What It Really Costs to Make Website Changes

There’s a question I ask on consultation calls that produces a longer pause than it should: when you need something changed on your website, what happens?

Most people know the answer immediately. They just don’t enjoy saying it out loud, because saying it out loud makes it sound worse than it feels day to day.

You email someone. They reply when they reply. It gets done a few days later. It shows up on an invoice at the end of the month.

Follow one small change all the way through

Say you spot a typo on your home page on a Tuesday morning. Eleven words, one of them wrong.

You email whoever helps you with the site. Wednesday goes by. Thursday they reply asking which page. You send a screenshot. Friday it’s fixed.

Four days and one line item, for a change that would take you forty seconds if you could reach it. Nobody behaved badly in that story — the developer has other clients, you have a business to run, and the process worked as designed.

That’s the visible cost, and it’s the small one.

The expensive part is the second time

After that happens twice, something changes in how you think about your own website.

You notice the old headline that doesn’t describe what you do any more, and you don’t send the email. You take on a new kind of client and don’t add the service page. Your prices go up in January and the site says the old number until March.

Not because any single change is unaffordable. Because every change now has a transaction attached to it — a request, a wait, a follow-up, a cost — and the mental arithmetic of “is this worth an email” comes out negative for almost everything small.

The site stops being wrong in one dramatic way. It drifts, gradually, and you stop looking at it.

That’s what I actually see when I audit sites for people. Not a bad website. A website that stopped being updated eighteen months ago while the business kept moving.

What it costs in money

I can look at a WordPress site from the outside and see a fair amount: which page builder it runs, which plugins load on the homepage, which theme, which host, where the email points.

Here’s a realistic picture for a solo service business, and I want to be careful about how I present it:

A premium page builder licence runs $59–199 a year. An SEO plugin $99. A caching or performance plugin around $59. A forms plugin $59. A backup plugin $80. Managed hosting anywhere from $100 to $400 a year, considerably more on some plans. A premium theme, $60 or so annually.

That’s somewhere in the region of $500 to $900 a year in software before anybody touches anything.

But that’s the number I can see, and it isn’t the important one.

Two things aren’t visible from outside: what you pay when you need a change made, and how long you wait for it. In every consultation I’ve had, those two are the whole story — and they’re the two nobody adds up, because they arrive one invoice at a time rather than as an annual figure.

If it’s $150 a change and you make one a month, that’s $1,800 a year, and you’re still not in control of the timing.

What it costs in something other than money

The part I find more interesting is what an unchangeable website does to how you talk about your business.

People stop sending it. They’ll describe what they do in an email rather than link to the page that describes what they do, because the page is out of date and explaining that is more embarrassing than just writing it out again.

At that point you’re paying to host something you’ve stopped using.

A website you can’t change becomes a record of what was true the last time someone else had time.