Website Maintenance: What It Should Actually Cover

A lot of maintenance retainers amount to an automated backup plugin and a monthly invoice. Here is what you should be getting, so you can check.

Updates, tested rather than automatic

Core, theme and plugin updates should be applied — but on a staging copy first for any site that matters commercially. Automatic updates on a live e-commerce store is how a Tuesday becomes an incident.

Backups you have actually restored

• Daily database, weekly full file backup as a minimum
• Stored off-server, not on the same hosting account
• At least thirty days of retention
• A documented restore procedure
• A restore tested at least once — an untested backup is a hypothesis

Uptime and error monitoring

Someone should know your site is down before your customers tell you. Uptime checks at short intervals, plus error log monitoring so a PHP fatal on one template gets noticed rather than sitting there for a month.

Security, beyond a plugin

• Login hardening and rate limiting
• File permission and integrity checks
• Vulnerability monitoring for the specific plugins you run
• SSL certificate expiry monitoring
• A documented response plan for a compromise

Performance, checked not assumed

Core Web Vitals drift over time as content and plugins accumulate. A maintenance plan should include a periodic performance check against field data, with the causes of any regression identified rather than a caching plugin being reinstalled.

A content change allowance

Most plans include a monthly allowance of small changes — text edits, a new page, a swapped image. Check whether unused time rolls over and what counts as “small”, because that definition is where disputes live.

What it should cost

A small brochure site is modest monthly. An e-commerce store costs more because the consequences of breakage are immediate and the testing surface is larger.

If a plan costs almost nothing, it is a backup plugin. If it costs a great deal without a change allowance, ask what the hours are being spent on.

The question to ask

Ask what happens at 2am on a Sunday when the site goes down. The answer tells you whether you are buying monitoring or buying a subscription.