Whether you outsource WordPress maintenance or hire someone in-house comes down to one question most businesses don’t ask early enough: how much WordPress work do you actually have on a given week? For most service businesses with a single site, the honest answer doesn’t justify a full-time hire, no matter how the comparison gets framed.
The decision to outsource WordPress maintenance instead of hiring in-house is mostly a question of utilisation. A single business website needs a few hours of genuine attention each month. A full-time hire needs roughly 160 hours of work to justify the role, which leaves a large gap to fill with other tasks, or a lot of paid time with very little to actually do.
According to 2026 salary data from ZipRecruiter, the average WordPress developer salary in the US sits around $84,500 a year, with entry-level roles still commanding roughly $94,000 on average. Add typical employer overhead, payroll tax, benefits, equipment, and software licences, and the effective annual cost of a single in-house hire commonly lands well above $100,000, even before accounting for time spent on anything other than maintenance itself.
That cost buys you one person’s working hours for 40 hours a week. For a business with one WordPress site, the actual maintenance workload, updates, backups, security checks, monthly reporting, typically takes a few hours a month, not a few hours a week.
Outsourcing WordPress maintenance means paying for the outcome, a properly maintained site, rather than for a fixed block of someone’s time regardless of how much work there actually is in a given week. A $99-$199/month care plan covers the same core tasks a full-time hire would handle, scaled to what one site actually needs.
The other advantage is breadth of skill. WordPress maintenance properly done spans security, performance, backups, and update management. A single in-house hire is rarely strong across all four. An outsourced provider working across many client sites tends to have specialised coverage of each area, simply because they encounter a much wider range of issues.
In-house starts to make sense once you have enough genuine WordPress workload to fill a real role, multiple sites, frequent custom development needs, or a business where website changes happen weekly rather than occasionally. At that point, the calculation shifts because the utilisation problem disappears.
| Outsourced Maintenance | In-House Hire | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical annual cost (single site) | $1,200-$2,400/yr | $100,000+/yr (fully loaded) |
| Skill breadth | Specialised across many client sites | Limited to one person’s range |
| Utilisation | Pay for the work actually needed | Pay for 40 hrs/week regardless of workload |
| Best fit | One to a handful of sites | Multiple sites or constant custom development |
Yes, provided the provider has a proper process: staging tests, verified backups, a stated response time. Reliability comes from the process being followed consistently, not from whether the person doing the work is an employee or an outside provider.
Yes, this is common. Some businesses keep content updates in-house while outsourcing the technical maintenance, security, and backups, since those require more specialised ongoing attention.
WordPress-specific maintenance is a narrower skill set than general IT support. It’s worth checking whether that person has genuine WordPress security and update experience specifically, rather than assuming general IT competence covers it.
Track how many hours of WordPress-specific work, content changes aside, your site genuinely needs in an average month. If it’s under 10-15 hours, outsourcing almost always works out better on both cost and skill coverage.
We’ll tell you plainly which tier fits your actual workload, not push you toward the highest one. See WordPress Care Plan pricing, or book a free call to talk through your specific setup.
Related: How Much Does WordPress Website Maintenance Cost? · How to Choose a WordPress Maintenance Company
Built to perform and maintained to last. Specialist WordPress studio for service businesses.