A website is closer to a vehicle than a painting. Here is what to check and how often, written so you could actually work through it yourself.
Website maintenance is four things: keeping the software current, keeping the backups real, keeping an eye on what silently breaks, and confirming the site still does its job. Almost every small business site failure traces back to one of those being nobody's responsibility.
The list below is genuinely usable. Work down it and you will find something, and the something is most often the contact form. Nothing here requires a specialist except the parts we have marked as such, and where a task is easy to do yourself, we say so rather than pretending otherwise.
If you would rather it was somebody else's job, that is what maintenance and care plans are for. If not, the list still works.
Fast enough that there is no excuse. This catches the failures that cost you enquiries while you are unaware they are happening.
The core loop. If you only ever do one section of this page, do this one, and do the backup and the forms without fail.
The drift catchers. None of these break loudly, which is exactly why they need a scheduled look.
The annual reality check. The restore test is the one that matters most and gets done least.
Not drama. Just a slow, boring decline that nobody notices until it costs something.
The pattern is consistent. The form breaks first, usually after a plugin update or an email change, and nobody knows because a broken form does not complain. Then the hours go out of date. Then a certificate lapses and the browser starts telling visitors the site is not secure. Then something out of date gets exploited, and the site starts serving something that is not yours, and now you are dealing with a search engine warning as well as a cleanup.
Each of those has a fix that takes minutes if caught early, and a bad weekend if caught late. That is the entire argument for maintenance, and it is why the running cost of a site is part of what the site really costs. The build was never the whole number.
We run this list so you do not have to remember it, and we tell you what we found rather than sending a report that says everything is fine. Most sites we look at have at least one item on this page already broken.
Yes, because the site is not the only thing that changes. The software it runs on ships security fixes, certificates expire on a schedule, browsers change, search engines change what they expect, and the third party services your forms and embeds depend on move on without telling you. A site left alone does not stay still. It slowly stops working, usually in the parts nobody looks at, like the contact form.
Actually submitting the contact form. Not looking at it. Submitting it, and confirming the message arrives in the inbox it is supposed to arrive in. Forms fail silently: the page still says thank you while the mail goes nowhere. Businesses have lost months of enquiries this way and only found out when a customer mentioned they never heard back. Do this monthly, from a phone, on the real live site.
At least once a year, and after any major change. A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis. The failure people discover at the worst possible moment is that the backups have been running fine for two years and restoring one does not actually work, or only covers the files and not the database. Test it while nothing is on fire.
Most of it, yes, and there is no trick to it. The weekly and monthly items on this page are largely looking at things and confirming they still work. The parts worth handing over are the ones that are easy to get wrong and painful when they go wrong: software updates that can break a live page, security hardening, and the restore test. Our maintenance service and care plans cover the whole list, but the honest answer is that a diligent owner with an hour a month can do a great deal of it.
They overlap heavily but they are not the same job. Maintenance keeps the site working: updates, backups, broken links, forms. Security is about keeping other people out and keeping the certificate valid. Most maintenance is security in practice, because the majority of small business site compromises come through software that was out of date, not through anything sophisticated.
Edits, updates, backups and monitoring so the site keeps working.
What to verify before and after a site goes live.
Certificates, hardening, and protection against the common attacks.
Find what is actually slowing the site down, then fix it.
The factors that actually drive the number, explained honestly.
Ongoing website care and support options.
Tell us what your site runs on. We will tell you what is out of date, what is quietly broken, and what it takes to keep it that way.