So, you’ve completed your website – that’s great! As a hub of information, your website is the centre for all online campaigns and is crucial for conversions. But let’s be realistic things change – not just the technologies but digital marketing and customer needs as well. Digital marketing strategies must also evolve alongside website maintenance to ensure your online presence remains effective and competitive.
What customers want is shifting constantly, while digital marketing constantly adapts to meet these wants.
And that’s where the importance of ongoing website maintenance comes in. Far too often we see business owners launching a website and then believing that their work is done. However, managing your own website comes with ongoing responsibilities and challenges, including the need for regular maintenance to keep it performing well and secure.
Website maintenance is an ongoing process that adapts to changing technologies and evolving customer needs, ensuring your site remains secure, functional, and optimized. In this article, we are going to explore why website maintenance is important, what it should cover and how to create a website maintenance checklist.
Without further ado, what is website maintenance?
What is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is all about making sure that your website is not only live but is up to date and free of errors. Far too often we see business owners launching a website and then believing that their work is done. They see the site is online and think that the site will continue to support their business with very little attention. But the reality is a little different. Many businesses choose to work with a maintenance service provider to handle technical updates, security, and optimization. A website maintenance service provider is a professional or agency that manages regular updates, security monitoring, backups, and performance optimization, ensuring your website runs smoothly and securely.
By hiring professional website maintenance services, you can benefit from expert handling of backups, security, updates, and troubleshooting, which minimizes risks and ensures smoother operation. A typical website maintenance service includes tasks such as regular backups, software and plugin updates, performance monitoring, and technical support.
In this article, we’ll explore the factors that require ongoing attention, the types of maintenance services that are typically included in a comprehensive maintenance plan, to ensure your website is well maintained.
So, why is site maintenance so important?
Why is Website Maintenance Important?
If you want your website to work properly, you need to keep an eye on the website’s every detail. A big part of any website maintenance checklist deals with site security – constantly checking for issues and security risks. Routine maintenance involves scheduled tasks like backups, updates, and security scans to ensure your website stays secure and optimized. Regular website maintenance helps prevent issues like security breaches, slow site speed, broken links, and malware, supporting ongoing site health and performance. But it’s not all about security.
Website maintenance is, for most businesses, an opportunity to keep content fresh. Think for a moment about the last website you visited. Did you notice any new content blocks or updates? Even if you know the website well and visit it often, fresh content will pique your interest. And that’s the end goal anytime you update your website – to draw readers and visitors in. Maintaining the website’s functionality is also essential to ensure all features and technical aspects work correctly for users. Regular website maintenance can also improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages, making your site more visible to potential visitors.
Technical issues can impact your site’s performance and site’s speed, so monitoring and optimizing these aspects is a crucial part of website maintenance.
Updating your website is not just about new content; it’s about attracting relevant traffic and meeting the needs of site visitors.
Maintaining your website can help improve your search engine rankings and bring in more site visitors. Optimizing your site for search engines is essential for improving your website’s ranking and increasing its visibility online.
Fresh Content
In short, fresh content has the power to keep the interest of return customers and attract new ones. You can do this by:
- Releasing new product updates and refreshing the information about the older ones
- Creating new blog posts and updating blog posts which interest your target audience
- Boosting your SEO with fresh content to increase your site’s visibility
- Answering the questions that customers ask
- Creating new FAQs
As part of your website maintenance plan, fresh content should remain high on your priority list. When you regularly update the website content, visitors and potential customers have a chance to learn more about you. Keeping your website content up to date is essential for attracting and retaining potential customers. From upcoming events to new team announcements, the more information you present to your customers, the more they will engage.
Modern digital marketing has shown, again and again, that customers buy from brands they relate to. When you use fresh content, you optimise the online experience and give customers a reason to keep visiting your website. Regularly reviewing and updating website content, including each individual blog post, ensures all information and links lead to relevant and up to date content, which is crucial for user engagement and search engine rankings. Using Google Analytics allows you to track visitor behavior and measure the effectiveness of your content updates, helping you make informed decisions for ongoing content optimization.
And this doesn’t just apply to big organisations. Even the smallest of businesses will find that regular content updates help to keep users engaged and returning for more.
SEO and Visibility
Fresh content isn’t just for the benefit of readers and customers. It is also hugely important when it comes to SEO, visibility, and the ranking of your site across platforms like Google. Search engine optimization plays a key role in improving your website’s position in search engine results pages (SERPs) and attracting organic traffic.
Google’s top-rated websites are those that regularly and consistently update their information. It shows Google that you are committed to giving your users fresh and relevant content on a regular basis. And that’s not all. Google also notices when old and outdated content is removed, showing the importance of maintenance in removing as well as adding new content.
Some of the aspects of website maintenance which link to SEO and visibility include:
- Showcasing your expertise in the industry you work in
- Reviewing and removing duplicated content
- Checking the quality of internal links
- Identifying and fixing broken links as part of regular website maintenance
If you already know about SEO and how to give Google what it wants, you will be aware of the importance of outbound links. But did you know that the quality of those links is as important as having them in the first place? Website maintenance should include reviewing and checking all outbound links regularly. This will allow you to pinpoint any sources which are lacking in quality or pages which have been removed. Fixing broken links can improve user experience and search engine rankings.
Keeping up With Updates
Besides marketing reasons such as helping users find your website easier or increasing engagement, there are also technical reasons for website maintenance, such as ensuring the website’s proper functionality, speed, site speed, website speed, and overall website performance. Regularly monitoring your site’s speed and website speed is essential as part of ongoing maintenance to ensure optimal user experience and search engine ranking. Technical issues can negatively impact your site’s performance and website’s performance, making it crucial to identify and resolve them promptly.
The site’s complexity also plays a significant role, as more complex sites often require more frequent or specialized maintenance to address their unique technical needs. Addressing website performance and technical issues quickly is necessary to maintain optimal site operation.
Website Core Updates
Website core updates are related to the website’s engine or backend code. They make sure your website stays up-to-date with web technology updates, has no issues in the code and is secure.
Core updates are not a one-time thing and need continuous surveillance so that your website can function without any issues. But the way you will manage these updates will depend on whether you have a custom-coded website or a CMS website.
If your website is customer-coded, then your developers need to constantly inspect the website code, in case there are any issues or something needs to be changed. In case your website works on a content management system (CMS), the platform allows for easier management of updates, user accounts, and website content. Depending on a CMS platform you may not even need to care about the core updates. Shopify for example controls all the server environments and manages core updates on your behalf.
But WordPress leaves it up to the admin to make the changes. For WordPress websites, there are unique update requirements, and it is important to manage user accounts securely to maintain website security and data integrity. They notify the website owners of upcoming updates and new versions so that they can install them. They don’t automatically update websites, as some hosting or plugin configurations may result in errors. Though some hosting providers make these updates automatically, it’s not recommended as websites may face significant issues because of automatic updates.
Web Technology Updates
One of these updates is web technology updates. These updates are similar to software updates like iOS, Android or Windows updates. If your website is not updated according to the latest standards and protocols, you’ll face speed, accessibility and many other issues.
For example, if your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, which has become an important requirement for every website, the users who try to open your website, will see a threat warning and many of them will quickly close your website. You will lose a big amount of your traffic because you simply didn’t install an SSL certificate which some hosts (including us) provide for free. Additionally, choosing the right web hosting plan is crucial for long-term website stability, as it affects your site’s security, performance, and scalability. Understanding the different types of web hosting and their associated costs can help you make informed decisions that support your website’s ongoing maintenance.
These kinds of updates are not so frequent, but they can hugely affect your website’s performance if you don’t pay attention to them on time. Decisions made during web development and website development, such as selecting appropriate technologies and hosting, directly impact the need for ongoing technology updates and maintenance.
Extension, Library, Plugin Updates
Many websites use additional extensions, libraries or plugins that add more functionality to their websites and which require to be updated too.
For example to implement a payment system many websites integrate PayPal or other payment systems into their website. While these payment platforms are responsible for their infrastructure updates, website admins are responsible for updating the libraries, plugins or extensions on their websites, so that they work properly.
And when your website has multiple plugins like this, you’ll need to manage all these updates so that they can function properly. These updates are essential website maintenance tasks that should be included in your maintenance plan to ensure ongoing security and performance. You might also want to avoid using too many different extensions or plugins as they might not be compatible with each other. As you see, this part of your website also needs ongoing support, and a professional maintenance service can help manage these website maintenance tasks efficiently.
Security
With different security requirements depending on the website platform and hosting used, your website developers will be able to help pinpoint the exact security risks and things to consider. For example, the WordPress vulnerabilities and security risks will be different from those across other platforms. But the concept remains the same no matter what hosting or website platform you use. Security is crucial for websites, and website maintenance is the best way to keep on top of it. Maintaining a secure website is essential to protect user data, prevent vulnerabilities, and ensure your site remains trusted by visitors.
Unfortunately, the web is crawling with malicious individuals and software that attempt to identify security vulnerabilities, bypass security systems and obtain control of business websites to either request a ransom or to use the hacked site for blackhat SEO tactics. Without proper security measures, your site is at risk of security breaches and potential data loss.
Depending on the platforms you can typically install more advanced firewalls, security and monitoring tools and take multiple proactive and counteractive measures to avoid the website being compromised, and also have a quick action plan for regaining access and removing malicious software should the website already be under attack. Keeping your site secure with regular security scans, updates, and monitoring not only protects your data but also supports your search engine rankings.
Constant maintenance checks and updates are a big part of keeping hackers out and keeping your website safe for all users. Regular backups and disaster recovery planning are also necessary to prevent data loss in the event of a security breach.
Responsiveness
Having a great website is all about delivering what users want, and when and where they want it. If you work in the online sphere then you will know the value of a responsive website. This means running a website which adapts to different devices – putting user experience in front and centre of every update. Maintaining a user-friendly website that meets user expectations is essential for keeping visitors engaged and satisfied. Ecommerce businesses especially benefit from dedicated support to ensure smooth operations and quick issue resolution, given the complexity and scale of their sites.
And that’s where website maintenance becomes a little more complicated. Because updates don’t need to just work in a chrome browser running on a Windows PC with a Full HD 1920×1080 screen – they need to consider the updates of every device and platform and adapt accordingly.
In fact, over half of all website visits come from mobile devices. That means that if your website isn’t responsive in design and experience, you are providing a poor experience for over half of your potential customer base.
Your website maintenance checklist should include regular monitoring of the customer journey on different devices. This will allow you to pinpoint any stumbling blocks and make the necessary updates to keep the experience smooth and effective, especially for an ecommerce site where smooth functionality and a positive user experience are crucial.
With website maintenance covering so many different areas, building a plan and a website maintenance schedule is the best way to keep on top of it. Let’s take a look at what an ideal plan looks like.
How to Create a Website Maintenance Checklist
A website maintenance checklist should list what needs checking and how often it needs to be checked. By assigning a priority list to each of the main areas of maintenance, you can build a website maintenance schedule. Using a monthly website maintenance checklist helps ensure all essential tasks are completed regularly, reducing the risk of errors and improving website performance and security.
Most businesses work with a high-quality website design company to support their website build and ongoing maintenance. By outsourcing this process, you ensure both quality and consistency, with every update managed by a company that understands the software, internal, and external updates. Monthly website maintenance and flexible maintenance plans, such as support services or custom retainer agreements, can help businesses stay on top of updates and security. There are a variety of website maintenance plans available, including contracts, retainers, and ala carte options, allowing for customized solutions tailored to each client’s specific needs. Website maintenance services cover a broad scope of ongoing website care and support, ensuring your site remains secure, high-performing, and up-to-date.
Here are some of the things to check as part of your website maintenance strategy – and how often to check them.
Software Updates
Checking for and staying ahead of software updates is the best way to ensure your website security is always effective. As a general rule, any software updates should be prepared for completion between the launch of the new software and the removal of the old software. This ensures that you remain in a safe, protected zone and never remain without proper software support.
The frequency of software updates can change, and this is something your website design and maintenance team should be able to look out for. Maintenance agencies and website maintenance agencies often offer a maintenance package that includes regular software updates, security audits, and performance optimization, making it easier to keep your website secure and up to date.
Website Loading Time
Back in 2020, Google launched its set of update requirements for ranking – called Core Web Vitals. This list of requirements deals largely with user experience as a core part of the ranking of a website. As such, website maintenance has shifted to become more focused on the user experience than ever before – and that includes load time. Checking your website loading time regularly will allow you to stay ahead of any stumbling blocks, isolating and fixing them quickly. Each web page should be optimized for faster loading and better user engagement to ensure visitors have a positive experience. This should be checked every few weeks.
Accessibility
Another area which considers user experience is accessibility, encouraging websites to regularly review the accessibility of navigation, the customer journey, and the layout. A full check should be completed every 5-6 months. This should look at colour, font, wording, layout, white space and many other things.
Quality
Short and sweet, this is where you assess the quality of content and the customer journey as a whole. The quality of the website as part of ongoing maintenance means considering how effective the site is concerning the needs of the end-user. This means putting yourself in the shoes of a customer and viewing the site from their eyes. Better yet, for many businesses, it means conducting regular surveys to assess how users are interacting with the site.
SEO
From metadata to outbound and internal links, website maintenance means ensuring your website is in a good position to be found. SEO is, as discussed earlier, a core part of the success of a website. Because of this, investing time and effort in SEO will give you your desired results. But remember, that SEO is a continuous process, so you need to regularly check and assess keywords, update content, refresh backend data, and check links. As part of your website maintenance plan, it’s important to have a clear SEO strategy that includes routine site updates, fixing issues, and maintaining overall website health to improve your search engine rankings.
A full SEO check should be done every few months, but the quality of content should be checked more often.
Maintenance Frequency, Resource Allocation, and Website Maintenance Plans
Understanding what needs to be done is only half the battle—you also need to ensure you have the resources to execute consistently.
Here’s a realistic breakdown of the time investment required for comprehensive website maintenance:
Weekly Tasks (2-4 hours)
- Security monitoring and patch application
- Broken link checks on high-traffic pages
- Performance monitoring and quick fixes
- Content updates for time-sensitive information
Monthly Tasks (8-12 hours)
- Full site security audit
- Content freshness review and updates
- SEO performance analysis
- Plugin and extension updates
- User experience testing across devices
Quarterly Tasks (16-24 hours)
- Comprehensive accessibility audit
- Full SEO strategy review
- Technology stack assessment
- Design and UX improvements
- Analytics deep-dive and optimization planning
Annual Tasks (40+ hours)
- Major platform updates and migrations
- Complete site redesign elements
- Comprehensive security overhaul
- Strategic planning and roadmap development
Total annual investment: 300-500 hours of specialized work
For most businesses, this translates to either:
- A full-time specialist (at $60,000-$120,000+ annually, plus benefits and tools)
- Multiple part-time specialists across different disciplines
- Ongoing agency retainers with unpredictable project costs
Maintenance services cost can vary significantly depending on your approach: hiring a professional agency often means fixed packages or retainer fees, while freelance experts may charge hourly rates, and subscription models offer predictable monthly pricing.
With Passionates’ subscription model, this entire scope is covered within your monthly fee. A full-time Grow package at $8,000/month ($96,000 annually) provides 2,080 hours of senior specialist time—more than enough to handle comprehensive maintenance with capacity for strategic improvements. Need more bandwidth? Stack multiple packages to scale resources instantly.
The math is straightforward: subscription-based maintenance delivers enterprise-quality results at a fraction of the cost of building an in-house team, with none of the management overhead.
How Often You Should Review Your Website
The frequency of reviewing a website actually depends a lot on your website and what kind of updates you need. Some updates, like web technology updates, need to be taken care of 1-2 times a year, and others need to be reviewed once a week. In general, reviewing your website once a month can make sure it’s up-to-date and works properly. Monitoring your website’s uptime is also an essential part of regular maintenance to ensure your site remains accessible and performs optimally. For a small business website, maintaining the website’s uptime is especially critical, as even brief downtime can impact customer trust and potential sales for small business owners.
Note that each item of a website maintenance checklist has its own timing and frequency, and if you’re planning to do the maintenance by yourself, you’ll need a plan for them separately, considering maintenance cost, maintenance costs, and website maintenance costs when creating your schedule. Small businesses and small business owners should pay special attention to planning their maintenance schedules and budgets, as the unique needs of a small business website often require careful allocation of limited resources.
Another important question about timing is how long website maintenance takes. It also depends on your website and its functionality. Small checks and updates won’t take even an hour, but bigger updates may take a couple of days. It’s highly recommended to place a message that your website is under maintenance so that users won’t get confused about why something is not working (if avoiding downtime is completely unavoidable). Web maintenance costs and the exact cost of maintenance can vary depending on the size and complexity of your website. Small businesses may have different maintenance requirements and cost considerations compared to larger organizations, often needing more basic support and cost-effective solutions tailored to their specific situation.
The Maintenance Dilemma: DIY, Traditional Agency, or Subscription Model?
Now that you understand what website maintenance involves and how often it needs attention, it’s important to recognize that website creation is just the first step—ongoing maintenance is required to ensure long-term success and to manage the evolving needs of ecommerce businesses. The next question is: who should handle it?
Most businesses face three options, each with distinct trade-offs:
DIY Maintenance requires significant internal resources. Your team needs expertise across security, development, design, content, and SEO—skills that typically span multiple specialized roles. For most businesses, this means either hiring multiple full-time specialists (at 2-5x the cost of outsourced solutions) or asking existing team members to handle maintenance alongside their primary responsibilities, which often leads to neglected updates and mounting technical debt.
Traditional Agency Partnerships offer expertise but come with their own challenges: project-based pricing that’s difficult to predict, 2-4x higher costs than subscription alternatives, complex procurement processes, and limited flexibility when priorities shift. When you need a quick security patch or content update, traditional agency timelines and minimum project fees can feel prohibitively expensive.
Subscription-Based Maintenance represents a newer approach that addresses these pain points. At Passionates, we’ve built our entire service model around the realities of modern website maintenance. Our unlimited subscription packages provide access to senior specialists (each with 5+ years of experience) across all maintenance disciplines—from security updates and performance optimization to content refreshes and SEO improvements.
Here’s how it works: Choose from three progressive tiers based on your needs. The Grow tier ($5,000/month part-time, $8,000/month full-time) covers design, development, and content updates. The Optimize tier ($6,000/month part-time, $10,000/month full-time) adds UX research and conversion optimization. The Innovate tier ($7,250/month part-time, $12,500/month full-time) includes AI implementation and advanced automation. See our subscription agreement for details.
Each subscription provides a dedicated project manager as your single point of contact, coordinating unlimited maintenance requests across our team of specialists. Most requests are completed within 1-3 working days—whether you need a security patch, content update, or performance optimization. No hidden fees, no project minimums, no cancellation penalties.
For businesses with lighter maintenance needs, we also offer flexible hourly packages starting at $199/hour in 1-10 hour blocks, with unused hours rolling over month to month.
The key difference? Predictable costs, rapid turnaround, and comprehensive expertise without the overhead of managing multiple specialists or the unpredictability of project-based pricing.
Why Senior Expertise Matters for Website Maintenance
Not all maintenance is created equal. The difference between junior and senior specialists becomes painfully apparent when something goes wrong.
Consider a seemingly simple WordPress core update. A junior developer might click “update” and hope for the best. A senior developer with 5+ years of experience knows to:
- Review the changelog for breaking changes
- Check plugin compatibility before updating
- Create a staging environment to test the update
- Verify backup systems are functioning
- Monitor site performance post-update
- Have a rollback plan ready if issues arise
This depth of experience prevents the costly disasters that plague DIY maintenance: sites that break after updates, security patches that create new vulnerabilities, or “quick fixes” that compound into technical debt.
At Passionates, every specialist on our team brings at least five years of professional experience. Our designers understand how maintenance updates affect user experience. Our developers know which security patches require immediate attention and which can wait. Our SEO specialists recognize when content updates will boost rankings versus when they might trigger penalties.
This senior-level expertise in web and mobile app design means:
- Faster problem resolution: Experienced specialists identify root causes quickly rather than treating symptoms
- Proactive prevention: We spot potential issues before they become emergencies
- Strategic thinking: Maintenance isn’t just about keeping things running—it’s about continuous improvement
- Quality assurance: Enterprise-grade standards on every update, no matter how small
When you work with Passionates, you’re not getting a rotating cast of junior developers learning on your site. You’re getting consistent access to senior specialists who treat your website maintenance as a strategic function, not a checkbox exercise.
Next Steps: Choosing Your Maintenance Approach
Website maintenance isn’t optional—it’s a fundamental requirement for any business serious about their online presence. The question isn’t whether to maintain your site, but how to do it effectively and efficiently.
Whether you choose to handle maintenance in-house, work with a traditional agency, or adopt a subscription model, the key is consistency. Sporadic maintenance is almost as risky as no maintenance at all.
Your Website Maintenance Checklist
Here’s your comprehensive starting point:
Security & Technical
- Software and CMS updates
- Security patches and monitoring
- Malware scanning and removal
- Hosting environment updates
- SSL certificate renewal
- Backup verification and testing
Performance & Functionality
- Page speed optimization
- Core Web Vitals monitoring
- Mobile responsiveness testing
- Browser compatibility checks
- Form and interactive element testing
- Database optimization
Content & SEO
- Content freshness reviews
- New blog posts and updates
- FAQ additions and refinements
- Internal and external link audits
- Metadata optimization
- Keyword performance tracking
User Experience
- Accessibility compliance checks
- Navigation and user flow testing
- Design consistency reviews
- Call-to-action effectiveness
- Conversion funnel optimization
Increase brand awareness, build trust and drive conversions.
A professional website custom-made for your business increases your customer trust and helps you build a better connection. And once that is done, you can expect improved purchase rates, customer loyalty and brand awareness.
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