What a Website Maintenance Plan Should Include
"Website maintenance" is one of those phrases that sounds specific and isn't. Two providers can charge similar money for wildly different work, and the difference only becomes visible on the worst day.
Here's what to look for.
The baseline: things that must happen
Updates, applied safely. Core, themes, and plugins — on a staging copy first, with a visual check afterwards, and a rollback path. Auto-updating everything on production is not maintenance; it's a coin flip performed monthly.
Backups, off-site, tested. Daily, retained sensibly, stored somewhere other than the server, and restored on a schedule so you know they work.
Uptime monitoring. Checked frequently, from more than one location, alerting a human who is awake. Monitoring that emails a mailbox nobody reads is monitoring theatre.
Security scanning. File integrity, malware, and known vulnerabilities in what's installed — plus somebody actually reading the output.
SSL and domain renewal tracking. Both expire. Both take a site down completely when they do. Both are entirely preventable.
The part that separates real plans from cheap ones
Someone answers. A defined response time, and a way to reach a person that isn't a ticket form that replies in three days.
Fixes are included, not just updates. The plugin update broke the layout — who fixes that, and is it billable? The answer to this question tells you what you've actually bought.
Small changes are included. A price change, a new team member, a seasonal banner. Most owners need a handful of small edits a month, and a plan that excludes them will feel expensive at exactly the wrong moment.
Performance is watched. Speed decays. New content, new tags, new plugins — someone should be noticing before your visitors do.
You get a report you can read. What was updated, what was found, what was fixed, what needs a decision. Not a 40-page automated PDF; a page a busy person will actually look at.
Questions worth asking before signing
- What happens if the site goes down at 2 a.m. on a Sunday?
- If we get hacked, is cleanup included, or is that a separate quote?
- Who owns the hosting account, the domain, and the code?
- Can I get a full export of everything, today, if I want to leave?
- What did you fix on my site last month? (Ask this after three months.)
That last question is the real audit. Plenty of maintenance plans are a standing charge for a monthly automated update and nothing else.
What it's worth
For a site that generates leads, maintenance is not a cost centre — it's the reason a bad week stays a bad week instead of becoming a bad quarter. The cost of one serious incident, in downtime and recovery and lost enquiries, typically exceeds several years of a decent plan.
The trick is making sure you're buying the plan and not the phrase.