"Didn't we just pay for a redesign?"
There is a lot of excitement right after a launch. We’ve been in the room for it. But many of the institutions we work with fund a redesign like a one-time capital project, and the following year, when the MarComm team asks for budget to maintain the new site, they hear some version of “didn’t we just pay for a redesign?” A few years later, when the site starts to age, the same room asks why the team doesn’t just rebuild it.
The challenge? Nobody budgeted for the proper maintenance of the site.
Your website is your institution’s most visible marketing asset. Protecting what you just built takes budget and staff time, every year, forever.
We usually tell institutions to plan on 10 to 20% of the site’s rebuild cost per year to run it well. That figure excludes internal staff time, hosting, and SaaS license fees.
Itemized cost | What it covers |
|---|---|
Hosting & infrastructure | Managed hosting, environments, CDN, uptime |
CMS licensing | $0 for Drupal and WordPress; annual subscription for SaaS platforms (Modern Campus, Cascade, Terminalfour) |
Fixes & security | Core and module updates, patching, monitoring, support |
Content operations | Writing, editing, governance: the people |
Continuous improvement | SEO/AISEO, accessibility, analytics, conversion work, new features |
At most institutions we’ve worked with, the first three get budgeted and the last two don’t. Content operations gets absorbed by whoever has capacity, which is how website content debt accumulates. Continuous improvement is sometimes the web team’s job and sometimes nobody’s job.
So, wait, how much should we budget to maintain the website?
Most of our clients spend between $1,000 and $10,000 a month on outside maintenance. Where you land depends on how much of the work stays in-house.
That range lines up with the 10 to 20% rule. A $150,000 rebuild implies roughly $15,000 to $30,000 a year, or about $1,250 to $2,500 a month. A $400,000 rebuild implies $40,000 to $80,000 a year, closer to $3,300 to $6,700 a month. If your number falls far below that band, the work has either moved onto your staff’s plate or possibly stopped happening.
Here is roughly what each band typically covers:
Monthly spend | What it typically covers |
|---|---|
$1,000 to $2,500 | Keeping the site safe: core and module updates, security patching, uptime monitoring, a small bank of support hours |
$2,500 to $5,000 | The above, plus improvement work: accessibility remediation against WCAG 2.1 AA, SEO and AI visibility, analytics reviews, small builds |
$5,000 to $10,000 | The above, plus shared ownership: content operations support, conversion work, new features, quarterly roadmap and strategy |
At the high end we manage everything: code, content, performance, and search. At the low end we come in for a specific part of the recurring work and your team handles the rest.
What should a typical website maintence retainer cover?
Well, it depends. Ours typically covers core and module updates, security patching and monitoring, uptime response, and a bank of support hours for the fixes and small builds every campus needs. Optimization retainers add the improvement work: SEO, AI Visibility, GEO, accessibility checks against WCAG 2.1 AA, analytics reviews, conversion improvements.
The distinction matters more than the pricing. Maintenance keeps the site you have; optimization compounds it. North Hennepin Community College’s redesign and ongoing optimization is the pattern we point to: 40% increase of in-state organic search sessions, with the gains coming from the running, not just the launch.
Curious what a retainer would cover for your site? See our maintenance and support services.
When does the retainer pay for itself?
Faster than most institutions expect, because one student is worth so much.
Run the back-of-the-napkin version. Say your net tuition revenue is $12,000 per student per year and students persist four years. One enrolled student is worth roughly $48,000 over their time with you. A $3,500-per-month retainer costs $42,000 a year.
So the retainer pays for itself if year-round maintenance and optimization recovers a single applicant you would otherwise have lost: like an RFI form that didn’t break in January, or a program page that kept ranking in AI search instead of drifting.
These are illustrative figures, and obviously net tuition revenue isn’t pure margin, but try to substitute your institution’s actual numbers and see if the shape of the argument holds up.
What happens with a $0 maintenance budget?
You still pay. Just in a different way.
We meet a version of this institution every year. Spending nothing has a cost, and it gets paid in plugin vulnerabilities, in accessibility drift, in the form that fails quietly during application season, and in a site so far gone by year five that the next redesign costs more than the maintenance would have.
For public institutions, the accessibility piece now carries a deadline. Under the Department of Justice’s Title II rule, public colleges and universities have to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. In April 2026 the DOJ issued an interim final rule pushing the compliance dates back a year: public entities serving populations of 50,000 or more now have until April 24, 2027, and smaller entities and special districts until April 26, 2028.
An extra year is not a reason to defer. Accessibility remediation on a large .edu is a multi-semester program, not a sprint, and every month of drift adds to the backlog you’ll have to clear. Institutions that treat the extension as breathing room to work steadily will be fine. Institutions that treat it as permission to wait will be doing the same panic project in 2027 that they were going to do in 2026, with less time.
Deferred maintenance is still maintenance. It just comes to you later, with interest.
How do I get started?
We’re always happy to talk through options, whether that means us maintaining your site, or training your staff and stakeholders to maintain it themselves. Whatever age or shape it’s in. Let’s talk.
Frequently asked questions about website redesigns cost
In our retainers, support hours can cover content work, but day-to-day publishing usually stays with your team; we train your editors so it can.
The license line is $0 on both. Total cost differences come from your site’s hosting, security, complexity and integrations more than the platform. Our Drupal vs. WordPress guide goes deeper.
Many institutions do some of it. As long as someone is specifically accountable for updates, security, and accessibility, with hours protected for it, you are okay. If it’s everyone’s fourth job, it’s no one’s job. (Not sure where you stand? The free AISEO readiness dashboard now includes a load-time and site-health review.)
