Website maintenance cost in Dubai: what an AMC should cover

Website maintenance cost in Dubai depends first on what the word covers. In the UAE it is often sold as an AMC, short for annual maintenance contract: a fixed monthly or yearly fee for keeping a live site safe, working and up to date.

A typical contract covers some or all of the following. Ask which items your quote includes.

• Software updates. The content management system, the theme and every plugin, the add-ons that extend a site.
• Backups. Copies of the site's files and database, stored somewhere other than the server itself.
• Security checks. Scanning for malicious code and known weaknesses.
• Uptime monitoring. An automatic alert when the site stops responding.
• Small changes. A monthly allowance of hours for text, image and price edits.
• Renewals. Keeping the domain and security certificate from lapsing.
• Reporting. A monthly note of what was updated, fixed and found.

The table shows maintenance prices that five providers serving Dubai publish on their own websites. We read each page on 27 September 2026. These are their figures, not ours, and each defines its plans differently.

The providers disagree by a wide margin. A plan with a fixed allowance of edits on a small WordPress site is a different product from round-the-clock support for a busy online store. Read what each price includes before you compare the numbers.

• Platform. A WordPress site with many plugins needs regular updating and testing. On a hosted platform such as Shopify, hosting is part of the subscription, so the work shifts to apps, theme changes and content.
• Plugins and integrations. Each one is another piece of software to update, and each payment gateway, booking system or CRM link is another thing to test after an update.
• Online store or company site. A store takes money every hour, so it usually needs more frequent backups and faster response.
• Hours of changes. Plans that include several hours of edits a month cost more than plans that include none.
• Response time. A promise to respond within hours, including at weekends, costs more than next-working-day support.
• Languages. An Arabic and English site means every change is made, and checked, twice.

Whatever you pay, the contract should answer these questions in writing.

1. Which tasks are included, and how often each one is done.
2. How many hours of changes are included each month, and the hourly rate beyond them.
3. How quickly the provider responds, and how quickly it fixes, for an outage, a broken form and a routine request.
4. How often backups are taken, where they are stored, and how many past copies are kept.
5. How often a backup is restored as a test. A backup that has never been restored is not proven to work.
6. Whether monitoring runs around the clock or during business hours only.
7. Who owns the domain, hosting, content management, analytics and payment accounts. They should be in your company's name, with the provider added as a user.
8. The notice period, and what the provider hands over when the contract ends.
9. Whether the price includes VAT. Check any VAT question with the Federal Tax Authority.

Our website maintenance page sets out how we answer each of these.

An unmaintained site rarely fails all at once. It degrades quietly until something visible breaks.

• Security. Patchstack, a WordPress security company, counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 42 per cent more than in 2024. It attributes 91 per cent to plugins and 9 per cent to themes, with 6 in WordPress itself. It puts the weighted median time to first exploit at 5 hours.
• Unpatched plugins. The same report found that 46 per cent of vulnerabilities were not fixed in time for public disclosure. Updates alone are not enough. Unused plugins should be removed, which WordPress's own security guidance also advises.
• Outdated software. WordPress's guidance states that older versions of WordPress do not receive security updates.
• Broken forms and checkouts. An update to one plugin can stop an enquiry form sending or a payment step loading. Without monitoring, you find out when enquiries stop.
• Lapsed renewals. An expired domain or security certificate takes the site offline or shows visitors a warning.

Ask for the monthly maintenance figure at the same time as the build quote. A site that is cheap to build and costly to maintain can cost more over three years than the reverse. Our guide to website cost in Dubai covers the other running costs.

Then match the plan to the risk. A company site that changes twice a year needs updates, backups and monitoring. A store that takes orders every day needs faster response, daily backups and tested restores.