simple site with few moving parts. Plugins are where most of the risk sits: Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, and 91% of them were in plugins.[3] Every plugin is another thing to update, test, and watch.
- Integrations and features. Booking widgets, payment processing, CRM connections, and online stores each add something that can break after an update. Expect higher pricing for e-commerce and booking-heavy sites.
- Hours of changes included. Content edits, new pages, and seasonal updates take human time. A plan with one hour a month and a plan with six hours a month are different products, even if both say “updates included.”
- Response time. “We reply within one business day” costs less to provide than “we respond within hours, including evenings.” If your phone rings because of your website, faster response is worth paying for.
- Hosting quality. Bundled hosting ranges from crowded shared servers to managed cloud hosting with caching and a CDN. Better hosting costs more but usually reduces performance and security work.
- Reporting and technical SEO. Monthly reports, broken link checks, and technical SEO reviews add value for sites that depend on search traffic, and they add cost.
Does maintenance cost less on Squarespace, Wix or a custom site?
Hosted website builders cost less to maintain in cash, because the platform handles the software for you. They do not remove maintenance entirely.
- Squarespace and Wix. The subscription covers hosting, security, and platform updates. Squarespace’s Canadian plans run from CA$21 to CA$109 per month on annual billing, or CA$30 to CA$139 billed monthly.[4] What is still on you: accurate content, working forms, page speed, and SEO. Check which currency a builder bills in, since some platforms show prices in USD.
- WordPress. You or your provider are responsible for the whole stack: core, theme, and plugin updates, backups, security, and hosting. This is why most care plans in Canada are priced with WordPress in mind.
- Custom and static sites. A site built without a plugin-heavy CMS has fewer parts to update and a smaller attack surface, so routine maintenance is lighter. It still needs hosting, monitoring, backups of its source, content updates, and someone who knows how it was built.
The cheapest platform to maintain is not automatically the cheapest overall. A builder can limit what you can change for speed, structure, or conversion. Our guide to how much a website costs in Canada covers how build and upkeep costs balance out over a few years.
Is doing your own website maintenance actually cheaper?
Doing it yourself saves the monthly fee, but it is only cheaper if you actually do it, every month.
For a simple site, routine maintenance might take an hour or two a month: applying updates, checking that the contact form still sends, confirming backups ran. The cost is your time, plus any tools you pay for, such as premium plugin licences or a backup service.
The real risk is not difficulty. It is inconsistency. A month gets skipped, then another, and the site falls several updates behind. Catching up later is slower and riskier than staying current, and a backup that has never been tested is not a recovery plan.
A practical test: if you can say when your last backup ran, where it is stored, and whether you have ever restored from it, you are probably in good shape to keep doing it yourself. If not, a basic care plan is likely cheaper than the first emergency.
What does skipping website maintenance cost?
Skipping maintenance costs nothing until something breaks, and then it usually costs more than the maintenance would have. A hacked site, a broken form, or a lapsed SSL certificate can mean lost leads, emergency repair fees, and time spent recovering instead of working.
These incidents are not rare. Statistics Canada found that about 1 in 6 Canadian businesses (16%) were affected by cyber security incidents in 2023, and that business spending on recovering from those incidents doubled from about $600 million in 2021 to $1.2 billion in 2023.[5] Not every incident involves a website, but an outdated website is one of the easier doors to leave open.
The quieter costs are harder to see. A contact form that silently stopped sending, or a site that has slowly become slower on phones, loses enquiries without ever triggering an alert.
What should a website maintenance quote include?
A good maintenance quote states exactly what is done, how often, and what costs extra. Before you sign, make sure you can answer each of these:
- Hours included. How many hours of edits or development are included each month, and do unused hours roll over?
- Response time. How quickly will someone respond to an urgent issue, and during which hours? Is emergency help included or billed separately?
- Backups. How often do backups run, how long are they kept, where are they stored, and when was a restore last tested?
- Hosting. Is hosting included, or will you pay a separate hosting company? If it is included, what kind of hosting is it?
- Currency and taxes. Is the price in CAD or USD, and does it include GST/HST? A plan priced in US dollars costs more than the same number in Canadian dollars.
- Contract terms. Is the plan month-to-month or locked into a year? What is the notice period to cancel?
- Out-of-scope rate. What is the hourly rate for work outside the plan, and will you get an estimate before work starts?
- Ownership and access. Do you own your domain, hosting account, and site files, and will you get full access if you leave?
A plan that answers all of these clearly is usually a better deal than a cheaper plan that answers half of them.
How does BitForward price website maintenance?
Our website maintenance plans cost $49, $89, or $149 per month, and every plan includes managed hosting, security monitoring, automated backups, and CMS and security updates.
- Care ($49/month) suits small and local service businesses that need reliable hosting, security, and basic upkeep, with up to 1 hour of site updates a month.
- Protect ($89/month) adds uptime alerts, priority support, monthly performance reporting, and a monthly technical SEO audit, with up to 3 hours of updates.
- Optimize ($149/month) adds high-performance hosting, emergency priority support, staging environment testing, conversion and UX checks, and a quarterly strategy review, with up to 6 hours of updates.
Plans are month-to-month, with annual plans available at a reduced rate. The full feature list for each tier is on our website maintenance plans page. If you are budgeting for a new site as well, our web design pricing shows what a build costs.
Frequently asked questions
Is hosting included in a website maintenance fee?
Sometimes. Many Canadian care plans bundle hosting, but others cover maintenance only and expect you to keep paying a separate hosting company. Ask directly, and compare plans on the combined cost of hosting plus maintenance so you are comparing like with like.
Do Canadian website maintenance prices include GST/HST?
Usually not. Most providers quote prices before tax and add GST or HST on the invoice at your province’s rate. Check the quote, and confirm whether the price is in Canadian or US dollars.
Does a Squarespace or Wix site need maintenance?
Yes, but less of it. The platform handles hosting, security, and software updates. You still need to keep content accurate, test your forms, watch page speed, and look after SEO.
Does a brand-new website need maintenance in its first year?
Yes. The software a site depends on starts changing the day it launches, and a new site is when monitoring, backups, and tested forms matter most, because problems are easiest to fix early. Some developers include a short support period after launch, so check when it ends and what happens next.
Website maintenance is a predictable monthly cost that protects a much larger investment. For most small service businesses in Canada, $50 to $200 a month covers what matters: hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, and someone to call when something goes wrong. The right plan is the one whose inclusions you can read and understand, not the one with the lowest number.
If you would like help figuring out what your site needs, get in touch and we will walk through your setup with you, or compare the tiers on our website maintenance service page.
