Maintenance Is What Happens After the Interesting Part
Building a website is a project. Keeping one is a habit, and habits are where small business sites fail. The build gets attention, budget and a deadline. Then the site goes live, the agency moves on, and eighteen months later the hours are wrong, a certificate warning is scaring people off, and nobody remembers who has the login.
Website maintenance services exist to own that second half. The useful ones do two different jobs at once: keep the site technically healthy, and make the changes you ask for without turning each one into a negotiation.
What Our Website Maintenance Plans Include
We publish four plans. Every one of them covers hosting on a global CDN, the SSL certificate and its automatic renewal, security updates, uptime monitoring, and change requests you send by text or voice memo.
| Plan | Monthly | Changes included | Also includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Host | $20 | 1/mo | Hosting, CDN, SSL, security updates, uptime monitoring |
| Maintain | $99 | 2/mo | Everything in Host, plus Core Web Vitals monitoring |
| Grow | $249 | 5/mo | 2 SEO blog posts/mo, keyword tracking, monthly reports, side-by-side diff of every change |
| Scale | $499 | 10/mo | 4 SEO blog posts/mo, weekly reports, priority queue, quarterly technical SEO audit |
Underneath all four, Search Console, GA4 and Bing data sync daily into your client portal, and Core Web Vitals are checked after deployments so a speed regression gets caught rather than discovered months later. The thresholds we check against are Google's published ones: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1, measured on real users rather than a lab score someone screenshotted once.
Plans are month to month with 30 days' notice to cancel. You own the site, the content and the domain either way.
Changes Are Included, Not Invoiced
This is the part of a maintenance plan that decides whether it was worth buying, so we will be specific about it.
You send a change the way you would text an employee — "swap the hero photo," "add the new service," "we close at 3 on Saturdays now" — typed or as a voice memo. It gets implemented, checked, deployed and logged in your activity feed. Follow-ups on a change you already sent are free, because a change that is not quite right yet is not a second change.
Over the last 120 days, across 117 client change requests, the median time from request to live was 18 minutes. 85% shipped within the hour and 97% the same day. We publish those numbers because turnaround is the part every maintenance plan leaves vague, and it is the part you actually feel.
The alternative structure — a low monthly fee plus an hourly rate for every edit — is common enough that we broke down how it inflates the real annual cost in a separate guide. The short version: the plan price is not the price.
Static Site vs. WordPress: Different Maintenance Entirely
"Website maintenance" means very different amounts of work depending on what your site is made of, and any honest maintenance company prices accordingly.
A WordPress site carries three separate update streams — core, themes and plugins — each shipping its own security patches. The WordPress project's own guidance is to keep all three current alongside broader hardening practices. That is genuine recurring labor, and it is why WordPress care plans cost what they do. A site running a dozen plugins needs someone watching it every month, with a staging environment, because updates occasionally break layouts.
A custom static site — the kind we build — has no plugin stack to patch. Pages are pre-rendered and served from a CDN, the code lives in a version-controlled repository, and every deploy is immutable, so "go back to last week's version" is a rollback rather than a restore from backup. What remains is hosting, certificate renewal, monitoring, and the content changes themselves.
Certificate renewal deserves its own line, because it is the classic small business outage. Let's Encrypt certificates are valid for 90 days by default, which is short on purpose — it forces renewal to be automated instead of remembered. Sites that leave it manual go down with a browser security warning roughly four times a year.
Maintenance, Management, Support: Read the Deliverables
The three terms are marketed as if they were tiers. They are not. What people usually mean:
- Website maintenance services — technical upkeep. Hosting, patches, certificates, backups, monitoring.
- Website management services — upkeep plus the work that moves numbers: publishing, reporting, SEO adjustments.
- Website support services — access to a person when something breaks or needs changing.
A quote can use any of the three words while delivering only one of the jobs. Our Host and Maintain plans are maintenance plus support: upkeep and changes, no ongoing SEO. Grow and Scale add the management half — recurring content, keyword tracking and reporting. We would rather draw that line here than let you find it in month three.
What These Plans Do Not Cover
- Host and Maintain include no ongoing SEO work. They keep the site fast, secure and current. They do not publish content or track keywords. If growth is the goal, Grow or Scale is the honest recommendation.
- New feature work is quoted separately. Databases, customer portals, booking systems and billing are real development rather than maintenance, and get scoped as website development at a fixed price.
- We do not take over unfamiliar sites automatically. Inheriting a codebase means auditing it first. Sometimes that ends in a maintenance plan; sometimes a free-first-pass SEO audit shows the platform itself is the ceiling, and a website redesign costs less than propping it up.
- No ranking guarantees. Nobody can honestly sell those, on any plan.
Keeping the Site From Going Stale
Patching is the floor. What actually decays is relevance — a blog with three posts from two years ago, a services page that never mentioned the thing you now do most.
That work runs through website automation: recurring SEO articles published on a schedule with human editorial review, plus repeating updates like seasonal pricing or menu changes that you set once and we keep. It is included on Grow and Scale at two and four posts a month, and it is the difference between a site that is maintained and a site that is growing.
When the Website Is Not the Bottleneck
Sometimes a maintenance conversation turns up a problem maintenance cannot fix. If leads land in a shared inbox and get followed up when somebody remembers, a faster site only produces more of a problem you already have. That is a different build: custom CRM development for the pipeline, records and invoicing you own outright, or wider custom business software when the SaaS subscriptions have quietly become the bigger line item. Both are quoted as a fixed scope and priced by usage, never per user. The rest of what we do is published here.
When You Do Not Need a Plan
If you are on a site builder, comfortable in the editor, and change your site twice a year, a maintenance plan is a subscription for something you already do. Keep the $99.
Hire a maintenance company at the point where the upkeep is either beyond you or not worth your hours — usually the first time something breaks during a busy week and there is nobody to call.
Start a Plan
Send us the URL. We will tell you what your site actually needs, which of the four plans fits, and when the answer is that you do not need one. Book a free consultation, or read the full pricing first.