So, the business website you’ve invested valuable time and money in has finally gone live. Great. But what happens next? Do you just sit back and hope it continues running smoothly for the next five years?<\/p>\n
Not quite.<\/p>\n
Even though the websites we build<\/a> are pretty darn stable, a website is still a piece of software. Content management systems change, plugins and extensions need updates, security threats evolve and sometimes things simply stop playing nicely together.<\/p>\n Website maintenance is about dealing with those things before they turn into bigger problems.<\/p>\n SEE OUR MAINTENANCE PACKAGES<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n A website maintenance plan is an ongoing set of preventative checks, updates and support designed to keep a website functioning properly after it has gone live.<\/p>\n Think of it a little like servicing a car.<\/p>\n You could wait until a warning light appears or something breaks completely before taking your car to a mechanic. But most of us would rather have it serviced regularly so smaller problems can be dealt with before we’re sitting on the side of the road wondering what just happened.<\/p>\n Your website isn’t all that different.<\/p>\n The exact work depends on the website and the plan, but ongoing maintenance can include CMS updates, plugin or software updates, backups, security monitoring, uptime monitoring, compatibility checks, database optimisation and technical support.<\/p>\n At eCBD, our website maintenance and care packages<\/a> are designed around that preventative approach, with different levels of support depending on how complex and business-critical the website is.<\/p>\n SEE OUR MAINTENANCE PACKAGES<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Most website maintenance isn’t particularly exciting.<\/p>\n When it’s working properly, you may not notice it at all.<\/p>\n That’s actually the point.<\/p>\n You don’t want to discover that an important plugin hasn’t been updated for two years because your contact form suddenly stops sending enquiries. You don’t want the first indication of a security problem to be a customer telling you they were redirected to a suspicious website. And you definitely don’t want to discover your backups don’t work at the exact moment you need one.<\/p>\n Regular maintenance helps reduce those risks.<\/p>\n Website software is updated for plenty of reasons, but security is one of the most important.<\/p>\n Vulnerabilities are discovered in content management systems, plugins, themes and other software all the time. Once a security fix becomes available, leaving the vulnerable software sitting there indefinitely gives automated bots and attackers more opportunity to find it.<\/p>\n Keeping software up to date doesn’t make a website impossible to hack. Nothing can promise that.<\/p>\n It does, however, remove known vulnerabilities and reduce avoidable risk.<\/p>\n That matters for the website itself, but also for the wider business. A compromised website can affect customer trust, produce spam pages or redirects and create a considerable mess in search results. We’ve seen first-hand how a website hack can damage SEO<\/a> long after the initial security problem has been cleaned up.<\/p>\n Websites usually involve several pieces of software working together.<\/p>\n On a WordPress site, for example, you may have WordPress itself, a theme, several plugins, forms, security software, analytics integrations and other functionality all relying on each other.<\/p>\n When one piece changes, another can occasionally stop working as expected.<\/p>\n That is why website maintenance isn’t simply about pressing “update all” and hoping for the best.<\/p>\n Updates should be managed with an understanding of how the website is put together, followed by checks that important functionality still works afterwards.<\/p>\n For ecommerce and more complex websites, this becomes even more important because there are more moving parts and more business-critical functions that can be affected.<\/p>\n A website can go offline for all sorts of reasons.<\/p>\n Sometimes the issue is hosting-related. Sometimes an update creates a conflict. Sometimes software fails, a site is compromised or an unexpected technical problem appears.<\/p>\n Without monitoring, you may not know anything is wrong until you happen to visit the website yourself or someone contacts you.<\/p>\n Uptime monitoring helps identify these problems earlier so they can be investigated before unnecessary downtime drags on.<\/p>\n Your website may have taken months to design, build and populate.<\/p>\n It may contain years of content, product information, enquiries, customer data and optimisation work.<\/p>\n Maintaining that asset makes more sense than allowing it to gradually become outdated and dealing with everything once something eventually breaks.<\/p>\n This is particularly important if you’ve invested in Search Engine Optimisation<\/a>. SEO cannot protect a website from poor maintenance, security issues or broken functionality. Keeping the underlying site healthy protects the platform that all of that SEO work depends on.<\/p>\n Maintenance plans vary between providers, so it’s worth understanding what you’re actually paying for.<\/p>\n For us, the important areas are keeping the website software current, watching for problems and making sure there is a recovery option if something goes wrong.<\/p>\n SEE OUR MAINTENANCE PACKAGES<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Your content management system is the foundation the website runs on.<\/p>\n Keeping it up to date helps make sure important security patches, bug fixes and compatibility improvements are applied rather than allowing the website to fall progressively further behind.<\/p>\n Updates do not automatically make every website faster, but running old software can create security, compatibility and performance problems over time.<\/p>\n WordPress websites commonly rely on plugins for forms, SEO functionality, security, ecommerce and plenty more.<\/p>\n Those plugins need to be maintained as well.<\/p>\n Updates can contain security fixes, bug fixes, compatibility improvements and new functionality. The important part is making sure the updates are applied sensibly and don’t create conflicts elsewhere on the website.<\/p>\n For more complex or ecommerce websites, eCBD’s Shop\/Advanced plan includes more frequent plugin checks as well as ecommerce and system software updates.<\/p>\n Maintenance isn’t only about updating what’s already there.<\/p>\n It’s also worth occasionally asking whether everything still needs to be there in the first place.<\/p>\n Unused, unsupported or unnecessary plugins add complexity and can increase the number of things that need to be monitored.<\/p>\n Reviewing the software installed on a website helps keep the setup cleaner and can uncover better functionality or outdated components that need attention.<\/p>\n Software updates can sometimes affect the way a website looks or behaves.<\/p>\n A layout might shift, a component may stop displaying correctly or functionality connected to the theme may behave differently after an update.<\/p>\n Basic visual and functionality checks help identify those problems before they sit unnoticed on the live site.<\/p>\n A backup is your safety net.<\/p>\n If something breaks during an update, important data is accidentally deleted or the site is compromised, a clean backup can make recovery much easier.<\/p>\n The important part isn’t simply having “backups” written in a maintenance proposal.<\/p>\n You need to know that the website is being backed up appropriately and that there is a practical way to restore it if needed.<\/p>\n The backup frequency should reflect how often your website changes. A relatively static business website and a busy ecommerce store taking orders every day do not necessarily need the same backup schedule.<\/p>\n Monitoring helps answer two fairly important questions:<\/p>\n That sounds basic, but business owners rarely spend their day refreshing their own website to check whether everything is still working.<\/p>\n Ongoing monitoring means unusual problems are more likely to be noticed earlier.<\/p>\n If the website has already been compromised, maintenance alone isn’t a substitute for properly cleaning it. A badly infected site may require a dedicated website hack repair<\/a> before normal ongoing maintenance can resume.<\/p>\n Over time, websites can accumulate database clutter, outdated software and other unnecessary baggage.<\/p>\n Depending on the website and maintenance plan, periodic optimisation can help keep things running efficiently.<\/p>\n For larger or ecommerce websites, this can be particularly useful because the website is processing more data and often relies on more complex functionality.<\/p>\n More comprehensive care plans may also include reporting and priority support.<\/p>\n That gives you visibility over what has been checked or updated and, more importantly, somewhere to turn when something isn’t working as expected.<\/p>\n The value isn’t really in getting another report in your inbox. It’s knowing someone understands the website and can investigate when something goes wrong.<\/p>\n This causes a fair bit of confusion.<\/p>\n Website hosting provides the infrastructure your website needs to exist online. Website maintenance looks after the website and the software running on that infrastructure.<\/p>\n Going back to the car comparison, hosting is a little like giving the car somewhere to drive and the fuel it needs to run. Maintenance is the servicing that helps keep the car itself in working order.<\/p>\n A good hosting provider may manage server-level security, backups and infrastructure. That does not necessarily mean someone is updating your CMS, reviewing plugins, checking your forms or investigating whether an update broke part of the website.<\/p>\n Similarly, a website maintenance provider may look after your website even if you host it elsewhere.<\/p>\n The important thing is knowing where one provider’s responsibility ends and the other’s begins.<\/p>\n There isn’t one maintenance schedule that suits every website.<\/p>\n A small brochure website that changes a few times a year does not have the same requirements as an ecommerce store processing orders every day.<\/p>\n As a general rule, basic maintenance should happen regularly rather than being saved up for once a year.<\/p>\n At eCBD, for example, our Core plan includes monthly plugin checks, while our Shop\/Advanced plan includes weekly plugin checks because ecommerce and more complicated systems generally need closer attention.<\/p>\n Security and uptime monitoring are different again. Those are most useful when they are ongoing, because a website obviously doesn’t wait for its monthly maintenance day before deciding to go offline.<\/p>\n Backup frequency should also reflect how much data the website could afford to lose.<\/p>\n If your website collects orders, bookings or other regularly changing information, more frequent backups make considerably more sense than they would for a static five-page website.<\/p>\n Nothing might happen tomorrow.<\/p>\n That’s partly why website maintenance is easy to ignore.<\/p>\n A neglected website can continue working perfectly well for quite a while. The problem is that software ages, vulnerabilities accumulate and compatibility problems become harder to diagnose the longer everything is left untouched.<\/p>\n If a website is maintained regularly, updates are usually dealt with incrementally.<\/p>\n Leave a WordPress website untouched for several years and you may suddenly be dealing with an outdated CMS, a dozen plugins several versions behind, an old version of PHP and functionality nobody is quite sure is still supported.<\/p>\n Bringing everything up to date at once can become considerably more complicated than keeping it current along the way.<\/p>\n Not every website problem produces a big error message.<\/p>\n Sometimes the site looks fine while the contact form has stopped sending emails.<\/p>\n Or a booking function fails on mobile. Or the checkout process develops an error. Or a page starts displaying incorrectly after a software change.<\/p>\n These quieter problems can be particularly costly because you may not notice them immediately.<\/p>\n Old website software is an attractive target because known vulnerabilities can often be exploited automatically.<\/p>\n A site doesn’t need to be famous or particularly large to attract unwanted attention. Bots scan websites at scale looking for weaknesses.<\/p>\n Keeping software current, monitoring the site and maintaining clean backups won’t eliminate every security risk, but it gives you a much stronger starting position than simply hoping nothing happens.<\/p>\n Preventative maintenance is usually much easier to plan for than an emergency.<\/p>\n If a website suddenly breaks or gets hacked, someone first needs to work out what happened, how extensive the problem is, whether clean backups exist and what needs to be restored or repaired.<\/p>\n That takes time.<\/p>\n It can also mean downtime, lost enquiries or lost sales while the problem is being investigated.<\/p>\n Keeping on top of maintenance doesn’t guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong. It simply reduces the chance of avoidable problems and gives you a much better recovery path when something does.<\/p>\n Absolutely.<\/p>\n If you have a relatively straightforward website and you’re comfortable managing software updates, backups and troubleshooting, there is no rule saying you need to pay someone else to maintain it.<\/p>\n The important thing is having a process.<\/p>\n You need to know:<\/p>\n The issue isn’t whether you’re allowed to press the update button yourself. Of course you are.<\/p>\n The question is whether maintaining the website is the best use of your time and whether you’re comfortable dealing with the situation when pressing that button doesn’t go according to plan.<\/p>\n Not every website needs the same level of care.<\/p>\n A simple business website may only need regular updates, monitoring and basic technical support.<\/p>\n An ecommerce site, membership platform or website with more complex functionality usually needs more frequent attention because there are more things that can break and the cost of downtime can be considerably higher.<\/p>\n When you’re comparing maintenance plans, look beyond the plan name and check:<\/p>\n The cheapest plan isn’t automatically the right one. Neither is the biggest.<\/p>\n It should reflect how important the website is to the business and how complicated it is to maintain.<\/p>\n We’ve kept our own maintenance options fairly straightforward.<\/p>\n The Core Maintenance Plan is aimed at standard business websites that need basic support, monthly plugin checks and ongoing uptime and security monitoring.<\/p>\n For ecommerce and more complex sites, the Shop\/Advanced Maintenance Plan provides a higher level of care, including weekly plugin checks, ecommerce and system updates, priority support, daily site backups, virtual plugin patching, performance and database optimisation, monthly reporting and an urgent patch response.<\/p>\n Custom plans are also available when a website doesn’t fit neatly into either option.<\/p>\n There are a couple of details worth knowing too. Free hack cleanup under the plans requires eCBD hosting, and the Core plan isn’t recommended for online shops because ecommerce sites generally need a higher level of ongoing maintenance.<\/p>\n That’s really the point of having different plans. A five-page business website and a busy online store shouldn’t be maintained in exactly the same way.<\/p>\n SEE OUR MAINTENANCE PACKAGES<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n If your website matters to your business, it is worth having some form of maintenance process in place.<\/p>\n That doesn’t necessarily mean every website needs an expensive support contract.<\/p>\n A very small website may only need relatively simple ongoing care. A larger ecommerce site may need considerably more.<\/p>\n What you probably don’t want is no plan at all.<\/p>\n Websites rarely stay frozen in time. Software changes, browsers change, security threats change and your own business changes.<\/p>\n Regular maintenance protects the time and money you’ve already invested in the site and gives you someone to turn to when things don’t go exactly as planned.<\/p>\n Most importantly, it lets you get on with running your business rather than spending Tuesday afternoon trying to work out why a plugin update has turned your contact page into a white screen.<\/p>\n You spent time and money getting your website right in the first place. Looking after it afterwards is simply part of protecting that investment.<\/p>\n Maintenance isn’t about constantly changing a website that is already doing its job. Quite often, good maintenance means doing very little visibly at all.<\/p>\n It’s the updates being applied properly, the backups sitting there when you need them, the monitoring happening in the background and someone noticing when something isn’t quite right.<\/p>\n Whether eCBD built your website, another developer built it or you put it together yourself, we can look at the current setup and tell you what level of ongoing care makes sense. If you’d like us to take a look, you can get in touch with the team<\/a>.<\/p>\n And if your website is already well maintained and doesn’t need anything else, we’ll tell you that too.<\/p>\nKey Takeaways<\/h2>\n
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What Is a Website Maintenance Plan?<\/h2>\n
Why Is Website Maintenance Important?<\/h2>\n
It Helps Keep Your Website Secure<\/h3>\n
It Helps Prevent Compatibility Problems<\/h3>\n
It Reduces the Risk of Downtime<\/h3>\n
It Protects the Work You’ve Already Put Into Your Website<\/h3>\n
What’s Included in a Website Maintenance Plan?<\/h2>\n
CMS Core Updates<\/h3>\n
Plugin and Software Updates<\/h3>\n
Plugin and Software Audits<\/h3>\n
Theme and Design Checks<\/h3>\n
Regular Backups<\/h3>\n
Security and Uptime Monitoring<\/h3>\n
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Performance and Database Maintenance<\/h3>\n
Reporting and Technical Support<\/h3>\n
Website Maintenance and Website Hosting Are Not the Same Thing<\/h2>\n
How Often Should a Website Be Maintained?<\/h2>\n
What Happens If You Don’t Maintain Your Website?<\/h2>\n
Small Problems Can Become Bigger Ones<\/h3>\n
Important Functionality Can Quietly Break<\/h3>\n
Security Risks Increase<\/h3>\n
Emergency Repairs Can Cost More<\/h3>\n
Can You Maintain Your Website Yourself?<\/h2>\n
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What Level of Website Maintenance Do You Need?<\/h2>\n
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What Does an eCBD Website Care Plan Cover?<\/h2>\n
Is a Website Maintenance Plan Worth It?<\/h2>\n
Keeping Your Website Looked After<\/h2>\n