The most common Monday-morning email we receive does not say "we want a new website". It says "the site is down, the homepage shows someone else's ads and Google has flagged us as dangerous". It is almost always a WordPress site someone built two or three years ago, handed over and never opened again. Fixing it costs CZK 10,000 to 30,000, and the owner always asks the same question: what would it have cost to have someone look after the site all along? Unlike the price of the website itself, that answer has a fairly narrow range.
In short: maintaining a typical business website in the Czech Republic in 2026 costs CZK 1,000 to 3,000 a month with a freelancer and CZK 3,000 to 6,000 a month with an agency. Extended plans with included change hours and a guaranteed response time run CZK 5,000 to 15,000; online stores and web applications cost CZK 10,000 to 40,000 a month. Doing it yourself costs only the hosting, but takes two to four hours a month - and you carry the responsibility when something breaks. Below I break down what you should get for the money, what drives the price, when you do not need a retainer at all, and what a site nobody maintains ends up costing.
What website maintenance means, and what it does not
Everyone sells something slightly different under "website maintenance", which is why prices appear to differ several times over. Strip away the package names and it is always the same list of tasks a site needs to work as well in a year as it did on launch day.
- Updates to the CMS, theme and plugins. On WordPress several ship every week and some close security holes.
- Backups stored away from the hosting, and above all a check that the site can actually be restored from them.
- Monitoring of uptime, SSL certificate and domain expiry, and form errors.
- Security: firewall, malware scans, blocking login attacks, disabling unused interfaces such as XML-RPC.
- Performance: watching speed and Core Web Vitals, cleaning the database, upgrading PHP.
- Small edits: a text change, a new photo, another menu item, a fixed broken link.
- A report, ideally monthly, of what was done and what happened.
What maintenance usually is not: hosting and domain (paid separately, CZK 100 to 500 a month), writing new articles, marketing and ads, a redesign or new features. If someone promises "complete website care including SEO and content" for CZK 2,000 a month, ask how many hours of work that really is. At the usual rate of CZK 800 to 1,500 an hour, it is two.
Website maintenance prices in 2026
The prices in the table come from the quotes we have seen clients receive over the past year, from public price lists of Czech studios and from our own pricing. They exclude VAT and apply to a typical business website of up to roughly thirty pages.
| Who maintains the site | Monthly price | What you get | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| You | CZK 0 + 2 to 4 hours of your time | Whatever you do yourself. You carry the responsibility for outages. | Small sites, technically confident owners |
| Managed hosting | CZK 300 to 1,500 | Automatic core updates, backups, firewall. Nobody checks whether the site still works after an update. | Simple WordPress sites without integrations |
| Freelancer | CZK 1,000 to 3,000 | Updates, backups, a few small edits. Response depends on workload; a holiday means no support. | Sole traders, small businesses |
| Agency, basic retainer | CZK 3,000 to 6,000 | All of the above plus monitoring, security checks, a monthly report and cover when someone is away. | Business sites that generate leads |
| Agency, extended retainer | CZK 5,000 to 15,000 | Plus 3 to 10 hours of changes a month, guaranteed response time, performance and SEO monitoring. | Frequently changing sites, campaigns |
| Online store / web application | CZK 10,000 to 40,000 and up | Updates tested on a staging copy first, payment and integration monitoring, on-call support. | Operations where an hour of downtime costs money |
One more number for comparison: rented platforms such as Shoptet, Webnode or Wix include maintenance in the subscription. For CZK 300 to 2,000 a month the provider handles updates, backups and security. In exchange you control neither the code nor the data - we cover when that trade-off is worth it in our guide to WooCommerce store costs.
What drives the price
Two maintenance quotes for the same website routinely differ threefold, and both can be honest. Five things make the difference.
Technology. WordPress with twenty plugins needs attention every week. A static site or a custom-built site without a CMS needs almost none - there is nothing to update and nothing to break into. That is why maintaining a custom site can be cheaper than maintaining WordPress, even though building it cost more.
Number of integrations. Every connection - payment gateway, CRM, booking system, invoicing - is one more place where an update can break something and one more thing the maintainer has to check after every change.
Change hours in the retainer. A basic retainer covers operations, not content work. If you change the site every week, you want a plan with included hours; they are cheaper than paying for them one by one.
Response time. "We will look within three working days" is free. "Within two hours, weekends included" costs a few thousand a month more, because someone has to be on call.
Staging environment. Cheap maintenance updates the live site and hopes. Better maintenance updates a copy first, checks the forms and the cart, and only then deploys. For a store that is the difference between a quiet night and an hour of broken payments.
WordPress, custom or static: how much maintenance each needs
The technology the site runs on affects the price more than anything else. The same number of pages can mean one hour of work a month on one stack and ten on another.
| Type of site | Work per month | Typical retainer | Main risk without maintenance |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress with a theme and plugins | 2 to 4 hours | CZK 3,000 to 6,000 | Compromise through an outdated plugin |
| WordPress store (WooCommerce) | 4 to 10 hours | CZK 6,000 to 15,000 | Broken payments or shipping after an update |
| Static site (Nuxt, Astro, Next.js) | 0.5 to 1 hour | CZK 1,000 to 3,000 | Practically none, only domain and certificate expiry |
| Custom web application | 4 to 20 hours | CZK 10,000 to 40,000 | Outdated libraries, server outages, data leaks |
| Rented platform (Shoptet, Webnode) | 0 hours | Included in the plan | No technical risk, only dependence on the provider |
According to Patchstack data, more than nine in ten reported vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem come from plugins and themes, not from core. That is why the cost of maintaining WordPress depends mostly on the plugin count: a site with five plugins is a different job from a site with thirty.
What an unmaintained website costs
An unmaintained site is not free; you just pay later and all at once. From what lands on our desk for repair, these are the typical bills:
- Cleaning up a hacked WordPress site: CZK 10,000 to 30,000, including removing malicious code, rotating passwords and keys and requesting a review from Google. Without a clean backup the site is often rebuilt.
- Lost search rankings: a site flagged as dangerous or slowed down by an outdated PHP version loses positions that take months to recover. We explain how speed relates to revenue in our piece on Core Web Vitals.
- Two years of updates at once: skipping updates and then applying them all together means CZK 5,000 to 15,000 of work, because several things break simultaneously and someone has to find out which.
- Expired domain or certificate: nothing to fix, but a day or two of a dead website and dead company email.
Add up three years of a basic CZK 3,000 retainer and you get CZK 108,000. That is a lot. But three years without maintenance on a WordPress site that brings in leads means, with near certainty, at least one compromise and one large catch-up update - CZK 15,000 to 45,000 plus the days the site was down and enquiries went to competitors. For a sole trader with a simple site the maths can go the other way, and that is the next section.
When you do not need a maintenance retainer
The honest answer: not every website needs a monthly retainer. You can skip maintenance or handle it ad hoc when at least two of these apply:
- The site is static or has no CMS, so there is nothing to update.
- There are no forms connected to other systems, no customer logins and no payments.
- The site is not your main source of leads and two days of downtime would not hurt.
- You use a rented platform where maintenance is included.
In that case, "one hour of checks every six months at an hourly rate" is a more sensible arrangement than a retainer. Conversely, if you run WordPress with a store, bookings or a client area, a retainer is the cheapest insurance you can buy.
How to recognise a good maintenance offer: 7 questions
- Where are the backups and when did you last test a restore? A backup that has never been restored is not a backup.
- Do you update on the live site or on a copy? For a store, insist on a copy.
- What is the response time and what happens at the weekend? Get it in writing, not "we will get back to you as soon as we can".
- How many change hours are included and what does an extra hour cost? Without this number the quotes cannot be compared.
- Will I get a monthly report? If you cannot see what was done, you do not know what you are paying for.
- Who holds the access and what happens if we part ways? Hosting, domain and admin accounts should be in your name. Handover with no strings attached.
- What is explicitly outside the retainer? Better to know up front that a redesign and new content are billed separately.
The same logic applies when choosing who builds your site; our twelve questions for a web agency complement these seven nicely. And if you have been quoted a site that is "cheap because it needs no maintenance", read why a cheap website ends up costing more.
What our maintenance includes
At Kosmoweb, website maintenance starts at CZK 3,000 a month: updates applied to a copy of the site first and deployed only after checking, off-host backups with regular restore tests, uptime and certificate monitoring, security checks and a monthly report of what was done. The extended plan from CZK 5,000 adds included change hours and a shorter response time. We maintain sites we built as well as sites built by others; for those we start with a security audit so we know what we are taking over. If you are not sure which row of the table your site belongs in, send us the link. Within two days we will tell you plainly whether you need a retainer or whether an hour of checks twice a year is enough.