What 'Website Maintenance' Should Actually Include

“Website maintenance, £95 per month” tells you almost nothing. Two agencies can quote the same figure, and one is running updates, monitoring, off-site copies, an hour of changes and a quarterly review, while the other has a script that presses update once a month and emails you a PDF.

This article is about the commercial side of that arrangement rather than the technical work itself — what should be written down, what usually is not, and the questions that separate the two quotes.

Why the ambiguity persists

Maintenance is sold as a subscription but consumed irregularly. In a quiet month the client feels they paid for nothing. In a bad month they discover the thing they assumed was covered was not.

Both parties have an incentive to leave the scope vague at the point of sale. The agency does not want to look expensive next to a cheaper quote. The client does not want to interrogate a small invoice. Then something breaks and the disagreement is about what the words meant.

The fix is boring: a written scope with categories, inclusions, exclusions and response times. Any supplier unwilling to produce one is telling you something useful.

The categories a real scope covers

Software currency. Which components are kept current, on what schedule, and who tests afterwards. “Updates applied” is not a scope line. “Core, plugins and themes reviewed and updated monthly, tested on a staging copy, with a rollback path” is.

Recoverability. How often copies are taken, where they are stored, how far back they reach, and how quickly a restore can be performed. Ask when a restore was last tested rather than whether backups exist.

Availability monitoring. Something checking the site is up, from outside your own network, at intervals of minutes rather than days. It should alert a person, not a mailbox. Ask what happens at 2am on a Sunday, and accept the honest answer if it is “nothing until Monday” — just know it before you need it.

Broken things. Link checking, form testing, certificate expiry, error monitoring. These fail silently and are the most common thing a site owner discovers months late.

Content changes. Usually an included allowance of hours. Establish what counts. Swapping a photo and editing a paragraph is maintenance. Building a new landing page with a bespoke layout is a project. Clarity here prevents most retainer disputes.

Reporting. Something short, in plain English, that says what was done and what it means. An automated export of server statistics is not a report.

Review. A scheduled conversation, quarterly or half-yearly, about whether the site is still doing its job. This is the item most often absent and the one with the most value in it.

What is generally not included, and should be said so

Being explicit about exclusions is a courtesy, not a hedge. Typical exclusions worth naming outright:

• New features and new page templates.
• Redesigns and rebrands.
• Recovery from a compromise, which is incident work and usually charged separately.
• Third-party service failures — the payment provider, the booking system, the CRM.
• Content writing, unless separately agreed.
• Marketing activity of any kind. Maintenance is not SEO services, and a retainer that quietly conflates the two lets neither be judged on results.

If a proposal is silent on all of these, assume they are excluded and ask.

Ownership, which matters more than the monthly fee

The most damaging maintenance arrangements are not the ones that do too little. They are the ones that leave you unable to go elsewhere.

Establish, in writing and before you sign, who holds what. The domain should be registered to your organisation, in an account you control, with billing contacts you can access. The hosting account should be yours, or clearly transferable. You should have administrator access to your own content management system — not an editor account, an administrator one.

Analytics, Search Console, advertising accounts and business profiles should be owned by your organisation with the agency granted access, rather than the reverse. Rebuilding a history of measurement data because it lived in someone else’s personal account is a real and avoidable loss.

Ask what happens at the end. A reasonable supplier will tell you the notice period, confirm you can take a full export of files and database, and hand over credentials without drama. An unreasonable one will discover unexpected complexity at exactly that moment.

Questions to ask before signing

• What exactly is included each month, and what is explicitly excluded?
• What is the response time for a site that is completely down, and for a minor request? Do those differ, and do they apply outside business hours?
• Who does the work — a named person, a rotating pool, or a subcontractor?
• Is there a staging environment where changes are tested first?
• How many hours of changes are included, do they roll over, and what is the rate beyond them?
• What is the notice period, and what is handed over on exit?
• Can I see a sample of the monthly report?

The report sample is the quickest test. It shows you what a month of this relationship actually looks like.

Doing it yourself, if that is the decision

Not every business needs a retainer, and running a five-page site yourself is a defensible choice provided it is a choice rather than a drift.

Put a recurring appointment in the calendar. Once a month: apply updates, confirm a backup exists and can be downloaded, load the site on a phone, submit a test enquiry through every form, and click the top-level navigation. Once a quarter: check certificate expiry dates, review who still has administrator access, and read the site as though you were a customer. Once a year: check domain renewal dates and confirm the contact address on the registrar account still reaches somebody.

That is perhaps an hour a month, and it catches the overwhelming majority of the problems a basic retainer would.

The point of the exercise

A maintenance agreement exists so that small problems are found by you rather than by a customer, and so that the site does not quietly decay into something nobody wants to touch. That is a modest promise. It is also worth paying for, provided it is written down.

If you would like a maintenance scope you can actually read, or a second opinion on one you have been sent, get in touch. Ongoing support sits alongside website development and, where the site needs new pages rather than repairs, content creation.