Is website maintenance worth paying for monthly

What it costs 6 min read

What a monthly website care fee actually buys, what breaks on a site nobody looks after, and when you are honestly better off not paying anyone.

There is a line on your bank statement for your website and you are not sure what it did last month. Nothing has broken, nothing has changed, and no email has arrived explaining either.

The awkward thing about maintenance is that when it is working, it looks exactly like paying for nothing.

What a monthly website fee is actually buying

Strip the word maintenance away and there are only ever a few things underneath it.

Somewhere for the site to live, which is the hosting. Copies of the site taken regularly and kept somewhere other than the server they came from, which is the backups. The security certificate that stops browsers putting a warning in front of your customers, kept renewed. The software the site runs on, kept updated when the people who make it release a fix. The inquiry form, tested from outside now and then to prove it still lands in your inbox. And a person who answers when you need the hours changed.

Some of those cost real money. Some cost almost nothing but somebody has to remember. The fee is mostly buying the remembering.

The four things that break with nobody touching them

Unlike a printed sign, a website sits in a stack of other people's software, and that software moves underneath it.

Certificates expire. They are issued for short periods and renewed automatically. When that renewal fails, and it does fail, the pages are still there but every visitor meets a full page security warning first.

Software gets updated, and updates conflict. The system your site runs on and the add-ons bolted to it are published by different people on different schedules. Most updates are dull. Occasionally two disagree and the site goes white.

Forms stop sending, quietly. Email providers tighten their rules regularly, and a form that has emailed you for two years can start being rejected with nothing visible changing on the page. This is the worst one, because the site looks fine.

Hosts change what they run. The server software gets a version bump on their schedule, not yours, and an older site can stop working the morning after.

None of that is a fault of yours. It is not something an owner is supposed to be watching for.

What actually happens to a site nobody looks after

It does not fall over on day one. It decays in a predictable order.

First the form stops arriving, and you do not notice, because a form that sends nothing looks the same as a quiet week. Then the certificate lapses and the browser warning goes up, and people who were going to call you go back to the results page instead. Then an update finally collides with another and a page breaks. Then, if the site runs on a common system and has been left unpatched long enough, a script finds it, and now you have a cleaning job rather than a fixing job.

The last stage is the expensive one, and it is the one worth paying to avoid.

The part of the fee that is not maintenance at all

Updates are the smaller part of what a monthly fee buys. The larger part is a person who answers.

Your prices changed in January. You close early on Christmas Eve. You took on a new lad and want him on the team page. Each of those is five minutes of somebody's time and a month of nagging if there is nobody to send it to.

That is why a care fee usually includes a small allowance of changes. Website Care includes twenty minutes a month. Twenty minutes is a price change, a new photograph, a set of holiday hours. It is not a new page every week, and anybody promising you unlimited changes for a small monthly fee is either quietly defining unlimited or losing money on you.

When you genuinely do not need to pay anybody

Say your site is a handful of plain pages with no database, no login and no add-ons. It is hosted somewhere that renews the certificate itself. Your inquiries come by phone anyway. You have not changed a word on it in two years and do not intend to.

Then you do not need a care plan. You need hosting, a domain renewal that will not lapse, and a reminder in your phone twice a year to load the site on mobile data and send yourself a test through the form. That is the whole job. Do not pay us $149 a month for it.

That stops being true when the site starts doing something rather than sitting there: a booking form, inquiries that lead to work, anything running on a system with add-ons.

What to check before agreeing to a monthly fee

Ask these before you start paying, and ask them of anybody you already pay.

• Where are the backups kept, and are they on a different machine from the site itself
• Can I have a copy of a backup, today, if I ask for one
• Is hosting inside this fee, or billed separately on top
• Who renews the domain name, and is it renewed automatically
• Is the security certificate included, and who notices when it fails
• How many changes are included, measured in something I can count
• What counts as a change and what is billed as a new job
• What is the notice period, and what happens to the site if I stop paying

What Carverpoint charges, and where the line is

Website Care is $149 a month. That is hosting, backups, the certificate, the form that emails your inquiries, and twenty minutes of changes. Care and Reviews together is $199 a month. Everything, which adds the social posts, is $499 a month.

There is no contract length and no exit fee. The site was yours from the day it was built, so stopping the monthly fee means moving the hosting, not losing the website.

The question to ask the person you already pay

If you are already paying somebody and cannot tell what you get, do not cancel in a temper. Send one short message and ask three plain things: what date was the most recent backup taken, when was the site last updated, and would you test the inquiry form and tell me it arrived.

A good answer comes back with dates. A vague answer is its own answer, and either way you have it in writing.

Questions people ask

What does website maintenance actually include?

At minimum, hosting, backups kept off the server, a valid security certificate, software updates, and somebody checking the inquiry form still delivers. Anything beyond that varies, so get it in writing.

Can I just do website maintenance myself?

Yes, if the site is simple and you are the sort of person who keeps a list. Take a copy of the site somewhere safe, apply updates when they appear, and test the form from a phone every few months.

What happens if I stop paying for website maintenance?

It depends on whether you own the site. If you do, you move the hosting and carry on. If it was rented to you monthly, it usually goes off when the payments do.

Is hosting the same thing as maintenance?

No. Hosting is only the space the site sits in. A host will keep the server running but will not update your site, notice a broken form, or change your opening hours.

How often does a small website need updating?

The software behind it, whenever the people who make it publish a fix. The content on it, whenever something about your business changes. Most small sites need the first far more often than the second.

Is a monthly fee just a way of charging me forever?

It can be, and that is a fair suspicion. The test is whether you could leave tomorrow and keep the website. If the answer is yes, the fee is buying a service. If the answer is no, it is buying access.