Outsourcing wordpress maintenance vs in-house

Outsourcing wordpress maintenance is a convenient way for agencies to make sure client’s websites are up to date, secure, and in-house team can focus on new projects and high-priority tasks

When it makes sense to outsource wordpress maintenance?

Usually outsourcing make sense for variety of situations

1. You’re just starting to do maintenance or have an unpredictable workload.
2. You need outside expertise to build the process in your agency, which has been tested with dozens of other agencies and hundreds of clients.
3. You don’t want to distract the core in-house team from new builds
4. You’re doing maintenance in-house, but know that it could be done better if you had more resources

Head-to-head comparison

Boost your agency’s billable hours with monthly audits

That’s what most agencies can’t do with an in-house team. In-house time is too valuable to waste on small maintenance plans. These plans usually include just 1 hour of development time, so you need 100+ clients to justify in-house hire

However, if spend this hour on actual audit and send a proposal to client with something like:

• Bug Fixes,
• UX Improvements,
• Page Speed Optimisation plan,
• Tech SEO audit results and actionable plan

You can get 5-10 extra billable hours per month, which makes 5x to your maintenance plan. With 100 clients, it could reach up to 500 billable hours every single month.

Compensate the lack of capacity

Selling audits, maintaining current projects, and landing new clients quickly make your agency’s capacity a bottleneck. By outsourcing routine maintenance of your existing clients – you free up resources to handle the main job:

• Build new pages
• Launch new websites

Share hours between your projects

A common situation that is kept as a secret in the agency world is unused retainer time. At Codelibry we understand that sometimes 1 allocated hour may be unused for some project, but if we’re talking about 30, 50 or 150 website under your agency care plan – that could add up to the solid number of hours that could be used on your behalf:

• QA work
• Design work
• Development work

For any of your agency projects. Meaning if you’re outsourcing to us 100 websites for maintenance, it also means you could allocate unused hours for anything you need under agency:

• Design new page,
• Test and fix the bug,
• Completely new page development

The cost-efficiency of outsourcing wordpress care plans to Codelibry

In-house hires are great, but expensive, here are some of the stats by Country:

• The average salary for a WordPress developer in the UK is approximately £35,000–£50,000 per year as of early 2026.
• The average gross salary in Europen Union between €35,000 and €60,000 per year
• The average salary for a WordPress developer in the US is approximately $77,000–$84,500 per year

• The average salary for a WordPress developer in Canada is approximately $60,000–$61,500 CAD per year. 
• The average salary for a WordPress developer in Australia is approximately $83,000–$90,000 AUD per year

All of these are average numbers. Big ranges mean junior to senior roles, so I’d recommend comparing higher ranges in the table above.The actual limit for the person is 160 hours per month, and a developer can’t do 2 things in parallel. Means if you have landed 2 projects – you can do them one by one and client may be unhappy with the delivery timeline.

All of this could be beaten by outsourcing, where maintenance packages starts from 99 USD/month.

160 hours, but on 4 devs workling in parallel

No project = no expenses

24-48 hours turnaround time for maintenance tasks