Two opposite mistakes get made after a site goes live. One is assuming a website is a finished object that needs nothing. The other is paying a monthly retainer for maintenance that nobody performs.
What a site actually needs depends almost entirely on how it was built.
What every site needs
- Domain renewal. Miss it and the site disappears, and someone else can register it. Turn on auto-renew and keep the card current.
- Hosting renewal, same reasoning.
- Content accuracy. Hours, prices, staff, services. Wrong information is worse than no website, and this is the item that rots fastest.
- A glance at Search Console once a month, for indexing errors and manual actions.
- Checking the enquiry path still works. Send yourself a test enquiry quarterly. Broken contact forms are the single most expensive silent failure there is.
What a WordPress site needs on top
A great deal more, and this is the real distinction. WordPress core, the theme and every plugin need regular updating, because outdated plugins are the most common way small business sites get compromised.
- Core, theme and plugin updates, monthly at minimum.
- Regular backups, stored somewhere other than the same server.
- Security monitoring, and a plan for when something gets through.
- Database maintenance as it fills with revisions and orphaned data.
- Testing after updates, because an update that breaks the layout on a Friday will stay broken all weekend.
A hand-coded static site has almost none of this. There are no plugins to update and no database to compromise. That is not a marketing point, it is what the architecture implies, and it is a large part of why the ongoing cost differs so much between the two.
What a fair retainer includes
- 1A specific list of what is done and how often, in writing.
- 2A stated number of content-edit hours, or a clear statement that small edits are unlimited.
- 3Backups you can verify exist, and a tested restore.
- 4A response time commitment for something being broken.
- 5Monthly confirmation that the work happened. A one-line note is fine; silence is not.
- 6The right to cancel without a notice period.
Questions worth asking your current provider
- “What did you do last month?” A retainer nobody can account for is a subscription to nothing.
- “Where are the backups and when was a restore last tested?” Untested backups are not backups.
- “Can I see the uptime record?”
- “If I cancel, what do I keep?” The answer should be everything.
Maintenance should be a short invoice for specific work, not a standing charge for existing.
What is not maintenance
SEO is not maintenance. Neither is new content, a redesign, or building new features. Those are projects, and bundling them into a vague monthly fee makes it impossible for you to tell whether any of them are happening. Keep them separate and priced on their own, so you can stop one without stopping the others.
