Hiring someone to update your website: your real options

Yes, you can hire someone to update your website, and you have five ways to do it: do it yourself, buy your hosting company’s plan, sign up with a national WordPress maintenance vendor, hire a freelancer by the hour, or put the site on a local agency’s care plan. They cost different amounts and, more importantly, they do different things. The questions that decide it are who posts your content, who answers when something breaks, and who holds the logins when the relationship ends.

I run a small studio in Edina, Minnesota, and a large part of our maintenance work is taking over sites that somebody else built and then stopped answering email about. So I have opinions. I have tried to keep them out of the comparison and put them in their own section near the end.

Can I hire someone to manage my website?

The job has four names. Older job postings say webmaster. Agencies say website manager, care plan, or maintenance provider. National vendors say WordPress maintenance or WordPress support. Hosting companies call their version managed hosting, which is where most of the confusion starts, because managed hosting manages the server and not the site.

Whatever the label, the work is the same list:

• Keeping the platform and its plugins or apps patched, because unpatched software is how small sites get compromised.
• Keeping backups somewhere other than the server, and testing that they restore.
• Watching for downtime, malware, and an expiring SSL certificate or domain.
• Posting the content you send: news, events, calendar changes, staff changes, photos, prices, documents.
• Testing the contact and application forms, because they fail silently.
• Answering when something breaks.

The five options below each cover some of that list. Only two of them cover all of it.

What are the five ways to get it done?

Option	What it costs, read October 2026	Posts your content	Tests your forms	Who answers
Do it yourself	Your evenings	You	Nobody	You
Hosting company plan	Hosting plus $3 to $8 a month for plugin updates	No	No	A ticket queue
National WordPress vendor	$59 to $395 a month published	Small edits by ticket	No	A ticket queue
Freelancer	$80 to $225 an hour	Yes, by the hour	If asked	If available
Local agency care plan	$50 to $850 a month published locally, by content hours	Yes, hours included	Monthly on the better plans	A named person

Doing it yourself

Free, if you do not count your time, and the right answer for more sites than agencies admit. If your site is five pages, nothing on it changes, and you are comfortable logging in once a month to click update and check that the form still sends, do that. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar, keep an off-site backup, and read our website maintenance checklist so you know what to check. The failure mode is not skill. It is that the monthly reminder gets dismissed in March and the site is quietly out of date by November.

Your hosting company’s plan

Managed WordPress hosts publish $18 to $50 a month for a single site, read October 2026: SiteGround $17.99 to $44.99 at renewal, Pressable $20.83, Flywheel $25, WP Engine $28 billed annually, Kinsta $35. For that you get a server somebody patches, WordPress core updates, nightly backups, and a firewall. Plugin and theme updates are often an add-on: Kinsta sells automatic plugin updates at $3 per environment, Flywheel at $8 per site, and Pressable’s documentation says site owners are responsible for keeping other plugins and themes up to date.

What no hosting plan includes, at any tier, is a person who looks at your pages. Nobody checks that the update broke your menu, posts the new staff member, tests the donation form, or notices that your hours still say summer. Hosting is the floor. It is not maintenance.

A national WordPress maintenance vendor

The national vendors sell exactly the missing layer, by subscription. Read October 2026 from their own pages: WP Buffs publishes $89 to $359 a month, WP SitePlan $79 to $279, FixRunner $69 to $500 with time banks of 90 minutes to 12 hours, websitemaintenanceservices.org $95 to $395, and SiteCare $435 and $2,190 with hosting included. The entry tiers cover updates, backups, and security with no content time. Edits appear from roughly $119 to $179 a month and are capped by minutes or by task size.

Two things to read in the fine print. First, “unlimited edits” means small content changes, and every vendor excludes custom development, design, and content creation from it. Second, support is a ticket queue, often email only, with a response promise rather than a resolution promise. For a straightforward WordPress site whose owner writes their own content and does not need anyone to know what a charter school lottery is, these plans are good value. The full comparison with every vendor’s inclusions is in WordPress maintenance plans compared.

A freelancer

Freelancers bill by the hour or by a small retainer. Rates I could verify on live pages in October 2026: Codeable, the vetted WordPress marketplace, lists $80 to $120 an hour plus a 17.5 percent fee; Minneapolis Made publishes $85 an hour outside its plans; Mankato Web Design bills $225 an hour for maintenance with no monthly plan at all. Upwork and Fiverr both carry website maintenance listings at a wide range of prices, but their pages returned errors when I tried to read them, so I am not quoting numbers I could not see.

The right freelancer is the best value in this list for a site that changes a few times a year: you pay for the hour, you talk to the person doing the work, and there is no subscription. The risk is continuity. A one-person operation goes on vacation, takes a full-time job, or stops answering, and the client finds out when the site breaks. If you go this route, the twelve questions below matter more, not less.

A local agency care plan

A care plan is a subscription with hours of content work included, from a studio that also builds sites. Six Twin Cities agencies publish their prices, read October 2026, and they cluster by content time: $50 to $100 a month for updates, backups, and monitoring with no edits; $149 to $250 for 30 to 60 minutes; $349 to $474 for about two hours; and $749 to $850 for four to five hours. The rest of the local agencies, eleven that I checked, publish nothing and quote after a call.

What you are paying for over the national vendors is a person who knows your site and your sector, tests things rather than waiting for a ticket, and can sit in your office for an afternoon. What you are paying for over a freelancer is that the plan survives one person’s vacation. Whether that is worth the difference depends on how much your site has to change, and on how expensive it is when it is wrong.

How much should I pay someone to maintain my website?

Price by content hours, not by the brand on the invoice. Every market figure above sorts into the same three bands once you ask how much posting is included.

What you need	Published market band, October 2026	Where the figures come from
Updates, backups, monitoring, no content	$50 to $100 a month locally; $59 to $99 nationally	Three Twin Cities agencies; four national vendors
30 to 60 minutes of edits a month	$149 to $250 a month	Three Twin Cities agencies
About two hours a month	$349 to $474 a month	Four Twin Cities agencies
Four to five hours a month	$749 to $850 a month	Two Twin Cities agencies
By the hour, no plan	$80 to $225 an hour	Codeable, Minneapolis Made, Mankato Web Design

The sanity check for any quote is simple: multiply the hours included by a plausible hourly rate for your market, add something for the automated work, and see whether the number you were given is in that neighborhood. A $400 plan with two hours of edits is ordinary. A $400 plan with no edits and no form testing is a hosting plan with a nicer name.

For our own plans, I do not publish a rate card. You get a fixed monthly price in writing after a free look at your site, and the number does not move unless you ask for more. I would rather say that plainly than print a figure that depends on which platform you are on and how much changes each month. The article on what website maintenance costs has every published figure I found, with its source.

Twelve questions to ask before you hire anyone

Ask all twelve, in writing, and keep the answers. Most of the disputes I have seen between organizations and their web vendors come down to a question nobody asked at the start.

1. Where are the backups kept, how long, and when did you last restore one? A backup on the same server is not a backup. “Daily, off-site, 30 days, restore tested” is the answer you want.
2. Whose name is on the domain, the hosting account, and the admin login? If the answer is the vendor’s, stop. Everything should be in your organization’s name, with billing on your card.
3. How often do you apply updates, and do you take a backup first? Weekly after a backup is normal. “When we get to it” is not.
4. What is your response time, and is it a response or a resolution? Most vendors promise a reply within one business day and nothing about when the problem is fixed. Know which you are buying.
5. What counts as an edit, and what is extra? Posting a news item is an edit. A new page from your copy is usually an edit. A new section with its own design, a booking feature, or writing the copy from scratch is usually extra. Get the line drawn before the first invoice.
6. Do you test on a staging copy before touching the live site? For a fragile or heavily customized site, yes. For a simple one, a backup first is enough. The vendor should at least know what you are asking.
7. Who tests the forms, and how often? The right answer is a person submitting every form monthly and confirming the email arrives. A broken form is the most expensive silent failure on a small site.
8. Do you check accessibility after content changes? New PDFs without tags and images without alt text are how an accessible site stops being one. Public schools and anyone taking federal funds should care about this specifically.
9. What do I get at the end of the month? A short report of what was updated and what was noticed. If nothing is written down, nothing is being done.
10. What happens if the site is hacked? On a good plan, cleanup and restore are included. Off a plan, cleanup is quoted. Either way the answer should be immediate and specific.
11. Is there a contract, and how do I leave? Month to month, cancel by email, and you keep everything is the answer that protects you. A twelve-month contract with the hosting in the vendor’s name is the one that does not.
12. Have you done this for an organization like mine? A school, a clinic, a nonprofit, and a masjid each have a calendar of pages that go stale. A vendor who has kept one current will know what it is without being told.

The red flags

• The vendor owns the hosting or the domain. This is leverage, whether or not anyone intends it that way. When you leave, you are asking for your own site back.
• A long contract for a short job. Maintenance is a month-to-month service. A commitment of a year or more is for the vendor’s benefit.
• No written scope. If what is included and what is extra is not on paper, you will disagree about it within three months.
• “Unlimited” without a definition. Every unlimited plan excludes something. Ask what.
• No report. If you cannot see what was done, assume the answer is less than you are paying for.
• Nobody will say who does the work. A named person, or at least a named team, is the minimum.

What a good handoff looks like

When a site changes hands, whether from the person who built it to a maintenance provider, or from one provider to another, five things should happen before any monthly work begins:

• A full off-site backup is taken and verified.
• Every account is inventoried: domain registrar, DNS, hosting, the CMS, analytics, form tools, email delivery, payment and donation platforms. Each is moved into your organization’s name, or confirmed to be there, and the list is handed to you in writing.
• The software is brought up to date and anything urgent is fixed: an expired certificate, a form that does not send, a hacked page.
• The pages that go stale fastest are identified, with who sends the updates and how often.
• The response-time, reporting, and exit terms are written down.

If a vendor wants to skip the inventory and start billing, that tells you how the relationship will end. Our checklist on whether you actually own your website is four accounts long and takes fifteen minutes.

When a freelancer or doing it yourself is the better answer

I would rather tell you this here than after you have paid for a month.

Do it yourself if the site is a brochure that changes two or three times a year, you are comfortable in the editor, and you will genuinely keep a monthly reminder. Keep an off-site backup and follow a checklist. The money you save is real.

Hire a freelancer by the hour if the site changes occasionally and unpredictably, you have no fixed monthly budget, and you are confident the person will still be reachable in a year. Insist on the handoff list above anyway, because the risk with a solo operator is not quality, it is continuity.

Use a national vendor if you have a standard WordPress site, you write your own content, you do not need anyone to understand your sector, and you are fine with a ticket queue. The entry tiers are good value for that.

Pay for a local care plan when something on the site has to change most months and nobody on staff owns it, when the cost of the site being wrong is high, or when you want the person doing the work to know what a charter school lottery, a Give to the Max Day page, or a Ramadan timetable is before you explain it.

Where TayoPro sits

We are the last option on that list, and I will describe it plainly. Three plans, differing mainly in content hours and response time, for sites we built and sites we did not. Hosting and the domain stay in your name. Forms are tested every month, speed and accessibility every quarter, and a named person in Central time answers. There is no contract. You get a fixed monthly price in writing after a free look at your site, and the market ranges above are what the same level of service costs elsewhere, so you can judge the quote. The plans are laid out on the website maintenance page, with a version for each sector we work in most.

If what you need is one evening of fixes a year, I will say so and point you at the checklist instead.

What to do next

Write down what has to change on your site in a normal month and who will send it. That single list tells you which of the five options fits, and it is the first thing any good vendor will ask for.

If you want a straight answer on your own site, send us the URL. We will tell you what is out of date, what is at risk, and whether you need a plan at all, before anybody talks about money.