The short answer, before the caveats
Website maintenance in the Philippines runs from about ₱20,000 a month for a brochure site, ₱35,000 a month for eCommerce, and ₱50,000 and up for large resource sites or anything holding financial and personal data.
That spread is not a negotiating range. It tracks something real: how much of the site can break, how badly, and how fast someone has to be there when it does. A five-page site for a law firm in BGC and an insurance portal handling member records are not the same object with different page counts. They carry different risk, and maintenance is priced on risk.
What actually sets the price
Most maintenance quotes in the Philippines are priced on page count. That is the wrong variable. Four things move the number, and page count is the weakest of them.
Brochure sites — from ₱20,000 a month
A corporate site, a services site, a company profile. Content changes now and then. Nothing transacts. If it goes down at 2am on a Sunday, it is embarrassing and it is fixed on Monday.
At this tier you are paying for the site staying current and staying up — framework and plugin updates, security patches, backups you have actually tested, uptime monitoring, and a person who answers when something looks wrong. Content updates are usually included up to an agreed volume.
eCommerce sites — from ₱35,000 a month
The moment a site takes money, maintenance changes character. Payment gateways update their APIs. Shipping integrations break quietly. A checkout bug does not cost you a page view, it costs you the order — and you often find out from a customer rather than from a log.
So this tier buys attention, not just patching. Someone watches the checkout path, the payment and shipping integrations, and inventory sync, and treats a broken cart as an incident rather than a ticket. For a retailer running 800 SKUs across a couple of promos a month, that is the difference between a bad hour and a bad quarter.
This tier covers Shopify stores as well as custom builds. Shopify takes the platform and hosting off your plate, which is genuinely less to maintain — but it moves the risk rather than removing it. Apps update on their own schedule and occasionally break each other, theme customisations get overwritten, and the more apps a store runs the more surface there is to watch. A Shopify store with a dozen paid apps in the checkout path is not a lower-maintenance object than a custom build.
Large resource sites and high-security builds — ₱50,000 a month and up
Two different sites end up in the same tier for different reasons.
The first is scale. A site with hundreds or thousands of pages — a news archive, a knowledge base, a property portfolio, a document library — has a maintenance cost driven by volume. Search stays fast or the site stops working as a resource. Links rot. Media libraries balloon. Migrations that are trivial on twelve pages take planning on two thousand.
The second is exposure. Insurance, financial services, healthcare, anything holding personal records. Here the work is security posture: dependency auditing, penetration testing, access control and key rotation, an incident response path someone has actually rehearsed, and the evidence trail your compliance people will ask for. Under the Data Privacy Act a breach is not only a technical failure, it is a reportable event with a named accountable officer.
Paying ₱20,000 a month to maintain a site like that is not a saving. It is an unpriced risk sitting on your balance sheet.
What a maintenance retainer should actually cover
Ask for this in writing before you sign anything, because "maintenance" means wildly different things across quotes.
Security patching and framework updates, with a stated frequency. Offsite backups, with a stated retention period and — this is the one nobody checks — a restore that has actually been tested. Uptime monitoring, with a defined response time. Content updates, with the included volume written down. Performance monitoring. And a named person who picks up, rather than a shared inbox.
If a quote does not say how quickly someone responds when the site goes down, it is not a maintenance contract. It is a retainer for availability that has never been defined.
Why we only maintain sites we built
This is where we differ from most of the market, and it is worth being direct about it: designblue does not take over other people's websites.
Not out of preciousness. Inheriting an unfamiliar codebase means inheriting every decision in it — the shortcuts, the abandoned plugins, the undocumented workaround someone shipped on a Friday. You cannot responsibly promise a response time on a system you have not read. Agencies that take on any site at a flat monthly rate are quietly betting that yours will not be the one that breaks.
The model we run instead is the one we use with InLife Benefits and Aboitiz Land: the team that designed and built the site is the team that keeps running it. Nothing is handed to a separate support desk. When something breaks, the person fixing it already knows why it was built that way. Your in-house IT keeps the server; we keep the site.
That does mean if you are searching for someone to adopt an existing site, we are not your answer — and you will save time knowing that now.
What happens when you skip it
Unmaintained sites rarely fail loudly. They decay.
An outdated plugin becomes an entry point. A payment integration deprecates a version and the checkout starts failing for one browser. SSL expires on a public holiday. Someone leaves the company and nobody rotates their admin access. Page speed drifts down over eighteen months and organic traffic goes with it, slowly enough that no one connects the two.
The rebuild conversation almost always starts the same way — not with "we want a new site" but with "we can't safely change this one anymore." By then you are not paying for maintenance. You are paying to build the thing twice.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does website maintenance cost per month in the Philippines?
From roughly ₱20,000 a month for a brochure site, ₱35,000 for eCommerce, and ₱50,000 and up for large resource sites or builds holding financial and personal data. The variable is risk and complexity, not page count.
Is website maintenance really necessary for a small brochure site?
Yes, though the scope is smaller. Even a static site runs on a framework with security updates, an SSL certificate that expires, and a host that occasionally goes down. What you are buying at the lower tier is mostly that someone notices before your customers do.
Does a Shopify store still need maintenance?
Yes — around ₱35,000 a month, the same tier as a custom eCommerce build. Shopify handles the platform and hosting, but apps update on their own schedule, theme customisations get overwritten by updates, and the checkout still has to be watched. The hosting burden goes away. The commercial risk does not.
Can I just pay someone when something breaks?
You can, and for a simple site with no transactions it is a defensible choice. It stops being defensible the moment the site takes payments or holds personal data, because by the time something visibly breaks the exposure has usually already happened.
Does designblue maintain websites built by other agencies?
No. We maintain the sites we design and build, so the team answering an incident is the team that wrote the code.
The question worth asking
Most people compare maintenance quotes by asking which is cheapest per month. The more useful question is the one nobody asks the agency: what happens at 2am on a Sunday when the checkout stops working — who picks up, how fast, and have they ever seen this codebase before?
The answer to that is what you are actually buying.
