“Website maintenance” sounds like something technical that happens somewhere in the background. Partly it is: updates, backups, security monitoring. But for a business, the other half matters just as much. You have a person to email “please change the opening hours” or “add the new service”, and it gets done correctly and quickly.
What does maintenance include?
- Technical upkeep: software updates, backups, security monitoring, speed tracking.
- Content changes: text, images, prices, contacts, new pages. You send an email and the change lands on the site.
- Advice: when you want something new, like bookings, a newsletter or another language, you get an honest opinion on whether and how to do it.
Why not do it yourself?
You can. A well-built site is simple enough to edit text on. But in practice this is what often happens:
- a small change takes hours because the last time you did it was six months ago;
- an image is the wrong size and the layout shifts;
- the person who looked after the site leaves, and nobody knows the passwords or how things work.
That last one is especially common. When the marketing person or assistant changes, the new person has to learn the website from scratch.
Does it pay off?
The value of maintenance comes from three places.
- Time. Your people’s hours go to their actual jobs, not to wrestling with an admin panel. Some businesses have avoided hiring an extra person this way.
- Quality. Someone who does this every day does it faster and better. The right image size, the right heading structure, and SEO that doesn’t break.
- Less risk. No maintenance rules out every risk, but regular maintenance protects well against common attacks. Restoring a hacked site, a data breach or a week of downtime costs many times more than a year of maintenance.
How do you decide whether you need it?
Ask yourself two questions. How much does a day without a website cost me? And does anyone in-house really have the time and skills to maintain it every month? If the first answer is “a lot” and the second “not really”, maintenance is the cheaper option.
How to choose a maintenance partner
- Communication. Do they reply quickly and in plain language?
- Clear scope. What’s included and what isn’t? How many hours of changes per month?
- Continuity. What happens when your contact is on holiday or ill?
- Transparency. Do you get a report of what was done?
My website maintenance plans are monthly and have a clear scope: updates, backups, security monitoring and a set number of hours for changes. If you’re not sure which plan fits, write to me and we’ll look at it together.
Read next: The WordPress maintenance checklist.
