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Key takeaways
- Websites break without anyone touching them, because the software and services around them keep changing.
- Domain expiry is the most avoidable outage there is; calendar it and use auto-renew where offered.
- A real maintenance plan has named tasks, a response time and a monthly report, not vague "support".
- Backups are part of maintenance only if restores are tested.
A website is not finished at launch. Browsers, plugins, hosting servers, payment providers and search engines all keep changing, and a site that nobody looks after drifts until something visibly breaks. Maintenance is the routine work that stops that happening, and it costs far less than an emergency fix. Here is what it covers, and what you can check yourself.
Why sites break when nobody touches them
- The domain expires. The single most avoidable outage. It happens to businesses and to agencies alike, usually because the renewal notice went to an old email address.
- Plugins and themes fall behind. Outdated code is the most common route for hackers, and eventually becomes incompatible with the platform it runs on.
- The hosting changes underneath you. Shared hosts retire old PHP versions; a site that relied on one stops loading overnight.
- The server fills up. Logs, uploads and old backups eat disk space or memory until the site slows or falls over.
- Integrations change. A payment gateway, SMS provider or map service updates its API, and checkout or forms quietly stop working.
- Spam builds up. Contact forms without protection fill your inbox, and real enquiries get lost among the spam.
What a real maintenance plan includes
| Task | How often | Who usually does it |
|---|---|---|
| Core, plugin and dependency updates | Weekly to monthly | Developer |
| Uptime monitoring with alerts | Continuous | Automated, watched by developer |
| Off-site backups | Daily | Automated |
| Test restore of a backup | Quarterly | Developer |
| Security scan and log review | Monthly | Developer |
| Form, checkout and payment test | Monthly | Developer or staff |
| Speed check on a mid-range phone | Monthly | Developer |
| Search Console errors | Monthly | Developer or SEO |
| Small content changes | As needed | Staff via admin, or developer |
| Domain and SSL expiry check | Monthly | Developer or owner |
What maintenance should not be
Be wary of plans described only as "support" with no list of tasks, no response time and no report. You should know what is being done each month, how quickly someone responds when the site is down, and what counts as a small change versus new work. A short monthly report — updates applied, uptime, backups confirmed, issues found — is a reasonable thing to expect.
A monthly checklist you can do yourself
- Open the site on your phone over mobile data and complete the main action: an enquiry, a booking or an order.
- Submit the contact form and confirm the message arrives.
- If you take payments, make a small real payment and confirm the order is marked paid.
- Check that the padlock shows in the browser and the certificate is not near expiry.
- Check the domain renewal date and the email address on the registrar account.
- Look at Google Search Console for new errors or security warnings.
- Confirm with your developer when the last backup ran and when a restore was last tested.
- Read your own home page as a customer would, and fix anything out of date: prices, hours, staff, notices.
What it costs
Maintenance is usually priced per site, monthly or yearly, depending on how much the site does. A brochure site needs little; a shop or a booking system with payments needs more care, because more can go wrong and an outage costs real money. Ask for a fixed monthly price with a clear task list. Ongoing SEO work is separate and priced on its own, since it is about growth rather than upkeep.
One useful comparison: the cost of an emergency rescue — a hacked site rebuilt from scratch, a lost domain recovered, a broken checkout found after weeks of lost orders — is almost always several years of maintenance in one go.
Build it to need less maintenance
How a site is built affects how much upkeep it needs. Fewer plugins, server-rendered pages, automated backups and monitoring, and an admin your staff can use for content changes all reduce the work. Our security checklist covers the protective side in detail.
Where to start
Run the checklist above this week, starting with the domain renewal date. If anything fails, or if you do not know who holds which login, that is your first job. If you would rather hand it over, our domain and hosting plans include monitoring and backups, and we can quote a maintenance plan for any site, whether we built it or not.
Frequently asked questions
It depends on what the site does. A small brochure site needs little ongoing work, while shops and booking systems need more. Ask for a fixed monthly or yearly price with a named list of tasks and a response time.
Yes. Most problems build up quietly — outdated plugins, nearly full servers, expiring domains — and only show when the site breaks. Maintenance catches them while they are cheap to fix.
The most common causes are an expired domain or hosting plan, a hosting change such as an old PHP version being retired, an automatic update that conflicted with a plugin, or the server running out of space.
You can handle content changes and the monthly checks yourself. Updates, security and backups are safer with a developer, because a bad update or an untested backup can turn a small problem into a large one.
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