Website maintenance plans: what you're actually paying for every month

Most website maintenance plans sell you the same thing: peace of mind. Which is a lovely feeling and a terrible line item, because you can’t check whether you got it.

Here’s the short answer before the detail. A maintenance plan is worth paying for when it covers four things you’d otherwise have to do yourself: hosting, updates and security, backups you can actually restore, and small edits done quickly. Anything beyond that is either a separate service dressed up as “maintenance” or padding. And depending on how your site was built, you might not need a monthly plan at all.

What a maintenance plan should cover

Strip away the marketing and a real care plan is four jobs:

• Hosting. Somewhere fast and reliable for the site to live. This should be included, not bolted on as a separate invoice from a company you’ve never heard of.
• Updates and security. Keeping the software behind the site patched. On WordPress that means core, theme and plugins, which is a real weekly job. On a modern static site it’s far lighter, but someone still owns it.
• Backups — tested ones. Not “we take backups.” Backups stored somewhere other than the server itself, and a person who has actually restored one. A backup nobody has ever restored is a theory.
• Small edits. New opening hours, a fresh photo, a price change, a staff member who left. Done in a day or two, without a quote, without a meeting.

Monitoring (an alert when the site goes down or gets slow) is the fifth item worth having, and it’s cheap to provide. If a plan doesn’t include it, the agency finds out your site is down when you call them angry.

What’s usually padding

The line items that make a plan look generous on paper:

• “Monthly SEO” that’s really a report. An automated PDF with traffic graphs isn’t SEO. Real SEO is research, content and fixes — it’s a separate service with a separate price, and it should say so.
• “Unlimited edits.” Nothing is unlimited. In practice it means “unlimited until we decide you’re asking too much,” and then the quoting starts. A clear allowance (say, an hour a month) is more honest and easier to plan around.
• “Performance optimization” on a site that was built slow. If it needs constant tuning to stay fast, the build is the problem — and no monthly fee fixes a site that’s slow by design.
• Hosting at three times market rate. Some agencies make their margin here. Ask what the hosting itself costs them. If they won’t say, that’s your answer.

The question nobody asks: why does the site need this much care?

Maintenance cost is mostly decided the day the site is built, not the day you sign the plan.

A WordPress site with twenty plugins needs regular attention, because every plugin is a piece of third-party code that can break, conflict or get exploited. That ongoing work is real, and paying someone to do it is reasonable.

A lean static site — the kind we build on our web design service — has far fewer moving parts: no database to attack, no plugin pile to patch. It still needs hosting, monitoring and the occasional edit, but there’s simply less to maintain. Which means the honest monthly fee for it should be lower, or optional.

So when you’re comparing quotes for a new site, compare the total cost over three years — build plus monthly — not just the build. A cheap build on a fragile stack is a subscription you didn’t know you signed.

When you don’t need a plan at all

This is the bit agencies tend to skip. You can reasonably go without monthly maintenance if:

• Your site rarely changes and you’re comfortable making text edits yourself in a CMS.
• It’s a static site on solid hosting, with no plugins to patch.
• You (or someone you trust) can handle the basics: renewing the domain, noticing when the site is down, restoring a backup.

What you can’t skip is ownership. Even with no plan, make sure the domain, hosting account and code are in your name — here’s how to check who owns your website. A maintenance plan should be something you can cancel, not something that holds your site hostage.

Five questions to ask before you sign

1. What exactly is included each month? Get a list, not adjectives.
2. How many hours of edits, and how fast? “Within two business days” is an answer. “As soon as possible” isn’t.
3. When did you last restore a backup? Watch for the pause.
4. Is there a contract, and what happens when I leave? Month to month should be the default. On exit, you get your files, your domain and your hosting access — no exit fee.
5. Is SEO included, or is that a different service? If it’s included, ask what work actually gets done.

If the answers are vague, the plan is vague. And vague plans are where the money disappears.

What we do (and when we’ll tell you to skip it)

Our own plan is on the pricing page: hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, and up to an hour of edits a month, month to month, no contract. If you’re on our SEO plan it’s included, because we’re already in the site every week.

But if your site barely changes and you’re happy editing it yourself, you probably don’t need us monthly — and we’ll tell you that. Not sure which camp you’re in? Tell us about your site and we’ll give you a straight answer, even if it’s “keep your money.”