Website maintenance: what it covers and what it costs

Once your website is finished, it's perfectly normal to ask, “Right, so do I have to keep paying for something now?” Fair question. Nothing will happen to the design or the copy for years. But a website isn't a poster on a wall. It lives on a domain that needs renewing, it sends enquiries through a mail server, it's built from code that gets security patches, and Google keeps reading it over and over. While all of that works, nobody notices. When something stops, the first thing you usually notice is that your phone has been oddly quiet this month.

What website maintenance actually is

Put simply, maintenance is making sure the site keeps working after launch the way it did on day one. Nobody touches the look and nothing new gets added. Someone checks every day that the site is up and how long is left before the certificate and the domain expire. When security patches come out for the packages the site is built from, someone installs them. When something breaks anyway, someone fixes it. And when you change your opening hours or a price, someone changes it on the site too.

A new design, new pages and new features aren't maintenance. That's additional work, and we agree on it separately. It sounds like a small detail, but this is exactly where expectations most often part ways, so it's better to know where the line is up front.

What breaks when nobody is watching

These are the things we find most often when someone sends us their site for a review. None of them is exotic, and none of them will email you to say it's happened.

A form that quietly stops sending enquiries

This one is our infamous favourite. The site looks normal, the send button works and the visitor gets a message saying the enquiry has been sent. Except it never arrives. The problem is almost always on the mail side. Someone changed a password, the key for the sending service expired, or the server changed its rules. And nobody knows a thing until one day a customer rings to ask why nobody ever got back to them. By then, who knows how many enquiries have come and gone without you ever seeing them.

A domain that expires

A domain is paid once a year, which is exactly why it gets forgotten. The card expires, the renewal invoice goes to an inbox nobody opens, and one morning neither the site nor the email on that domain works. If the renewal grace period runs out as well, anyone can register the domain. Including your competitors.

The certificate and that red warning

With most providers, the HTTPS certificate renews itself these days. Mostly. When it gets stuck, which usually happens after a DNS or hosting change, the browser shows a warning that the connection isn't secure instead of your site. Hardly anyone clicks past it. Most people go back to Google and open the next result.

Security holes in the code

Every website is put together from code packages that other people maintain, and holes turn up in those packages regularly. In 2025 alone, critical ones were found in both Next.js and React, which run a large share of modern websites. The fix was a simple patch. But only if someone actually put it in. With WordPress, it's the same story for each plugin separately.

Payments and bookings

Card payments and booking calendars depend on outside services, and those change their rules and versions every so often. What worked in May won't necessarily work in July. For a tourism business there's no worse moment, because the fault only gets noticed once the season is in full swing and you've got no time for anything.

Speed, Google and stale details

Someone uploads a new 8 MB photo and suddenly the home page loads as if it were 2005. Someone edits some text, accidentally leaves a noindex tag behind, and the page vanishes from Google. The opening hours on the site don't match the ones on your Google business profile. None of it looks like a fault, but every one of these slowly eats into your enquiries. We wrote about catching them in time in why your site is not on Google.

What good maintenance should cover

Good maintenance catches all of this before a customer spots the problem. Ideally, you never spot it at all. In practice, it looks like this.

• Every day, someone checks that the site is up and gets an alert when it isn't.
• The certificate and the domain are monitored, with a reminder before they expire.
• Security patches go in when they come out, not whenever someone remembers.
• Forms, bookings and payments actually get tested. It's not enough that the site opens.
• SEO and speed are checked regularly, because they get worse over time even when nobody touches a thing.
• Small changes, like opening hours, prices and photos, get done without a lot of fuss.
• Once a month you get a report on what was checked, what was fixed and what you need to decide.

The report sounds like paperwork, but it matters more than it looks. Without it, you're paying for something you can't see. And maintenance you can't see is the first thing you cancel, usually a month before you need it.

WordPress or custom code: which needs more maintenance

A WordPress site depends on the core, the theme and the plugins, and each of them has its own update rhythm and its own holes. Updating one plugin can knock over another, so it's done carefully, with a backup taken before every change. That's why WordPress needs more maintenance, and needs it regularly.

A site written in code has fewer moving parts. There are no plugins to keep in step and no standard admin area at a well-known address that bots try to break into every day. The code is stored with its full history of changes, so any change can be rolled back. There's less work, but there is some, because those packages get patches too. We compared the two in more detail in WordPress or custom code.

What website maintenance costs

It depends on how many moving parts the site has. A presentation site with a few pages and a contact form has little that can break. A web shop with payments and delivery, or a booking system with a calendar and deposits, has a lot more, and every fault in it costs you sales straight away. The other question is whether you just want the site to work, or also to grow, through SEO and new articles.

With us, a monthly plan isn't compulsory. If you don't need one, just get in touch when something comes up and we'll sort it. For people who want someone keeping an eye on the site all the time, we have three plans. In all of them we check every day that the site is up and let you know when it isn't, watch the certificate and the domain, check SEO, AEO and speed once a week, and send you a PDF report once a month. AEO, by the way, means preparing the site so that AI search tools like ChatGPT cite it.

• Basic: security updates and an urgent fix if the site stops working.
• Plus: everything in Basic, plus basic SEO, meaning fixes to titles, descriptions, speed and broken links that the weekly check turns up, and up to an hour of content changes a month.
• Growth: everything in Plus, plus SEO and AEO, meaning FAQs, structured data and tracking how AI search tools see you, a new blog article every two weeks, written and published, and priority when something's on fire.

Plans are paid monthly, and we send you the price together with a short review of your site. Hosting and the domain aren't part of the plan. You pay for those directly to the provider. If you're wondering what building the site costs in the first place, we broke that down in how much does a website cost.

Do you need a monthly plan at all

Honestly, not everyone does. If you have a presentation site that changes twice a year, takes no payments or bookings, and customers find you in other ways too, ordering changes as needed is the more sensible choice. It's enough for someone to look over the updates once a year and for you to know who to call when something comes up.

A plan pays off when the site does the selling for you. A web shop, bookings, deposits, or enquiries that only ever come in through the form. Especially in tourism, where a fault in July isn't measured in hours of repair but in lost bookings.

The third case is when you want the site to grow. More visits from Google, more mentions in AI search, regular articles. That's ongoing work, so it makes more sense as a plan than as a one-off order. If you're only just getting started with visibility, we've gathered the basics in SEO for small businesses.

A 10-minute check you can do yourself

You don't need any of us for this one. You need a phone, a browser and ten minutes.

• Open the site on your phone, over mobile data rather than Wi-Fi. Go through the steps to an enquiry or a purchase as if you were a customer.
• Send yourself an enquiry through your own form. Did it arrive? In which folder?
• Click the padlock next to the address and see how long the certificate is valid for.
• At your domain registrar, check the expiry date and whether automatic renewal is switched on.
• Type site:yourdomain.com into Google and see whether all your important pages are there and the titles look right.
• Measure the mobile version of your home page on pagespeed.web.dev.
• Compare the opening hours, prices and contact details on the site with the ones on your Google business profile.

If everything passed, great, the site is fine today. If not, at least you know where to start.

And if you can't face doing this every month, send your site address to info@strigy.com. We'll take a look and tell you what works, what needs fixing and which plan makes sense, if any. If you don't need a plan, we'll tell you that too.