Launch day ends and the site starts ageing. Nothing dramatic happens: no alarm, no error message on the homepage. The software underneath gets a few months older, a certificate quietly approaches its expiry, and the contact form keeps working right up until the week it does not. Maintenance is the boring discipline that stops the slow rot, and the honest question for a small business is how much of it you need to do yourself versus pay someone to absorb. Here is what “maintained” actually means, job by job.
What maintenance actually is
Strip the word down and a maintained website means four jobs, none of them mysterious:
| Job | What it involves | Typical cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Updates | Keeping the platform, plugins and libraries current | Monthly at minimum |
| Backups | Automatic copies, stored away from the site itself, tested | Daily, restore check quarterly |
| Monitoring | Knowing the site is up and the forms work | Continuous, alerts to a human |
| Small fixes | Broken links, form glitches, the logo that shrank on phones | As found, batched |
A site with all four running is “maintained” in the sense that matters: problems get found before customers find them. A site with none is not broken today, which is exactly the trap. The gap between a maintained and unmaintained site is invisible on the day you choose, and enormous twelve months later.
What your hosting already does
With a decent managed host or a static site, half the list is included. Managed hosting platforms patch the server, keep the runtime current, handle the TLS certificate renewal, and usually run daily backups on their higher tiers. Static sites, where the pages are plain files, sidestep plugin updates entirely: there is nothing to patch beyond the hosting itself.
The catch is the boundary. Your host keeps the lights on, but they do not know whether your contact form delivers mail, whether your booking widget still opens, or whether last Tuesday’s plugin update broke the mobile menu. Those are yours, or your developer’s, and they are the failures customers actually see.
The three checks that stay with you
Whatever the setup, three checks belong to the business, and they fit in fifteen minutes a month:
Open the site on your phone and act like a customer: tap the number, send the form, check the enquiry arrived. The form test is the one that saves real money, because a silent form failure means every enquiry since it broke went nowhere.
Look at the analytics or at least the enquiry count, and investigate a sudden drop. Enquiries that halve in a month usually have a cause: a broken page, a form, a site that stopped loading somewhere.
Open the list of renewal dates, domains, hosting, certificates, and check the payment method on file still works. Expired cards are a leading cause of quiet disappearances.
What a fair maintenance arrangement looks like
When you buy maintenance rather than do it, you are buying response time as much as labour. A fair agreement states four things in writing: what is covered (updates, backups, small fixes), what is not (new pages, redesigns, features), the response time when something breaks, and the monthly price. Anything vaguer than that is not an agreement, it is a hope with an invoice attached.
| Arrangement | What you get | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Included with managed hosting | Patches, uptime, sometimes backups | Nobody watching your forms or content |
| Monthly care plan from a developer | The full list, a human who knows your site | Response time in writing, not “prompt” |
| Ad hoc, call when broken | No monthly cost | The broken month costs multiples of a year of care |
Ask any provider one test question: “When did you last email a client to tell them something was broken before the client noticed?” A care plan without proactive alerts is a retainer for work you will have to commission.
A website is not a brochure you print once, it is a small machine that runs in public. Machines need someone who notices when they stop. The question is only ever whether that someone is you, your host, or a person you pay, and the worst answer is nobody.
How much is too much
For a small static or well hosted site, the honest cost of self-maintenance is fifteen minutes a month plus a calendar. For a site running plugins, booking systems or anything that takes payment, the risk sits in the software you did not write, and a care plan is usually worth more than it costs the first time a form dies before a bank holiday weekend.
The worst position is the undecided one: no plan, no calendar, no idea who would notice a failure. Pick one of the three, this week, and write the chosen name somewhere you will look.
Launch is the starting line. Fifteen minutes a month, or a named human on a care plan, is the entire price of the site still working in three years.