What does church website maintenance cost?
Church website maintenance covers hosting, software updates, backups, security monitoring and small content changes. Hosting with email is $15 per month. Care packages start at $400. An unmaintained WordPress site typically becomes vulnerable within six to twelve months of missed updates.
What does maintenance actually include?
Maintenance covers four things: keeping the software patched, taking backups that have been tested by restoring them, monitoring for security problems, and making the small content changes a congregation needs.
The fourth item is the one churches use most. A service time changes, a staff member leaves, an event moves. These take minutes and are the difference between a current site and an embarrassing one.
What happens to a church website nobody maintains?
Two things happen on different timescales. Within months the content drifts out of date, and a wrong service time on a website costs a first-time visitor.
Within six to twelve months the software becomes exploitable. Church websites are attacked not because they are valuable targets but because automated scans find unpatched sites indiscriminately.
The usual result is not dramatic. It is spam pages inserted quietly, which Google eventually notices, at which point the site is flagged and the congregation discovers the problem from a visitor.
Is a maintenance package worth it for a small church?
It depends entirely on whether someone at the church will otherwise do the work. If a competent volunteer applies updates monthly and tests backups, a package adds little.
If nobody does, the package is inexpensive relative to what it prevents. Cleaning up a compromised site and restoring search trust costs substantially more than a year of care.
Do backups on the hosting count?
Host backups are better than nothing and worse than most churches assume. They are frequently overwritten on a short cycle, which means a problem discovered three weeks later has already been backed up over.
A backup that has never been restored is a hypothesis, not a backup. Testing a restore once a year is the only way to know it works.
How often do updates actually need applying?
WordPress core, theme and plugin updates appear most months, and security releases can arrive at any time. Monthly is the practical minimum for a site nobody watches daily.
The gap that matters is between a patch being published and being applied. Automated scans begin probing for a newly published vulnerability within days, which is why a 6-month update cycle is effectively no protection.
A care package from $400 applies these on a fixed rhythm rather than when someone remembers.
| Task | Hosting only | Care package |
|---|---|---|
| Server and email | Yes | Yes |
| Software updates | No | Yes |
| Tested backups | Partly | Yes |
| Security monitoring | No | Yes |
| Small content changes | No | Yes |
| Cost | $15 / month | from $400 |
Frequently asked questions
Can we do maintenance ourselves?
Yes, if someone will reliably apply updates, test backups and watch for problems. The failure mode is not inability but attention: it works until the volunteer gets busy.
What if our site was built by someone else?
Maintenance can be taken over for an existing site after a review of how it was built. Some sites need repair work first, which is quoted separately.
How often do updates actually matter?
WordPress core, theme and plugin updates appear most months, and security releases can appear at any time. Monthly is the practical minimum for an unattended site.
Does maintenance include search visibility work?
No. Search work is separate, starting at $400 for the SEO Light package. Maintenance keeps the site healthy rather than growing its traffic.
What happens if the site goes down?
Monitoring detects it and the cause is investigated. Most outages are hosting-side and resolve quickly; the value of monitoring is knowing before the congregation does.
Talk it through first
A short call costs nothing and usually clarifies whether this is the right next step for your organisation.
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