Website Maintenance

For the first few months, nothing. That is exactly why website maintenance is so easy to put off — the site works, visitors arrive, there is no visible problem. The damage builds up quietly.

After six months without updates, the system and its plugins fall behind the versions in which security holes were patched. Those holes are published openly, so automated programs hunt for them across the whole internet — no target is chosen, everything is swept in turn. That is why small companies' sites get hacked even though nobody would attack them on purpose.

When a break-in happens, the result is rarely a deleted site. More often it is worse: content that does not belong is injected, so Google flags the page as unsafe and drops it from the results. Getting back takes weeks and costs more than years of maintenance.

The second part is less dramatic and just as expensive. A site without maintenance gradually slows down, forms stop sending and nobody notices, links start leading nowhere. Enquiries thin out and the owner concludes that “the site doesn't work”, when the real problem is that nobody has been looking at it.

Website maintenance makes sense for companies whose site genuinely does work — bringing in enquiries, orders or bookings. When a site contributes to revenue, a day it is down is not an annoyance but a cost, and the owner knows that without being told. A client like that doesn't ask why maintenance costs money; they ask exactly what is covered.

Our best clients for this service are people who have consciously decided this is not going to be their problem. They don't want to learn what a system update is, they don't want to remember when the last backup was taken, and they don't want to discover the contact form is broken because a customer rings to ask why nobody is answering. They pay monthly and cross it off the list.

If your site is a business card you look at twice a year and you are willing to risk a few days of downtime, maintenance probably isn't necessary — and we will tell you so honestly. Equally, if you expect a monthly fee to cover constant content changes, we have misunderstood each other: maintenance keeps the site safe; larger changes are separate work.

Website maintenance is often sold as a vague “looking after your site”, so the client never finds out what they actually paid for. Our list is specific and always the same, so you know at any moment what is covered.

The technical side covers updating the system, themes and plugins to new versions, and only after they have been checked on a copy of the site. With it come regular backups of the site and the database, stored separately from the server the site runs on — a backup on the same server is worth nothing the day that server fails.

The security side covers watching for changes to files, checking for unknown user accounts, reviewing access logs, and knowing whether the site has been flagged as unsafe anywhere. It also includes tracking when the SSL certificate and the domain expire, because an expired domain is the silliest way for a site to vanish from the internet.

The functional side is the one clients value most and expect least: somebody actually walks through the site and checks that the things visitors use still work. A contact form that quietly stops sending is the most expensive failure there is, because it shows up nowhere — the site looks fine, and the enquiries simply stop arriving.

Last comes measurement: loading speed, links that lead nowhere, and errors Google reports. Anything that has got worse since the previous month is fixed straight away, not when somebody notices.

Most of the sites we maintain run on WordPress, so it is worth saying why they in particular need regular attention. WordPress powers a vast share of the internet, and that is exactly why it is a standing target — attackers don't choose a victim, they sweep everything in turn, looking for known holes in old versions.

Those holes are published the moment a patch is released. Which means every day without updating works against you: the list of weaknesses is open to everyone, and your site is still on the old version. That is why maintaining a WordPress site is not a luxury but basic hygiene.

The second thing is that WordPress rarely runs alone — it usually carries ten to twenty plugins that update independently of one another. A new version of one plugin can fall out with another, break the layout or take the site down. That is why we never push updates straight to a live site; they go to a copy first, and only once everything looks right do they go live.

The third thing is abandoned plugins. The author stops maintaining them, they stay on the site for years, and quietly become the weakest point. Part of regular maintenance is spotting those and replacing them while things are still calm, rather than after something happens.

This is the question that causes the most friction in this line of work, so we settle it up front. The monthly fee covers maintaining the site — keeping it working, safe and fast. It does not cover developing new content or new features.

Maintenance includes small interventions: fixing a typo, changing a phone number or opening hours, refreshing an image, repairing a link that has stopped working. These are jobs of a few minutes and are not counted separately.

Outside maintenance are a new page, new copy, a change to the menu structure, a new feature, importing a price list, or preparing campaign banners. That is development and is billed by scope, with an estimate you get before anything starts — never after.

The line isn't measured with a stopwatch but with common sense, and always in your favour when a job sits on the boundary. If something turns out to be bigger than it looked, you hear about it up front and you decide whether it goes ahead.

This gets confused more often than anything else, so it is worth separating. Hosting is the space on a server where the site lives — the power and the walls. Maintenance is the work somebody does on that site — checks, updates, repairs.

A hosting provider is responsible for keeping the server running. It is not responsible for your WordPress being up to date, for the contact form working, for plugins not being obsolete, or for nobody having injected foreign content into the site. When a site is hacked, the provider will usually tell you the problem is in the site — and they will be right.

So “I have hosting” is not the same as “my site is covered”. You pay the domain and hosting to the provider and the maintenance to us — two separate costs for two separate things. If it suits you, we can also take over dealing with the provider, so you don't have to explain technical matters yourself.

A site always breaks at the worst possible moment — Friday evening, in the middle of a campaign, the day a quote went out. That is why how quickly somebody responds, and how long it takes to get back to normal, matters more than any list of services.

When we spot a fault, we first bring the site back up from the last good backup, and only then look for the cause. The order is deliberate: while the culprit is being found, the site is already running and you are not losing enquiries.

After that you get a short explanation of what happened and what was done to stop it recurring — without technical jargon and without blaming the hosting, the plugins or the previous contractor. If the mistake was ours, we say so.

This is where the packages differ most. Start covers a response during working hours. Plus adds uptime monitoring that alerts us the moment the site goes down, often before you notice. Priority means a response within two hours including outside working hours, and priority in the queue when several calls land at once.

Three packages, because a ten-page site and a shop with steady traffic are not the same job. Start is €50 a month and covers brochure sites: weekly backups, monthly updates, security monitoring and an hour of small changes.

Plus is €120 a month and is meant for sites that bring in enquiries and orders. The difference is not the number of line items but the frequency and the speed: daily backups instead of weekly, weekly updates checked on a copy of the site, uptime monitoring around the clock, and a reply the same working day. This is the package we suggest to most clients.

Priority is €250 a month and is built for shops and sites that must not stop. Backups several times a day, a separate copy of the site where every change is checked before going live, a response within two hours including outside working hours, and priority in the queue when something comes up.

The hours for changes cover small jobs — fixes, swaps, refreshes. Developing new pages and features is separate work, and you get the estimate before anything starts. You can cancel at any time, with no notice period.

If you are wondering whether it pays off, the comparison is short. A year of maintenance costs less than a single clean-up of a hacked site, and far less than weeks spent out of Google's results because the search engine has flagged your site as unsafe. Those are numbers you only see once it is too late.