Your website is a few years old. It runs on WordPress with a pile of plugins, and someone has quoted you a monthly fee to keep it updated. It sounds sensible. But over two years, that fee can cost more than a new website would.

This guide puts the two side by side. The maintenance prices come from 18 Australian providers’ own pricing pages, 11 of them in Perth, read on 8 and 9 October 2026. We haven’t named them, because prices change.

The short version: On the pages we read, most entry-level maintenance plans cost $45 to $175 a month before GST. That is $1,080 to $4,200 over two years, and at the end you still have the old site. A new five-page site from CatalystHub is $500 once. It has no plugins to update, and hosting is free on your own account. Bigger sites have their own packages or a custom quote. Rebuild if your site is a simple one of five to fifteen pages. Keep it if it runs a busy online store, bookings or memberships that work well.

What to do next: See what a new build includes on our pricing page, or start your project. Happy with your current site and just want it looked after? See our maintenance plans.

What two years of maintenance adds up to

Monthly plan	Over two years
$45	$1,080
$99 (a middle example)	$2,376
$175	$4,200

Most of the entry plans we read sat between $45 and $175 a month before GST. The full range ran from about $25 to $540 plus GST. The breakdown is in our guide to what website maintenance costs.

Changes are often extra. The change time included in the entry plans ran from none to about two hours a month. Beyond that, the six hourly rates we read ran from $66 to $200 an hour.

Why an old site needs the plan

Nearly all of the Perth plans we read are for WordPress sites. WordPress sites use plugins, which are add-ons made by other people. Those plugins keep changing even when your pages don’t.

Patchstack, a WordPress security company, counted 7,966 new security holes across WordPress, its plugins and its themes in 2024. Of those, 96% were in plugins.
Sucuri, which cleans hacked websites, found that 39.1% of the infected sites it cleaned in 2023 were running out-of-date software.

On an old WordPress site, somebody has to do the updates. You can pay for that each month, or move to a site that needs far fewer.

What a rebuild costs next to it

Route	Upfront	After launch	Two-year total
Keep the old site on a $45 plan	$0	$45 a month	$1,080
Keep the old site on a $99 plan	$0	$99 a month	$2,376
Keep the old site on a $175 plan	$0	$175 a month	$4,200
New CatalystHub site with our Basic care plan (hosting, daily backups and security updates)	$500	$49 a month, first month free	$1,627 inc. GST
New CatalystHub site, no care plan	$500	Your domain. Hosting is free on your own account	$500, plus your domain

The plan prices are as published. Some include GST, some add it on top and some don’t say. Our prices include it.

The $500 is for a five-page site. A site of about nine pages is around $900 as a custom quote, and a Specialist build of up to 15 pages starts at $1,500. Extra pages after launch are $100 a page, and anything outside the packages gets a custom quote. The full list is on our pricing page. To see what other designers publish for a new site, we list local prices on our Perth and Western Australia pages.

Does a new site need any maintenance?

Much less, but not none.

We build on Astro and host on Cloudflare. Each page is made ahead of time and sent out as a finished file. There is no WordPress and no plugin to update, so the updates most WordPress plans are built around aren’t needed. Hosting is free on your own Cloudflare account, so there is no monthly hosting bill either.

Here is what’s left:

Your domain. About $23 a year for a .com.au at VentraIP’s regular price. If it expires, your website and email stop working.
Your content. New prices, new photos, a new service. You can change these yourself in an editor that works like Word.
The code underneath. It needs an update now and then. That is part of what our optional care plan covers, along with backups and uptime checks.

You can run one of our sites with no plan at all. Someone should still watch the domain, the backups and the uptime. The one bill you can’t skip is the domain.

Keep the old site if

It runs a busy online store. Years of products, orders and customer accounts are worth more than a tidy rebuild.
It takes bookings or memberships through plugins that work. Those features work, and rebuilding them costs money.
It has hundreds of articles that bring in visitors. Moving them is a bigger job than five pages.
It’s only two or three years old and you’re happy with it.

If you’d rather keep it, ask us. We can often take on a site we didn’t build. We look at it first, then quote. Our plans are on the maintenance page. Bigger sites are quoted separately when the time comes to rebuild.

Rebuild if

It’s a simple site. Five to fifteen pages that say who you are, what you do and how to reach you.
You can’t change it yourself. Every small edit means an email and an invoice.
You don’t have the logins. If the site, the domain or the hosting sits in someone else’s account, read who owns your website first.
It’s on the old developer’s own system, and no one else can host it. You can’t take it anywhere, so the way out is a rebuild on a standard setup you own.
It’s hard to use on a phone.
Updates keep breaking it.

Rebuilding a slow or locked site with us

In short: We rebuild it as a new site on our usual packages, sized to how many pages it has. A Standard build is five pages for $500 including GST and goes live in seven business days. Your words, images and domain come across, and you own the new site outright.

What it costs. Nine pages is around $900 as a custom quote, and a Specialist build of up to 15 pages starts at $1,500. The packages are on our pricing page.
What comes across. Your words, your images and your domain name. They are yours, so they move to the new site whether the old one runs on WordPress or on a developer’s own system.
Speed. Every Standard build scores 95 or more for Performance on mobile in Lighthouse. Google’s ranking systems use Core Web Vitals, its measures of how fast a page loads, responds and holds still, but Google also says good scores don’t guarantee a top spot, because the most relevant page still comes first. Google’s mark for a good load is the main content showing within 2.5 seconds.
No lock-in. Every login is handed over at launch, and the no-lock-in promise is written into the contract.
Your Google rankings. When we rebuild a WordPress site, we set up redirects from the old page addresses to the new ones.
Your time. About an hour in total: a short brief and one 30-minute call.

Don’t lose your place on Google

A rebuild shouldn’t cost you the rankings the old site earned. Three things protect them.

Keep the same domain name. Google’s Change of Address tool is only for moving to a new domain, so keeping yours skips that step.
Keep the same page addresses where you can. Where an address has to change, the old one should send visitors on to the new one. Google’s guide to moving a site says to map each old address to its new one and redirect it, and that a permanent redirect (often called a 301) doesn’t lose link credit. It also says to keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year.
Keep the words that work. If a page already brings in enquiries, carry its main points across.

Ask whoever rebuilds your site how they will handle all three, and get the answer before you sign.

After launch, the same guide says to point the site’s own links at the new addresses and submit the new sitemap in Search Console. On a small or medium site, most pages take a few weeks to move across, and rankings can shift while Google rereads the site.

Your next step

If the maths points to a rebuild, a five-page site is $500 flat including GST, live in seven business days. A bigger site is a bigger package or a custom quote, and we do those too. See our pricing page and sites we’ve built, or start your project. Keeping the old site? Send it to us. We’ll look at it and, if we can take it on, quote a maintenance plan. Or call (08) 6288 0080.

Frequently asked questions

Is it cheaper to rebuild a website or maintain it? For a simple site, a rebuild is often cheaper within two years. Most entry maintenance plans we read cost $1,080 to $4,200 over two years before GST. Our five-page build is $500 once, including GST, with free hosting on your own account. Add our Basic care plan and it is $1,627 over two years. With the care plan, the rebuild comes out ahead once the old site’s plan is about $68 a month or more.

Does a new website need maintenance? Much less, if it has no plugins. You still renew the domain and update your own content, and the code needs an update now and then. Hosting is free on your own account, so the domain is the only bill you can’t skip. A care plan is optional on the sites we build, from $49 a month, and the first month is free with a new build.

How do I know if my site is WordPress? Add /wp-admin to the end of your website address. If a WordPress login page appears, it is. If nothing appears, ask whoever built it.

Will I lose my Google ranking if I rebuild? It shouldn’t cost you your rankings for good if the move is done properly. Google says to expect them to move around for a while after a big change, then settle. On a small or medium site, most pages take a few weeks to move across. Keep the domain, keep or redirect the page addresses, and keep the content that already works.

My old developer built my site on their own system. Can you move it to a standard setup? We rebuild it. A rebuild with us is a new build on our usual packages, sized to how many pages your site has, and your words, images and domain come across. The new site runs on Astro, TinaCMS and Cloudflare, which is open infrastructure, so another developer could work on it later. You own the code, the domain and the hosting. If the domain is in their account, read who owns your website first.

Can you just maintain my current site instead? Often, yes. It depends on how it was built, so we look at it and quote it. Our plans are on the maintenance page.

How long does a rebuild take? A Standard or Specialist build is live in seven business days. It takes about an hour of your time.

What if my site has more than five pages? We build those as well. About nine pages is around $900 as a custom quote, and a Specialist build of up to 15 pages starts at $1,500. The packages are on our pricing page.