What monthly website maintenance actually covers (and what happens when nobody does it)

A website is not finished the day it launches. The software under it keeps changing, certificates and domains expire, plugins get security holes, and forms break quietly when something they depend on changes. None of this is visible from the homepage until the day it is.

“Maintenance” is often sold as a vague monthly fee. This article lists what it should actually include, so you can check what you are paying for, or do it yourself.

What happens when nobody looks after a site #

These are the cases we see most often when we take over an existing website:

• The domain expired. The card on file was replaced, the renewal email went to a former employee, and the site and every email address on the domain stopped working the same day.
• The site was hacked through an old plugin. Visitors from Google are redirected to spam, or the search results show pages in a language you don’t speak. Google may label the site as unsafe.
• The contact form stopped working months ago. It still says “Thank you”, but the messages go nowhere (we wrote about why form emails land in spam).
• There is a backup, but it doesn’t restore. It was stored on the same server that failed, or it was never tested.
• Nobody has the passwords. The person who built the site is unreachable, and the hosting account is in their name.

Each of these is cheap to prevent and expensive to fix.

The checklist #

The quarterly items are the ones most often skipped, and the ones that matter most on the bad day.

What doesn’t need doing every month #

Maintenance is not a redesign. If a provider charges for “SEO” every month with no report of what was done, or reruns the same automated scan and sends it as a report, ask what changed on your site as a result.

Good maintenance is mostly invisible: nothing breaks, the site stays fast, and you get a short record of what was updated and what was checked.

Questions to ask before paying for maintenance #

Whoever does it, an agency, a freelancer or someone on your team, these questions separate real maintenance from a monthly invoice:

1. Where are the backups stored, how long are they kept, and when was a restore last tested?
2. Whose name are the domain and hosting accounts in? They should be yours, with the provider given access, not the other way round.
3. How quickly do you respond, and what happens outside business hours if the site is down?
4. What counts as a change, and how many hours of changes are included? “Unlimited small changes” usually means a queue with no promise.
5. What do you send me each month? Even three lines are enough: updates applied, checks done, anything that needs a decision.
6. If we stop working together, what do I get? You should receive the files, the database and every access, with no exit fee.

How we do it #

On our website plans, the monthly fee covers hosting, SSL and CDN, domain management (registered in your name), daily backups, monitoring and security updates, plus a fixed number of hours each month for changes, with the response time written in the plan. If you already have a website, the starting point is a diagnostic that looks at access, security, speed, SEO and email, and tells you what to fix first, whether or not you work with us afterwards.