How Much Does a Website Cost Per Month? Every Cost, Broken Out

Ask "how much does a website cost per month?" and you will find answers from $5 to $1,000. Neither is wrong. They are measuring different things: one counts hosting, the other counts an agency that updates the site every month.

So this guide works the other way round. It splits the monthly bill into seven costs, prices each one, and asks whether you need it at all. Three complete worked examples follow at the end. Prices are for the US market in 2026. Running a site in the UK or Ireland? We have separate guides for the UK and Ireland, because prices and legal requirements differ.

Key takeaways

• Technology (domain, hosting, licenses) is the cheapest part of a website, usually $10 to $100 a month.
• Maintenance, changes and new content are the expensive part, because someone bills for their time.
• Four small changes a month at an agency rate cost more than hosting does in a year.
• A static site removes most of the license and maintenance cost.
• Content is the one cost worth keeping: it is the only one that brings money back.

The seven monthly costs at a glance

1. Domain: $1 to $2 a month

A standard .com, .net or .org costs $10 to $20 a year, so about $1 to $2 a month. There is nothing to save here. There is one thing to check: the domain should be registered in your name, not your web designer's. It is the most common reason a later switch gets complicated. More on that in Do you own your website?

2. Hosting: $0 to $60 a month

• Shared hosting: $3 to $10. Fine for a normal business site with light traffic.
• VPS or managed hosting: $20 to $60. Mostly what you pay so that someone keeps WordPress running smoothly.
• Static hosting (the site is served as finished files from a CDN): $0 to $15. There is no database and no PHP to look after, and many static hosts have a free tier.

The difference is not a matter of taste. A static website has fewer moving parts that can break, which lowers cost 2 and, more importantly, cost 5.

3. Licenses and plugins: $0 to $125 a month

The cost almost everyone underestimates. A typical WordPress site runs on a premium theme or page builder, a forms plugin, a backup and security plugin, an SEO plugin and often a translation plugin. Each renews yearly, and together they come to $700 to $1,500 or more a year, so roughly $60 to $125 a month. The full list is in The real cost of a WordPress website.

Website builders bundle this cost: plans run about $15 to $50 a month for a standard site, in exchange for tying your site to that platform. Which builder does what is covered in our website builder comparison.

4. Legal: $0 to $30 a month

There is no single US law that requires every website to publish legal pages, but several state laws require a privacy policy as soon as you collect personal information, which a simple contact form already does. If you get visitors from the EU or UK and use analytics or marketing cookies, you also need a consent banner.

• Privacy policy generators: $0 to $20 a month
• Cookie consent tools: $0 to $25 a month, depending on traffic

The cheapest route is to collect less: privacy-friendly analytics without marketing cookies usually needs no banner at all.

5. Maintenance and security: $0 to $500 a month

This is where it gets expensive, depending on what your site is built on.

• DIY site on a builder: $0 to $50, the platform does most of it
• Custom site with a maintenance plan: $50 to $200
• Small business site with an agency: up to $500
• Static site: close to zero, because there are no plugins and no database to patch

Much of the maintenance on a WordPress site is upkeep the system demands of itself: plugin updates that clash, security holes in third-party code, themes that shift after an update. The US Federal Trade Commission's cybersecurity guide for small businesses lists keeping software updated among the basics, which is exactly what this cost pays for. The detailed breakdown is in What website maintenance really costs.

6. Changes: $0 to $600 a month

The cost that never appears in a quote but shows up every month. A new phone number, an updated price list, a team photo, three sentences on the homepage.

• Freelancer: around $75 an hour is typical, and few bill less than half an hour
• Agency: $100 to $150 an hour
• Hours included in a maintenance plan: often one or two a month, anything beyond billed extra
• Doing it yourself: $0, but your time

Four small changes a month at agency rates add up to $200 to $600. For many small businesses that is the largest single monthly cost, and it appears in no price comparison. It is also why so many sites go stale: not because no one wants the change, but because it is not worth a billed hour for one sentence. Why this feels especially sticky on WordPress: Why WordPress feels like work.

7. New content and visibility: $100 to $300 per page of copy

The one cost where cutting back hurts. A site that never adds anything slowly loses ground to competitors who keep publishing. Professional copywriting runs about $100 to $300 per page, and SEO help is usually a monthly retainer on top.

This is also the only cost that earns money back. How search engines and AI assistants send customers to small business sites: Get new customers from search and Why your own website matters more for AI search.

The eighth cost that is not on any invoice

Between "I need a change" and "the change is live", most small businesses wait days or weeks. That wait costs no money directly, but it costs work when your site still shows last year's prices or is missing a service customers ask about. It explains the other seven: almost everything that makes a website expensive is dependency on someone who bills by the hour.

Three worked examples

The same ten-page business site, three ways to run it:

ShiftPress care is billed in euros. The honest reading: the builder is cheapest as long as your own time is free. The agency route is most expensive because every task is a billed task. What an agency charges and how that adds up over five years: What a web design agency costs.

Where you can actually save

1. Simplify the technology instead of switching hosts. A static site removes most of cost 3 and cost 5, which on a typical WordPress site is $150 to $250 a month.
2. Be able to make changes without a developer. Then cost 6 disappears.
3. Don't cut cost 7. It is the only one that brings in revenue.

The right guide for your situation

This guide covers running costs. For one-off costs and special cases:

• You only need a single page: One page website cost.
• You are deciding between a template and a custom design: Custom website vs template.
• You already have a site and want to renew it: Website redesign cost.
• You are comparing monthly plans in the UK: Pay monthly websites.
• You have a quote in front of you: Questions to ask a web designer.
• You are on Wix or considering it: How much does a Wix website cost.
• You want a WordPress site built: Hiring someone to build a WordPress website.
• You run a nonprofit: Nonprofit website cost.
• You want someone else to look after the site: Website care plans.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

"How much does a website cost per month?" only has an answer once you split it into its parts. The technology is cheap and predictable. The expensive part is anything a person bills by the hour, and that is where your monthly bill is decided.

To see where your own site stands, start with the WordPress check: it shows what your site runs on and which of these costs apply to you.