Website maintenance: what it covers and what happens without it

Hardly anyone commissions a website thinking about the afterwards. It gets paid for, published, celebrated, and from then on nobody touches it again. Months later comes the call: the site is crawling, there's an odd warning when you open it, or it simply doesn't load. Website maintenance is what prevents that call, and it costs considerably less than fixing the mess.

Why a website breaks on its own

The obvious question: if nobody touches it, how does it break? Because underneath there are parts that keep moving even when you don't.

• The CMS and its plugins update every few weeks. Fall behind and you leave holes open; update blindly with no backup first and something breaks.
• The security certificate expires. When it does, the browser shows a red warning before letting anyone in.
• The domain expires. A year goes quickly, and with the domain down there's no website and no email.
• The server changes the version of the language running your site, and what worked stops working.
• The content ages: prices from three years ago, an old phone number, a news section frozen in 2023.

None of this announces itself. You find out when a customer says they can't get in, and by then you've had days without enquiries.

What real maintenance covers

Worth being specific here, because "maintenance" gets used to sell very different things. What it should include:

Keeping it up

Decent hosting and monitoring that the site actually responds. Finding out yourself on a Monday isn't the same as your provider finding out on Saturday night.

Backups somebody has tested

A backup nobody has ever restored isn't a backup, it's a folder full of hope. The test is simple: ask how long it would take to rebuild your site from scratch, and whether anyone has tried.

Updates with a safety net

Backup first, then update, then check that the parts that sell still work: the form, the shop, the search. In that order, with someone watching.

The day-to-day changes

Changing opening hours, uploading four photos, correcting a price, adding a new service. Five minutes of work that, without maintenance, turn into a quote and a three-week wait.

Watching the speed

Sites put on weight with use: heavy photos uploaded from a phone, plugins left over from an experiment. Google measures the real experience of the people landing on your pages and documents it in its Core Web Vitals guidance; a slow site loses on both counts, rankings and customers.

What skipping it costs

The figures you actually see:

• A site down over a weekend in peak season means all that traffic gone, and it doesn't come back.
• A hacked site has to be cleaned, disclosed, and then you wait for Google to trust it again. That's weeks, not hours.
• A broken contact form is the quietest failure of all: the site works, you notice nothing, and the messages go nowhere.
• Rebuilding an abandoned site costs more than three years of maintaining it.

And if your site holds customer data, protecting it is your company's responsibility, not the developer's. Spain's data protection agency publishes guidance for small businesses, and INCIBE has free material on backups and updates worth reading once.

What gets checked every month

Our list, deliberately short:

• Updates to the CMS, theme and plugins, with a backup first.
• A backup taken and verified.
• Certificate and domain: expiry dates in plain sight, no surprises.
• Forms genuinely tested by sending one and checking it arrives.
• Mobile speed, which is where nearly everyone arrives from.
• 404s and broken links, which appear on their own as things change.
• Whatever changes you asked for that month.

With that covered, the surprises come down to genuine incidents, and there are few of those.

What website maintenance costs

There are three models about: hourly when something breaks, a monthly fee, or included inside a wider service. The first looks cheap until the first incident: when the site is down, you're the one paying for the rush.

We run it on a monthly fee and it's published on our pricing page: from €100 a month for a landing page and €200 a month for a site of up to ten pages, with high-performance hosting, email on your domain and maintenance included. The €200 plan adds one article a month so the site doesn't stall. VAT excluded, no lock-in.

The digital presence plans, from €400 a month, include the same and add content, your Google profile and campaigns. If all you want is someone keeping an eye on the site you already have, say so and we'll talk about that; there's no need to buy a whole plan.

Maintaining isn't redesigning

Worth separating the two, because they get mixed up and that's where budgets disappear. Maintenance keeps what already exists standing and current. A redesign changes the structure, the copy or the look, and that gets quoted separately.

A well-maintained site holds up perfectly well for four or five years. Three signs genuinely call for rebuilding, and none of them is age:

• It no longer says what you sell now. Your services, prices or type of customer have changed and the site still tells the old story.
• It can't be updated without breaking something. When every small change needs a developer, the problem is structural.
• It's unusable on a phone. Not slow: unusable, with buttons you can't tap and text you can't read.

If none of those apply, the money goes further on content and rankings than on a new website.

Five questions for your current provider

• When was the site last updated? If nobody knows the date, you have your answer.
• Where are the backups and how much history do they keep?
• Who finds out if the site goes down on a Sunday?
• Whose name is the domain in, and when does it expire?
• What's inside the fee and what gets billed separately?

Five minutes of conversation that spare you from finding out on the worst possible day.

How we go about it

Maintenance isn't sold separately: it sits inside the service, in the same place as the website and the email. We update with a backup first, check the parts that sell after touching anything, and tell you when something goes wrong instead of waiting for you to spot it.

If you also want the site to grow rather than merely survive, that's content and SEO, and it sits in the monthly plans. And if your actual problem is that the site doesn't show up when people search for you, start there before redesigning anything.

Write to us and we'll take a look at what you have. Ten minutes is enough to see whether it's being looked after or waiting to break.