Website Maintenance: What It Involves and When It's Worth Paying For
What website maintenance actually covers, which parts you can do yourself, and how to tell whether a monthly plan is worth it for your business.
A website isn’t finished the day it launches. Hours change, prices change, a new service starts, a form stops working after an update, a domain comes up for renewal. Someone has to keep up with all of it.
That work is what people mean by website maintenance. This post explains what it involves, what you can reasonably do yourself, and when it’s worth paying someone to handle it.
What maintenance involves
Maintenance falls into three kinds of work.
Keeping the content accurate
This is the part most businesses need most often:
- updating hours, including holiday hours
- changing prices, menus and service lists
- adding a new service, product or staff member
- replacing old photos
- publishing news or blog posts
Out-of-date information costs you customers. Someone who turns up to find you closed, or finds a price that’s no longer right, is unlikely to trust your website again.
Keeping it working
- Testing the contact form. Forms can stop working after a change, and nobody tells you. Send yourself a test message every so often.
- Fixing broken links, especially to booking, ordering and social pages.
- Checking it on a phone, since that’s where most visitors see it.
- Checking the speed, since new photos and features can slow a site down over time.
Keeping it safe and online
- Renewing the domain name before it expires. If it lapses, your site and any email on that domain stop working, and someone else can register the name.
- Keeping the security certificate valid, so browsers don’t warn visitors that your site isn’t secure. Most hosts renew this automatically, but it’s worth checking.
- Software updates. Sites built on WordPress and similar systems need regular updates to the core software, themes and plugins. Skipping them is one of the most common ways sites get hacked. Custom-coded sites without those systems need far fewer updates.
- Backups, so the site can be restored if something goes wrong.
What you can do yourself
Plenty of maintenance takes no technical skill:
- put a reminder in your calendar to check your hours, prices and contact details every month
- set your domain to renew automatically, with a card that won’t expire soon
- test your contact form and booking links when you check your details
- open your site on your phone now and then, as a customer would
If your site runs on a builder like Squarespace or Wix, you can also make most text and photo changes yourself, if you have the time and don’t mind learning the editor.
When paying for it makes sense
A maintenance plan is worth considering if:
- your information changes often, such as menus, prices, availability or listings
- you want to publish regularly, for example blog posts, and don’t have time to write them
- you’d rather not touch the website at all, and want to send changes by email or text
- your site runs on software that needs regular updates, and you don’t want to manage them
It’s probably not worth it if your site rarely changes, you’re comfortable making updates yourself, or your budget is very tight. In that case, keep a simple monthly checklist and ask for help only when you need it.
What to look for in a plan
If you do pay for maintenance, ask:
- What exactly is included each month? Hours of changes, blog posts, updates, backups?
- How do I ask for a change, and how long does it usually take?
- What happens to unused hours? Do they carry over, or reset each month?
- What costs extra?
- Can I cancel, and what happens to my site if I do? You should keep your site and your domain either way.
Avoid plans that lock you in for a long term, or that make your site depend on the provider staying your provider.
How our maintenance works
We keep it simple: one plan, at $125 a month. We look after your site and make your changes, so you never have to touch the code unless you want to.
If you’d like regular blog posts, they come with our SEO plans instead: 4 posts a month, written for the searches you want to win, from $797 a month.
Our sites are built in custom code that belongs to you, so there’s no plugin stack to keep patched, and you can leave a plan without losing your website. The details are on our pricing page. If you’re not sure whether you need a plan at all, tell us about your business and we’ll give you an honest answer.