What does website maintenance actually include?

Most people paying for website maintenance couldn't tell you what they're buying. The direct debit goes out, nothing appears to happen, and once a year they wonder whether to cancel it.

The honest list: updates to WordPress and everything bolted onto it, backups kept somewhere that isn't your server, security and uptime monitoring, checks that the parts bringing in money still work, a bit of time each month for small changes, and a person who fixes what they find and tells you what they did. Anything past that is a project with its own quote.

The updates are the risky bit

WordPress, the theme and the plugins all put out updates, most of them patching security holes. They want applying quickly. The hole becomes public knowledge the moment the fix ships, which is the bit nobody mentions when they tell you to keep your site up to date.

They also break things. Rarely, and always on a day you've got something else on, which is why pressing the button and walking away is a bad plan. Someone has to load the site afterwards and click through the pages people actually use. That check is the difference between a £40 plan and a proper one, and it's about as glamorous as it sounds: a Tuesday morning, a brew, and twenty minutes of clicking.

Backups nobody has ever tested

We back up every site daily to a data centre run by a different provider from the host. Different building, different company. If the server has a bad night, the backups aren't sat on it waiting to die with it.

Worth asking your current lot two things: where the backups live, and how long a restore takes. A backup you've never restored is a theory.

Security

Brute force protection stops bots working their way through admin passwords, and the monitoring runs around the clock. Out of date plugins are how most WordPress sites get done.

If nobody's watching, you find out when Google flags the site and your customers get a red warning screen instead of your homepage. Cleaning that up is a bad week, and the warning hangs about for a while after.

Why we watch the speed

Performance monitoring tells us when a page has got slower. Sounds like a metric for its own sake, until you see what slow costs.

Wolf Laundry were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads and getting zero leads. Their website took ten seconds to load and over half the people clicking those ads never saw it. Genius Division, the agency behind Better, rebuilt it. It loads in about a second now and they're on 150 to 200 leads a month.

Websites get slower on their own, too. Someone uploads 40 photos straight off a phone, a plugin gets added for a Christmas promotion and never removed, and two years later it's crawling.

The stuff that makes you money

A contact form can stop sending and nobody finds out, because the people who tried it just rang a competitor instead. So we test that forms and emails from the site arrive, every month, on purpose.

On Better+ we go further through the site each month: broken links, SSL, redirects so old addresses still land somewhere useful, page titles and descriptions, contact form spam, and a Screaming Frog crawl for whatever's left. Search Console, GTmetrix, PageSpeed and Semrush get read together rather than one at a time, which is the only way any of it means anything. Prices for each plan are on our pricing page.

Does maintenance include hosting?

Not always, and this catches people out. A lot of plans cover the WordPress side only and you pay a hosting company separately, which is how you end up with two suppliers blaming each other while your site is down.

Ours include hosting, an SSL certificate and a content delivery network, so your site is served from somewhere near whoever's looking at it. We don't drop sites onto a crowded shared server and hope. Cannon Hall Farm, one of ours, has a national TV following, and the night a programme goes out is not the moment to find out what your hosting can take. That's a decision made months earlier.

Does it include changes?

Small ones. On Better+ and above you get 45 minutes a month for the ordinary jobs: new opening hours, a staff photo swapped, a price updated, a question answered. Anything bigger is charged at our hourly rate, and unused minutes don't carry over.

That 45 minutes is deliberately modest. If you need an hour a week, tell us and we'll put studio hours on your plan instead of pretending it fits.

What it doesn't cover

New features. A booking system, a members' area, anything that needs building is development work and gets quoted separately.

Writing your content, too. We'll add words you send us, and we'll say so if they're doing you no favours, but sitting down and writing the things is a different job altogether.

And maintenance won't fix a website that isn't working. If yours is five years old and the enquiries have dried up, updating the plugins will keep it secure and slow. That's a redesign conversation, and we'll say so rather than take your money for another year of keeping the lights on.

What the report should tell you

Ours turns up monthly and shows how fast the site loads on mobile and desktop, visitors and search clicks with last month next to them, key events, whether the SSL is valid, how many days of backups exist, broken links, what got updated, and what we did with our hands. Then a line on what we'd do next.

You also get a dashboard with every report in it, so you can compare months or mash a quarter together when somebody upstairs asks how the website's doing.

The test for any report is whether you can read it in two minutes and know whether things got better. If it's forty pages of graphs with no sentence at the top, it's been written to look like work.

How often does all this need doing?

Backups daily, monitoring constantly. Updates and a proper look through the site monthly at a minimum, and straight away when a security fix lands for something yours runs.

Six months of ignoring it and you'll get away with it. Two years, and the quote you get will be for a new website. If you want to know what all this costs, we've written up website maintenance prices in the UK, and what makes us Better covers how we actually do it.