What Does Website Maintenance Include, and What Should It Cost?

A website is the only piece of equipment most businesses own that they expect to run forever without service. The truck gets an oil change. The furnace gets a filter. The website gets launched, admired for a week and then left alone until something breaks, usually at the worst possible moment.

Website maintenance is the oil change. This article explains what a real maintenance plan includes, what each part is for, what it should cost and how to tell a genuine plan from hosting with a new name. We host and maintain both WordPress sites and static sites for our clients, so the list below is what we actually do each month.

The eight things a maintenance plan should cover

1. Hosting that is someone's job

Maintenance starts with knowing where the site lives and who is responsible for it. That sounds obvious, but a surprising number of owners cannot say where their site is hosted or who pays for it. A plan should include hosting, or state plainly that it does not, and the person maintaining the site should have full access to the hosting account. Ours includes hosting, domain setup and company email.

2. Daily backups you can restore from

Backups are the difference between a bad morning and a lost business. A proper backup runs automatically every day, is stored somewhere other than the server the site runs on, keeps several versions so you can go back to a specific date, and is restored from often enough that everyone knows it works. Ask any provider two questions: how often, and when did you last restore one.

3. Software updates, applied carefully

If the site runs on WordPress, the core software, the theme and every plugin release updates constantly, and most security problems on WordPress sites trace back to an update that was never applied. The catch is that updates also break things. A maintenance plan applies them promptly, checks the site afterward and rolls back when one goes wrong. On a static site there is far less to update, which is one reason we build many sites that way now.

4. Security scanning and an SSL certificate

Antivirus and malware scans catch the infections that get through, and an SSL certificate keeps the padlock in the browser bar and the site on https. When the certificate lapses, visitors see a warning instead of your homepage, and the fix is trivial if someone is watching and expensive in lost customers if nobody is. We covered why the padlock matters in HTTP vs. HTTPS.

5. Uptime and performance monitoring

Someone should know the site is down before a customer tells you. Monitoring checks the site around the clock and raises an alert when it stops responding or slows down. The same checks notice when a form stops delivering or a page starts returning errors, which are the quiet failures that cost leads for months without anyone noticing.

6. Content and page changes

This is the part most owners actually need and the part most "maintenance" plans leave out. New hours, a price change, a staff photo, a new service page, a seasonal banner. On our plan these are made in under 48 hours and there is no per change fee. If a plan you are considering covers updates and backups but charges for every change, you have hosting with a different name.

7. Analytics and Search Console, owned by you

Google Analytics and Google Search Console tell you who is visiting, what they searched for and whether Google has found a problem with the site. A maintenance plan should set both up in an account the business owns and keep an eye on the Search Console messages, which is where Google reports broken pages, security issues and mobile problems before they show up in rankings.

8. A person who answers

Every item above is a process. The thing that makes a plan work is a person who picks up when the site is down on a Saturday, who you can text a photo to, and who knows your site because they built it or took it over. Our plan includes 24/7 support response, and the person responding is the one who maintains the site, not a ticket queue.

What website maintenance costs

Prices for small business sites fall into three bands.

• Hosting only, $5 to $50 a month. A server and nothing else. Backups and updates are your job.
• Updates and backups, $50 to $150 a month. Software kept current, backups taken, security scanned. Changes to the content cost extra, usually billed by the hour.
• Full care with changes, $150 to $400 a month. Everything above plus your content and page changes, monitoring and support.

Our hosting and maintenance plan is $200 a month and sits in the third band: hosting, daily backups, security updates, SSL, analytics setup, 24/7 support response and content changes made in under 48 hours, with no contract and no hidden fees. The same care is included in the Small Business plan and in Grow Together, and you can compare all three on the pricing page.

Signs your site is not being maintained

If any of these are true, the site is on its own:

• The browser shows "Not secure" or a certificate warning on your own site.
• The footer still says a year that is not this one.
• A contact form submission you sent as a test never arrived.
• The site shows a WordPress or plugin update notice that has been there for months.
• You cannot name where the site is hosted, or the last time it was backed up.
• The person who built it has not replied to an email in weeks.

The last one has its own page, because it is so common. If you have lost touch with the person who built your site, read how to switch web designers without losing your site or go straight to our website takeover service. We take over abandoned sites for businesses anywhere in the US, secure the accounts and look after them from then on.

Maintenance versus a redesign

Maintenance keeps a good site good. It does not make a dated site modern. If the site is slow on a phone, hard to update, invisible in search or embarrassing to send people to, upkeep will not fix that and a redesign will. The quickest way to tell which you need is our free website grader, which scores any site from 0 to 100 on speed, SEO, accessibility and security, with no email required. A high score with a stale footer needs maintenance. A low score needs more.

What to ask before you sign a maintenance plan

1. Is hosting included, and do I have access to the account?
2. How often are backups taken, where are they stored, and when did you last restore one?
3. Are software updates applied, and what happens when one breaks the site?
4. Is the SSL certificate renewed automatically?
5. Are content and page changes included, and how fast are they made?
6. Who do I call when the site is down, and when?
7. Is there a contract?

Our answers are on the hosting and maintenance page. If you would rather just hand the site over and know it is being looked after, tell us about it. Jason replies in under 24 hours.