Most Canadian small businesses spend somewhere between about $20 and $300 a month to keep a website hosted, secure and up to date, or roughly $250 to $3,600 a year. A simple builder site sits at the low end. A WordPress site with paid plugins, managed hosting and a care plan sits at the high end. The real money usually leaks out through renewals, plugin licences and one bad week after a hack, not the headline hosting fee.
Below are real published prices from the platforms most small businesses use, what “maintenance” should actually cover, and a quick test for whether you are paying too much.
What website maintenance actually includes
“Maintenance” is a fuzzy word, and that fuzziness is where overcharging lives. A proper maintenance setup covers eight things:
- Hosting: the server or platform your site runs on.
- Domain: your yourbusiness.ca or .com, renewed every year.
- SSL certificate: the padlock. Free certificates are standard now through hosts and services like Let’s Encrypt, so nobody should be charging you extra for one.
- Updates and patches: core software, plugins, themes and code dependencies.
- Backups: automatic, stored off the server, and actually tested.
- Security monitoring: malware scanning, a firewall, and someone who responds when something goes wrong.
- Content edits: new photos, updated hours, a new service page.
- Uptime monitoring: an alert when the site goes down, ideally before your customers notice.
Some of these come bundled with your platform. Some you pay for separately. Some, quietly, nobody is doing at all.
Typical costs by site type
Prices below are from each vendor’s own pricing page as of September 2026. Note the currency: some list CAD, many only list USD, and exchange rates move. Taxes are extra.
| Site type | What you pay for | Typical monthly range | Typical yearly range |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Squarespace, Wix) | Plan, domain, any apps | About $20 to $160 | About $250 to $1,900 |
| Shopify store | Plan, apps, theme, payment fees | About $44 to $517 CAD on standard plans | About $530 to $6,200 CAD |
| WordPress, self-managed | Hosting, premium plugins, your time | About $10 to $60 plus your hours | About $150 to $800 plus your hours |
| WordPress, managed host plus care plan | Managed hosting, plugins, care plan | About $120 to $400 | About $1,400 to $4,800 |
| Custom static or edge-hosted site | Hosting (often near zero), domain, developer time for changes | About $0 to $10 hosting, plus edits as needed | Mostly domain plus edits |
These are market ranges built from the price points below, not quotes. Your number depends on traffic, how many paid add-ons you run, and how much hands-on help you want.
DIY builders
Squarespace lists its plans in Canadian dollars: Basic is CA$21 a month billed annually (CA$30 month to month), Core is CA$32 (CA$45), Plus is CA$46 (CA$59), and Advanced is CA$109 (CA$139). Basic also takes a 2% fee on online store sales.
Wix shows its plans in US dollars, from about US$18 a month for Light up to about US$160 for Business Elite, and notes that prices vary by location. Check the price at checkout in Canada before you commit.
On a builder, hosting, SSL, backups and platform updates are included. You are paying for convenience. What is not included is anyone editing your content or watching your search rankings.
Shopify
Shopify’s Canadian pricing page lists Basic at $44 CAD a month paid yearly ($49 monthly), Grow at $120 ($132), and Advanced at $465 ($517). The plan is only the start. Most stores add a handful of paid apps, and each one is its own monthly bill.
WordPress
WordPress itself is free. Running it well is not. You need hosting, and the gap between cheap shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting is big.
On the managed side, Kinsta’s single-site plans start at US$35 a month (US$30 billed annually), with free malware removal included on all plans. WP Engine’s Essential plan lists at US$28 a month billed annually, with daily automated backups and free SSL.
Then there is the care. WordPress applies minor and security releases automatically, but major releases still need someone to click update, and plugins and themes are their own story. Agencies sell this as a care plan. As one published example, WP Buffs lists plans from US$89 to US$359 a month, with edits included from the US$179 tier up and full malware removal on its US$239 tier.
Custom static or edge-hosted sites
A modern site built as static pages or on an edge platform is the cheapest to host by a wide margin. Cloudflare’s Workers pricing includes 100,000 requests a day on the free plan, serves static assets free and unlimited, and the paid plan starts at US$5 a month.
There is no plugin stack to patch, no database to break and far less for an attacker to aim at. The trade-off: content changes usually go through whoever built the site, unless they gave you an editing tool. So your ongoing cost is mostly the domain plus whatever edits you need.
The hidden costs nobody quotes you
The monthly number on a pricing page is rarely what you end up paying. Watch for these.
Renewal pricing. Hosting and domains are often cheap in year one and noticeably pricier at renewal. Compare the two-year cost, not the welcome offer.
Plugin and theme licences. Premium WordPress plugins are usually yearly subscriptions. One caching plugin, WP Rocket, lists at $59.95 a year for a single site. Add a page builder, a forms plugin, an SEO plugin and a backup plugin, and you can be paying several hundred dollars a year before anyone touches the site.
Apps on builders and Shopify. Booking, reviews, upsells and email popups each tend to carry their own monthly fee.
Emergency fixes after a hack. This is the big one. A hacked site can mean lost leads, a “this site may be hacked” warning in search, and an urgent cleanup bill. Some hosts include cleanup (Kinsta does, as above). Otherwise you pay a security service; Sucuri’s platform plans run US$229 to US$549 a year with unlimited cleanups and response times from 30 hours down to 6. If you have neither, you are paying a developer by the hour on the worst possible day. We cover prevention in our small business website security guide.
Your own time. “Free” self-maintenance costs an evening a month if things go well and a lost weekend if they don’t.
Currency. Many hosts bill in US dollars. A weak loonie raises your bill without anyone sending you a price change notice.
How to tell if you are overpaying
Run your current setup through this checklist. If you answer “no” or “I don’t know” to more than two, you are probably paying for something you are not getting.
- Can you name exactly what your monthly fee covers, item by item?
- Have you seen a backup restored, or at least confirmed backups exist off the server?
- Do you get a short report of what was updated each month?
- Is SSL included at no extra charge?
- Does your plan say what happens, and what it costs, if the site is hacked?
- Are small content edits included, or at least priced up front?
- Do you own your domain, in your own account, under your own name?
- Is your hosting tier matched to your actual traffic? A local trades site rarely needs a plan built for hundreds of thousands of visits.
Two red flags deserve special mention. First, paying $150 or more a month for a brochure site where nobody has changed anything in a year. Second, a provider who holds your domain in their account. If you ever want to leave, that becomes leverage over you.
The flip side is real too. A $15 a month host with no backups, no updates and no one to call is not a bargain. It is a bet that nothing goes wrong.
How maintenance fits into the total cost of a website
Maintenance is the part of the budget people forget when they price a new site. When you compare quotes, ask every provider what the site will cost to run for three years, not just to build. A cheaper build on a plugin-heavy stack can cost more over time than a pricier build that is cheap to host and hard to break. We lay out build pricing in our guide to how much a website costs in Canada, and the trade-offs between builders and custom work in custom web design vs Wix and Squarespace.
FAQ
How much does website maintenance cost per month in Canada?
For most small businesses it lands between about $20 and $300 a month. A builder plan like Squarespace starts at CA$21 a month billed annually. A WordPress site on managed hosting with a professional care plan can reach a few hundred dollars a month once you add plugin licences.
Is hosting the same as maintenance?
No. Hosting keeps the site online. Maintenance keeps it updated, backed up, secure and accurate. Builders bundle a lot of maintenance into the plan, while a WordPress site on plain hosting includes almost none of it.
How much does WordPress maintenance cost?
Doing it yourself costs your hosting, your premium plugin renewals and your time. Paying for it usually means a care plan; published plans like WP Buffs run from US$89 to US$359 a month, and many local freelancers and agencies sit somewhere in that territory or below it. Ask exactly what is included before comparing prices.
Can I skip maintenance on a small website?
On a builder or a static site, you can go a long time with very little. On WordPress, skipping plugin and theme updates is the most common way small business sites get hacked. At minimum, keep updates and off-site backups running.
What should I do if my site gets hacked?
Take a backup of the current state, change every password, and call your host first, since some include cleanup in your plan. If yours doesn’t, a security service or experienced developer can clean it and close the hole. Then fix whatever let them in, or it will happen again.
What we’d do
Start by listing every bill your website generates in a year: hosting, domain, plugins, apps, care plan. Most owners are surprised by the total. Then check it against the overpaying checklist above.
If the stack is the problem, not the price, it may be cheaper to rebuild on something lighter than to keep patching. TheBomb® has handled maintenance and hosting for small businesses across Canada and the US since 2014. Get a free website audit to see what shape your current site is in, or get in touch and we’ll give you a straight answer on what it should cost to run.
