Web maintenance is experiencing a major increase in costs (and price). There are a lot of reasons for this, but it is clear when you look at the marketplace online. For example, we see web maintenance agreements often being priced at about $300 per month for what we do for almost any of our WordPress customers. We understand that (to a point). The web has changed fairly dynamically in the past few years:
- Multiple platforms to access web sites by
- Multiple software programs to build websites
- Ever increasing frequency of software upgrades which require monitoring and troubleshooting
- Much more fractured and competitive marketplace to provide visibility for sites to marketplace
- Greater coordination needed between server environments
- Continuing expansion of areas of web “expertise” required
- Security issues, security issues, security issues
Each one of these items alone would increase staffing needs, which increases costs. However, the combination of these items can make the web developer’s job change from proactively planning to reactively responding. Every web developer knows that firsthand.
We’re looking at our pricing to change as we better define our services going forward. These changes will occur close to the end of this year.