How much does Website Support cost?

At Modular we help a number of clients with website support, hosting and maintenance. Website support is essential for ensuring your website runs effectively and efficiently, performs well and is up to date and secure.

Websites, like your mobile phone, need regular software updates – otherwise they might stop working or key functionality stops performing. Often, this is in really weird ways. Logging in to an app or checking out at an e-commerce store starts to become troublesome, or things just start to look odd with misplaced content and imagery.  

Open source Content management systems and platforms run on many 3rd party supplier pieces of software. These are updated at different times with improved or new features and regularly in response to security threats. It is common for these updates to cause conflicts that will result in webiste issues and in some cases not function at all.

Even though this is a pain, and it a result of keeping up-to-date, it is better to resolve these issues and be up-to-date and secure, than to have an out dated and insecure website. Keeping all of these different pieces of software working harmoniously together requires updates and maintenance.

One of the first questions a new client will ask is “How much does Website Support cost?”

Naturally, understanding what the monthly, quarterly or annual fee may be is really important for budgeting, cash flow and internal sign off for the contract. 

Website support generally has a number of core services; website hosting, software updates, security monitoring and the support service itself.

However, what is included in a support package and how much that costs, can differ greatly. The size of your business or organisation will have some impact on the cost, as will the depth and complexity of your website along with how many administrators are involved in publishing content to the site. 

Additionally, the level of support your organisation requires will affect the cost. Smaller businesses operating during the business day only will probably only want support cover Monday to Friday between 9-5, whilst others offering round the clock services will need 24/7 cover.  

Website support costs vary quite a bit

Having done some research and looked at a range of suppliers, costs for website support start from around £50 per month and can go up to £5,000 per month for enterprise level support. 

Smaller businesses with simpler requirements will pay between £50 and up to £500 per month, medium sized businesses slightly higher and can pay anything between £90 – £1,200 and enterprise level requirements closer to £1,200 – £5,000 per month.

Generally sites that sit in this range will have a high volume of visitors, are required 24/7 (think vehicle breakdown support, helplines, publishing platforms ) or are  e-commerce platforms. 

Additional website support costs 

Depending on your website support package additional time to respond and resolve an issues may incur an additional cost.

At Modular, we find that most small organisations raise on average 2-5 tickets a year. More active publishing teams might raise that many tickets or issues in a week. Expect even higher numbers for larger, complex sites with multiple publishers.  So when you are thinking about a budget for your own website support you might need to factor in some resources for additional incident support. 

Budgeting for ongoing website support

Which means, it can be pretty hard to budget for a new website support contract, especially if you do not already have a contract in place or are unsure of your organisation’s website needs.  As a starting point, ask yourself the following questions.

• How many website visitors do you expect?
• How many administrators will be using the website?
• How frequently will you be updating the website with new content, additional pages and new features?
• How reliant is your organisation on your website performing well?
• What would be the impact if the website went down?

The answers to these questions will help you begin to understand what level of website support you may need and provide a supplier with a good overview of your organisational needs for your website support. 

If you are unsure of how much you should budget and how much website support might cost your organisation, feel free to reach out and give me (Emma) a buzz on 07584 652285.

Modular is a Human First design and development company who create websites, apps and animations for organisations looking to make a big impact on a local or global scale. 

Our Modular Website Support Service ensures your website is always online, so you are always connected to your customers.