Website maintenance: what needs doing and how often

Website maintenance for a small business is mostly small, regular checks: a few minutes a month to confirm the site works and the details are right, a longer look each season, and a yearly review of accounts, renewals and pages. If your site runs on WordPress you add software updates on top. Below is a checklist by month, season and year, how long each job usually takes, and which ones are worth paying someone else to do.

What "maintenance" actually covers

When a web company sells a "maintenance plan", it can mean very different things. It helps to split the work into three kinds:

Keeping it working: the site loads, forms send, the phone number can be tapped, nothing is broken.
Keeping it safe: software updates, backups, logins.
Keeping it true: hours, prices, services, staff, photos and offers that match the business today.

Owners tend to worry about the second and forget the third. Yet customers notice wrong hours or a service you dropped two years ago far sooner than an outdated plugin.

Every month (15 to 30 minutes)

Put a repeating reminder in your calendar for the first Monday of the month.

Open the site on your phone and read the home page as a customer would. Is everything still true?
Send yourself a test message through the contact form, and check it arrives in your inbox, not spam. A form that quietly stopped working is the most expensive problem a small site can have, because nobody tells you.
Tap the phone number and the email link to confirm they work.
Check opening hours, especially before holidays.
If you run WordPress: log in, apply updates to the core, theme and plugins, and check the site afterwards. If an update breaks something, your host can usually roll it back.
Glance at your enquiry count. However you track it, a sudden drop to zero usually means something broke rather than that customers vanished.

Every season (an hour or two)

Four times a year, take a longer look.

Photos. Add a few recent jobs, dishes, haircuts or products. A gallery whose newest photo is from three summers ago tells visitors the business has gone quiet.
Services and prices. Add what you now offer, remove what you no longer do, and update any prices you show.
Seasonal content. Holiday hours, seasonal menus, summer and winter services, a reminder for the busy season ahead.
Reviews. Add a few recent ones from Google or from customers who wrote to you.
Links. Click through your menu and footer links. Look for pages that no longer exist or links to a partner who has closed.
Speed. Run your home page through PageSpeed Insights. If the score has dropped since last season, a new photo or widget is often the cause.

A once-a-season website routine goes into more detail on the content side.

Every year (an afternoon)

Once a year, pick a quiet week and go through the bigger items.

Accounts and renewals

Domain renewal date and whether it renews automatically with a card that is still valid. An expired domain takes your site and often your email offline at the same time. What happens if your domain expires explains the grace periods.
Hosting or builder plan renewal, and what the price will be at renewal, since introductory prices often rise.
Who has access. Remove former staff, old designers and agencies you no longer work with from every account.
Passwords and two-step codes on your registrar, hosting and email.
Where your backups are, and when a restore was last tested.

Content and pages

Read every page once. Fix anything out of date: staff who left, a service area that changed, a certificate that expired.
The footer year. A copyright year from long ago is one of the first things visitors notice. Does the copyright year in the footer matter? has the short answer.
Legal pages. If you have a privacy policy, check it still describes the tools you use, and ask your attorney if anything has changed for businesses like yours.
Accessibility. Run a quick scan for missing photo descriptions and low contrast.

The big question

Finally, look at the site as a whole and ask whether it still represents the business. Open it next to a competitor's site on your phone. If yours looks older, slower or harder to use, the answer is no longer more maintenance; it is a redesign.

Who should do which jobs

Most owners can do the monthly checks and the content updates themselves, as long as the site's editor is easy to use. Software updates and backups are where help is worth paying for if you are on WordPress and do not enjoy it.

A rough way to split it:

You: monthly form and phone test, hours, photos, prices, reviews, reading pages for accuracy.
Your host or platform: server security, backups, HTTPS certificates, and, on website builders, all software updates.
A web person, if you have one: WordPress updates, fixing anything that breaks, larger changes to layout or new pages.

Before paying for a monthly plan, ask exactly which of these it covers and how fast they respond when something breaks. Some plans are mostly updates you would not notice, with content changes billed extra.

Making maintenance smaller

The size of the maintenance job depends on how the site is built. A WordPress site with many plugins needs regular updates and checks after each one. A builder site needs fewer. A site made of plain pages with no plugins and no admin area to patch needs almost none of the "keeping it safe" work, which leaves you only the part that matters to customers: keeping it true.

If your current site makes even small updates painful, that is worth fixing on its own. Updating your website yourself covers what a sensible editor should let you do in minutes.

Your maintenance calendar

First Monday of each month: phone check, form test, hours, updates if WordPress.
Start of each season: photos, services and prices, seasonal content, reviews, links, speed.
Once a year: renewals, access, passwords, backups, every page read through, footer year, legal pages, and the honest question of whether the site still fits.

If the yearly review tells you the site has fallen behind, you can see your site rebuilt first and compare it with the current one before deciding.