For most small businesses, it’s cheaper to outsource website maintenance than to do it yourself, once you count your own time and the risk of a hack. DIY can make sense if you’re technical, the site is simple and you’ll actually do the work every week. This guide helps you run the sums with your own numbers.
Key takeaways
- DIY maintenance isn’t free. Price your hours at what they’re worth to the business.
- Urgent security fixes can’t wait for a quiet month, so DIY means checking in every week.
- Add a risk cost: every 1% yearly chance of a $56,600 incident is worth about $566 a year.
- DIY suits simple sites run by confident owners. Shops, booking sites and busy owners usually come out ahead by outsourcing.
What does DIY website maintenance actually involve?
Updating plugins is the visible part. The real job is everything around it, done on a schedule, even in your busiest weeks. Our website maintenance checklist lists every task, but here’s the shape of it for a typical WordPress site:
- Weekly: check for urgent security fixes and apply them, confirm last night’s backup ran, glance at uptime alerts.
- Monthly: update WordPress, plugins and the theme, then test forms, checkout and key pages. Review malware scan results.
- Every few months: test a restore, check the PHP version, renew licences, remove unused plugins and old admin users.
The weekly part matters more than most owners expect. Patchstack found that heavily exploited WordPress flaws were attacked at scale within a median of 5 hours of being disclosed (Patchstack). A once-a-month routine leaves weeks of exposure.
How much is your hour really worth?
This is where most DIY sums go wrong. Your time has a price, even if nobody invoices you for it. Use whichever of these is highest:
- your billable rate, if you charge clients by the hour
- what you’d pay someone to cover the work you set aside
- what an evening is worth to you, if maintenance eats into family time
Then time yourself honestly for a month. Include the reading, the checking and the “why is the contact form broken now?” detours, not just the clicks. Most people find the first few months take longer while they learn.
DIY vs outsourced: a worked example
Here’s an example with round numbers. Swap in your own. Say maintenance takes you 3 hours a month and your time is worth $100 an hour. That’s 36 hours and $3,600 of your time a year, before any paid backup or security tools.
| Option | Year one cost | Later years | Who restores a backup or cleans a hack |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY (3 hours a month at $100) | $3,600 of your time | $3,600 of your time | You, or a paid emergency job |
| Maintain & Protect Essentials | $600 + GST ($480 plus $120 setup) | $480 + GST | Included (restores are fair use) |
| Maintain & Protect Advantage | $1,200 + GST ($960 plus $240 setup) | $960 + GST | Included, with unlimited restores (fair use) |
Even if your time is worth half that, DIY still costs more than Essentials. The gap only closes if maintenance takes you under an hour a month, which is hard to do properly.
What does the risk of a hack add?
Time is only half the comparison. The other half is what happens if something goes wrong while you’re busy. The ABS found that 21% of Australian businesses had a cyber security incident in 2024–25 (ABS). ASD puts the average cost of a cybercrime report from a small business at $56,600 (ASD).
Those figures cover all cybercrime, not only websites, so don’t plug them in directly. Use them to price risk instead. Each 1% yearly chance of a $56,600 incident is worth about $566 a year. If you think your odds are 2%, that’s roughly $1,130 a year of risk on top of your time.
Missed updates push those odds up. Sucuri found that 39.1% of content management systems were out of date when they were infected (Sucuri). The weeks you skip are the weeks that count.
When does DIY website maintenance make sense?
DIY is a fair choice in some cases. In our experience, it works when most of these are true:
- You’re comfortable with WordPress, FTP or a hosting file manager, and with restoring a backup.
- The site is a simple brochure site with a handful of well-known plugins.
- You’ll check in every week, not just when you remember.
- A day of downtime wouldn’t cost you sales or bookings.
- Your host already handles server security and off-site backups.
If that’s you, set a weekly calendar reminder and keep a simple log of what you updated and when.
When is it better to outsource website maintenance?
Outsourcing usually wins when the site earns money directly, or when you’d rather not learn the technical side. Common signs:
- You run a WooCommerce shop, take bookings or collect payments.
- Updates keep slipping because the business comes first, as it should.
- You’ve been hacked before, or you’re not sure you could restore the site yourself.
- The person who built the site has gone quiet. If your web designer is not responding, someone else needs to pick it up.
Our Maintain & Protect website care plans start with a full security audit and lockdown, then cover updates, backups, scans and monitoring each month. If you’d also like the server looked after by the same team, managed hosting pairs well with a care plan.
How do you hand maintenance over safely?
Choose carefully, then hand over cleanly. Our guide to choosing a website maintenance company has 12 questions to send to any provider. Before you switch, work through the website handover checklist so you hold the logins, licences and backups yourself. That way you stay in control whoever does the work.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to outsource website maintenance?
Our Maintain & Protect plans are $40, $80 or $120 a month + GST, plus a one-off setup fee of $120, $240 or $360 for a security audit and lockdown. Compare that with the value of the hours you’d spend each month.
How many hours a month does website maintenance take?
It depends on the site, the number of plugins and how much testing you do. Time yourself for a month, including checking backups and testing forms after updates. Shops and booking sites take longer because checkout needs testing too.
Can I do some maintenance myself and outsource the rest?
Yes. Many owners keep content changes in-house and hand over updates, backups and security. Just agree in writing who updates what, so two people don’t update the same plugin or each assume the other did it.
Is my host already maintaining my website?
Usually not. Most hosts look after the server only. Updating WordPress, plugins and themes, testing forms and cleaning up after a hack is website maintenance, which is a separate job unless your plan says otherwise.
What if I outsource and the site still gets hacked?
Ask any provider that question before you sign. Sites on our Maintain & Protect plans are covered by hack-free or we fix it free, so a clean-up doesn’t become a surprise bill.
Sources
- State of WordPress Security in 2026, Patchstack
- Characteristics of Australian Business, 2024–25, Australian Bureau of Statistics, June 2026
- Annual Cyber Threat Report 2024–2025, Australian Signals Directorate, October 2025
- 2023 Hacked Website and Malware Threat Report, Sucuri, June 2024