WordPress maintenance ROI calculator
What the routine work costs you every month in labour, plus what incidents cost when an update goes wrong. Nothing is stored, nothing is emailed, no signup.
Free, no email required. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.
Your numbers
Estimates only. Incident reduction assumes verified updates with automatic rollback, which prevents most but not all update-related failures.
How to fill this in honestly
The number most people get wrong is minutes per site. It feels like ten, because that is how long the updating takes when nothing goes wrong. Count the whole thing: opening the site, reviewing what is pending, taking or checking a backup, applying updates, loading a few pages to confirm nothing broke, and noting it somewhere. For most agencies that lands between thirty and sixty minutes per site per month.
Blended hourly cost means what an hour of your team costs you, not what you bill. Salary plus employment costs divided by productive hours is close enough. Using your billing rate inflates the result and makes the whole exercise less useful.
Update-related incidents means anything where a change broke something and someone had to investigate: a plugin conflict, a layout that shifted, a form that stopped submitting, a checkout that failed. Include the ones the client reported, because those are the expensive ones.
Reading the result
The headline figure is not a saving. It is the cost you are already paying, most of which is invisible because it is spread across many small tasks.
Routine work
The predictable part. Updates, backup checks, monitoring reviews and reporting. This is the portion automation addresses most reliably, because none of it requires judgement.
Incident work
The unpredictable part, and usually the more expensive one per hour. It also arrives at the worst moments and displaces billable work, which the raw cost figure understates.
What is reclaimable
Routine work automates well. Incidents reduce rather than disappear, because verified updates with rollback prevent most update-caused failures but not everything that can go wrong.
The cost this calculator does not show
Two things are missing from the figure above, and both usually matter more than the labour cost.
The first is opportunity cost. Ten hours a month spent on maintenance is ten hours not spent on billable project work, and at a typical agency the gap between internal cost and billing rate means the real cost is two to three times the labour figure.
The second is client relationship damage. A broken checkout that the client discovers before you do is not measurable in hours. It costs trust, it makes the next renewal harder, and occasionally it costs the account. That is the cost verified updates are actually protecting against, and it does not appear in any calculator.
Questions about the calculation
It is a common figure once you count everything rather than just the updating: reviewing what is pending, handling the backup, applying updates, checking the site afterwards and recording what you did. Agencies who time it honestly for a month are usually surprised it is not lower.
Because incidents are expensive per hour and arrive unpredictably, displacing billable work. A three-hour emergency on a Tuesday afternoon does not just cost three hours of labour; it costs whatever those three hours were meant to be spent on.
Most agencies find seventy to eighty percent of routine maintenance is decision-free and automates cleanly. What does not automate is judgement: deciding whether a major version upgrade is worth the risk, or how to handle a client with an unusual setup.
No, and any tool claiming otherwise is overselling. Verified updates with automatic rollback prevent most update-caused failures, which is the largest category. Hosting problems, third-party outages and human error remain.
No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to us, nothing is stored and there is no email form in front of it.
Next steps
Reclaim the routine hours
Automate the decision-free work, verify every change, and spend the time you get back on work clients pay for.
Free during early access. No credit card required.