What a Website Maintenance Plan Should Include

Website maintenance is one of the easiest services to sell badly. When it goes well the work is invisible, so an invoice for doing nothing looks identical to an invoice for doing the job.

So ask what proof of the work arrives each month. The list of inclusions matters less.

The floor: what any plan must cover

Updates, applied and verified

Core platform, theme and plugin updates. Verification is the important part. An automatic updater that applies a plugin update and breaks the checkout at 2am has made things worse. Updates should go onto a staging copy first, get checked there, and then get pushed live.

Backups that have been restored

Daily backups, stored off the server they’re backing up, with a documented restore test at least once a year. Until somebody restores a backup, nobody knows whether it works.

This item is most often present on paper and useless in practice. Ask when the last test restore happened. If nobody can answer, it’s never been done.

Until you’ve tested a backup, it’s a folder you’re hoping about.

Uptime monitoring with a person attached

The site gets checked every few minutes, and an alert goes out when it goes down. That alert has to reach somebody who’ll act on it. Monitoring that emails a shared inbox nobody watches is theatre.

Security basics

Malware scanning, a firewall, login rate limiting, and monitoring for SSL certificate renewal. An expired certificate throws a full-page browser warning, and it’s one of the few failures that stops nearly every visitor cold.

What a real plan adds

A monthly report you can read

It covers what was updated, what broke and got fixed, uptime percentage, page speed trend, traffic and conversions, all on one page. When nobody at the agency looks at the automated PDF before sending it, what you’re getting is a receipt.

Included content changes

Every business needs small changes, and a sensible plan includes an hour or two a month for them: a new staff member, updated hours, a price change, a seasonal banner. When a plan bills separately for every ten-minute edit, owners stop asking, and the site goes stale.

Performance work, ongoing

Sites slow down as content piles up. A plan that only applies updates is watching the site degrade. Quarterly image audits, script review and database cleanup should be in scope.

Somebody who answers

When the site goes down on a Friday afternoon, the plan’s response time is what you’re paying for. A shop taking orders online needs a four-hour response. Plenty of other businesses do fine with next business day, and that should cost less.

The questions to ask before signing

1. What exactly is in the monthly report? Show me last month’s for another client, redacted.
2. When was the last test restore from backup?
3. Is staging used for updates, or do they go straight to production?
4. How many content changes are included, and what happens at the limit?
5. What is the response time when the site is down, and outside business hours?
6. If we cancel, what do we take with us?

What it is reasonable to pay

A brochure site with updates, backups, monitoring and a short report costs a modest monthly amount. A site that takes orders, with a four-hour response and a real content allowance, costs meaningfully more, and it should.

Be suspicious of the cheap plan that includes everything. It’s almost certainly automated end to end with nobody looking. Automation handles updates fine, and a plan made of nothing else leaves nobody watching the site.

The Green Acres partnership shows what this maintenance work looks like in practice: monthly reports, ongoing SEO and speed work, and a named person you can call.