What website maintenance is actually for

We record what clients come back for after a project ends. Across 10,164 leads carrying at least one follow-on opening, the ranking is unambiguous.

Hosting and maintenance together come to 1,945 — more than three times SEO, and more than everything else on the list combined. The recurring relationship between a business and whoever built its website is overwhelmingly about keeping it working, not about marketing it. That is worth knowing on both sides of the table.

Maintenance is not updates

Ask most people what a maintenance plan is and they will say running the updates. Updates are the smallest part of it and the part most amenable to automation. Anyone can click update. The value is in everything wrapped around that click.

• A backup taken before the update, stored somewhere other than the same server, that somebody has actually restored at least once to prove it works.
• A staging copy where the update runs first, so a plugin conflict is discovered by you rather than by a customer.
• A rollback that takes minutes rather than a support ticket, because the point of a backup is the restore, not the file.
• Monitoring that notices the site is down, and a human who responds to it.
• A record of what changed and when, so a fault that appears on Thursday can be traced to Tuesday's update instead of guessed at.

A plan that runs updates without those five is not maintenance. It is a cron job with an invoice attached, and its main effect is to convert a rare catastrophic failure into a slightly more frequent one, because updates applied without staging are how sites break.

What plans quietly exclude

The most common gap between what a maintenance plan says and what a client thinks it says is content changes. People assume that paying monthly means small edits are covered. Most plans exclude them, and both sides discover this the first time somebody asks for a new team member's photo to go up.

Neither position is wrong, but it has to be stated. Either the plan includes a defined allowance — an hour a month, say, with unused time not carrying over — or it does not and edits are billed. What causes the friction is a plan that says maintenance without saying which of those it means.

Two other exclusions worth checking before signing anything: whether licence renewals for premium themes and plugins are inside the fee or billed on, and whether an emergency outside working hours is covered or charged at a different rate. Both are reasonable to exclude. Neither is reasonable to leave unstated.

What it should cost, roughly

Pricing follows risk rather than effort. A brochure site with five pages and three plugins carries very little risk: if it breaks, some enquiries are missed. A store carries a lot: if it breaks on a Friday evening, sales stop and nobody notices until Monday. The plan for the second should cost several times the plan for the first even though the update process is nearly identical, because what is being paid for is response, not clicks.

The useful way to sanity-check a quote is to work out what an hour of downtime costs your business, then ask what response time the plan actually commits to. If an hour of downtime costs more than the annual plan, the plan is cheap. If the plan costs more than a day of downtime, you are probably over-insured.