Website maintenance cost in India (2026): monthly and yearly charges, and what an AMC should include

A website isn't finished at launch. Software it depends on keeps changing, domains and hosting renew, and someone has to change the prices, add the new service and fix the form that stopped sending emails. Website maintenance is the name for all of that, and an AMC (annual maintenance contract) is a yearly agreement to pay someone to do it.

Our website development cost guide gives the short version: budget roughly 15 to 20% of the build cost a year. This guide goes through what Indian providers actually charge, what their plans include and leave out, and which renewals catch people out. Every figure was checked on the provider's own page on 12 and 13 October 2026.

Published website maintenance plans in India

Marketplace listings go lower. Sellers on IndiaMART list WordPress maintenance at ₹9,500 a year and basic website maintenance at ₹5,000 a year. Agency blog posts that estimate the market don't agree with each other: we read eight, and their "typical" ranges ran from ₹1,500 to more than ₹1,20,000 a month.

The two RankON price lists show why headline prices mislead. Its WordPress page sells 5 hours a month for ₹15,000 a year, while its general page sells 2 hours a month for ₹36,000 a year. Same company, different products. Always compare what's inside.

What a maintenance plan actually includes

Reading the plans side by side, they differ on the same seven things. These are the questions that decide whether a plan is good value:

Hourly rates for one-off changes

If your site rarely changes, paying per job can be cheaper than a plan. Aero Business Solutions in Bengaluru publishes ₹995 an hour for content editing, ₹2,995 an hour for custom coding, and ₹1,995 an hour for emergency basic work (₹5,995 for emergency coding). On freelance platforms, a seller in Kanyakumari on Contra charges $40 an hour beyond a small monthly plan, and Upwork puts the median rate for Indian web developers at $25 an hour, based on its contract history.

The catch with paying by the job is that nobody is watching in between. Updates, backups and security checks are exactly the work that doesn't happen unless someone is responsible for it.

Renewals: what the first-year price hides

Domains

Hosting

Shared hosting is advertised at its introductory price, which applies only to the first term. Hostinger India shows both numbers clearly on its 48-month plans:

MilesWeb's hosting page headline promises the same price at renewal, while a comparison table further down the same page shows its ₹129 plan renewing at ₹219 a month. If a host's page contradicts itself, ask for the renewal price in writing.

SSL certificates

You shouldn't need to buy one. Let's Encrypt issues free certificates, and the hosts we checked include free SSL with their hosting plans. Paid certificates still exist: MilesWeb sells a single-domain certificate at ₹799 for the first year, renewing at ₹1,499. Note that certificate lifetimes are shrinking. Let's Encrypt's default moves from 90 days to 64 days in February 2027 and 45 days in February 2028, and it advises against renewing by hand. Your hosting must renew certificates automatically.

Licences and platform fees

Many WordPress business sites use a few premium plugins, each billed yearly. These are the published prices for one site, in the currency the vendor showed us:

On Shopify there are no plugins to patch, but the plan itself is the running cost. Shopify India lists Basic at ₹1,499 a month billed yearly (₹1,994 monthly), Grow at ₹5,599 (₹7,447 monthly) and Advanced at ₹22,680 (₹30,164 monthly), and says a third-party transaction fee of 2%, 1% or 0.6% may apply if you don't use Shopify Payments.

Why maintenance isn't optional

• Only the latest WordPress is supported. WordPress.org says only the latest version is officially supported, with fixes for older versions offered as a courtesy. It ships two or three major releases a year plus point releases in between: 7.0 in May 2026, 7.1 in August, and three 7.1.x updates by 6 October.
• PHP versions expire. Each PHP version gets two years of active support and two of security fixes. PHP 8.1 reached end of life on 31 December 2025 and 8.2 stops getting security fixes on 31 December 2026. WordPress recommends PHP 8.3 or newer.
• Plugins are the main risk. Patchstack's report on 2025 counted 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities, 91% in plugins and 9% in themes, with heavily exploited flaws attacked within a median of 5 hours. Wordfence found plugins behind 96% of the vulnerabilities it published in 2024. Both companies sell security products, so treat these as vendor data.
• Security is part of page experience. Google's page experience guidance asks whether pages are served securely. Google announced HTTPS as a very lightweight ranking signal in 2014, though its current guidance says page experience aspects other than Core Web Vitals don't directly help ranking.
• Speed decays. Every plugin, script and large image added after launch slows the site. Google's Core Web Vitals set the targets: main content within 2.5 seconds, a response to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and a layout shift score of 0.1 or less.

Indian rules that touch website maintenance

CERT-In. Directions issued under the IT Act in April 2022 require listed cyber incidents to be reported to CERT-In within 6 hours of noticing them. The list includes website defacement, intrusion into a website and malicious code. CERT-In's FAQ says the directions cover businesses, including sole proprietorships, but not individual citizens. A maintenance contract should say who notices an incident and who reports it.

DPDP. Any site with a contact or booking form collects personal data. The DPDP Rules notified in November 2025 set minimum security safeguards, including access controls, logging and monitoring, backups for continuity and keeping logs for a year, and require breaches to be reported without delay. These rules apply 18 months after publication, which takes them to May 2027. Our guide to DPDP consent for Indian websites covers the consent side.

What a written AMC should spell out

1. Which sites, and which platform (WordPress, Shopify, custom code).
2. The monthly quota of changes, and the unit: requests, hours or pages. Does unused time carry over?
3. How often backups run, where they're stored, how long they're kept, and how often a restore is actually tested.
4. Whether core, theme and plugin updates are included, and whether they're tested on a staging copy first.
5. Uptime and security monitoring, and whether malware cleanup is included.
6. Response time and fix time, separately, in working hours or days.
7. Who pays for and renews the domain, hosting, SSL and licences, and in whose name they're registered.
8. Who reports a security incident to CERT-In, and how quickly you'll be told.
9. What counts as new work (a new section, page or feature) and its rate.
10. Whether the price includes GST.

A worked example: a small WordPress business site

Using the published prices above, before GST:

• .com domain renewal at GoDaddy or MilesWeb: ₹1,599 a year.
• Hostinger Premium hosting after the introductory term: ₹449 a month, or ₹5,388 a year.
• Two premium plugins, a page builder and a caching plugin: about $120 a year.
• A care plan such as Aarav Infotech's Starter, billed yearly: ₹3,000 a month, or ₹36,000 a year, plus 18% GST.

That comes to about ₹43,000 a year plus the plugin licences, before GST. Drop the care plan and it's about ₹7,000 plus licences, with nobody watching the updates. The plan is most of the cost, which is why the quota, backups and response times inside it matter so much.

How we handle maintenance

Most websites we build are custom React sites rather than WordPress, so there are no WordPress plugins to patch. Our Business Website plan includes three months of fixes after launch.

After that, our content plans cover content changes and small fixes (they don't include hosting, backups or uptime monitoring). Content Essentials is ₹6,000 a month for 4 articles or pages a month, unlimited small updates with a two-day turnaround, on-page SEO for everything published and a monthly summary. Content Pro is ₹12,500 a month for 8 articles or pages, a campaign landing page each month and internal linking. See the content management page for details, or send us your current AMC and we'll tell you what it covers.