Most of the money and attention in a website project goes into building it. Very little goes into the day after it goes live. The short answer is that a website needs ongoing care, someone has to be responsible for that care, and you should know who it is before you sign anything. The cost is usually small compared to the build, but skipping it is how good websites slowly go bad.
A website is not a printed brochure
A printed brochure stays the same once it leaves the printer. A website doesn't. It sits on a server, runs on software, and often connects to other services like email, booking tools, or payment providers. All of those change over time. Browsers get updated, the software underneath the site releases fixes, and the services it connects to change their rules.
Nothing has to go wrong for a site to need attention. The world around it keeps moving, and the site has to keep up.
What actually needs looking after
Domain and hosting renewals. Your domain name (like yourbusiness.com) is rented, usually by the year. Hosting is usually a recurring payment too. If a renewal fails because of an old credit card or a notice sent to an email address nobody checks, the site can go offline. Find out whose email address receives those notices.
Security updates. Software has flaws, and they get found and fixed over time. If your site is built on a platform with plugins or add-ons, those updates need to be applied. A site that never gets updated becomes easier to break into as the months pass. This matters more if the site has logins, forms, or payments.
The security certificate. This is what puts the padlock next to your web address and makes it start with https. It often renews on its own, but "often" isn't "always". When it fails, visitors see a large warning saying your site isn't safe, and many visitors will turn back.
Backups. If something breaks or gets hacked, a recent backup turns a disaster into an annoying afternoon. Ask how often backups happen, where they are stored, and whether anyone has ever tested restoring one. A backup nobody has tested is a hope, not a plan.
Forms and email. For many small businesses, the contact form is the most important part of the site, and it fails quietly. Imagine a local electrician whose email provider changes its spam rules. Messages from the contact form start landing in a spam folder, and nobody notices for weeks. The website looks perfectly fine the whole time. Only the enquiries stop.
Small changes. New opening hours, a changed price, a holiday closure, a new photo. These come up constantly. If the process is "email the developer and wait", that delay is a cost, even if nobody puts it on an invoice.
Who is responsible?
There are really only three setups:
- You look after it yourself.
- Your developer looks after it, usually under a monthly or yearly maintenance agreement.
- Nobody does, because nobody discussed it.
The third one is the most common and the most expensive. It looks free until the day something breaks, and then you are searching for someone to fix a site they didn't build.
If you choose option 1, that can be perfectly reasonable for a simple site, as long as you know what the tasks are and someone has shown you how to do them.
If you choose option 2, get the details in writing. A plan that only says "support and maintenance" is hard to judge. Ask these questions:
- Which specific tasks are included (updates, backups, renewals, small content changes)?
- How quickly will you respond if the site goes down?
- What counts as extra work that costs more?
- How do I cancel, and what happens to the site if I do?
Make sure you own the important parts
Whoever looks after the site, these should be in your name:
- the domain name,
- the hosting account,
- the admin login to the site itself,
- and a copy of the code and content when the project ends.
If any of these belong to the developer, you are renting your own website from them. That is fine only if you knew it and agreed to it. It is a real problem if you find out when the relationship ends.
How much should this cost?
I won't give a number, because it depends on how big the site is and what it does. A simple site with a few pages needs much less looking after than one with bookings, payments, or customer logins. What I'd look at instead is whether the price matches the size of the site and whether the plan lists exactly what it covers. A vague plan at a high price is a worse deal than a clear plan at a modest one.
A five minute check you can do yourself
Once a month, it is worth doing this yourself, whoever looks after the site:
- Open the site on your phone and click through the main pages.
- Fill in your own contact form and confirm the message actually arrives.
- Look for the padlock next to the web address.
- Check when your domain and hosting are next due for renewal.
It takes five minutes, and it catches the problems that otherwise cost you customers without you ever knowing.
If you're planning a small business website and want to understand what ongoing care it will need before you commit, you can see how I approach these projects on my small business website service page.