Website maintenance: updates, backups, content

A website is never finished.

WordPress ships security releases constantly. Plugins follow. Themes too. And your content keeps moving: new prices, new opening hours, a new face on the team page.

None of that is complicated. It just sits there undone.

That is exactly what maintenance is for. Someone looks at the site regularly. Someone applies the updates. Someone has a backup when things go sideways.

For a small company, that is almost always cheaper than the emergency. A hacked site costs days. A maintenance plan costs a few Euro a month.

What website maintenance actually covers

Maintenance has three parts: security updates, backups and content upkeep. Everything else is an add-on.

Security updates are the non-negotiable part. WordPress publishes maintenance and security versions on a steady rhythm, as documented in the WordPress version history. Then there are the plugins. A typical company site runs somewhere between 8 and 15 of them. Every single one is a possible way in.

Backups are the safety net. Daily, stored away from the hosting account, kept for 30 days. A backup sitting on the same server is not a backup.

Content upkeep is the part you notice directly. New copy, swapped images, one more post. Plus the small stuff: fixing a phone number, replacing a PDF, adding a field to a form.

And then there are the checks nobody ever gets around to. Does the contact form still work? Do the messages land in the inbox or in spam? Are the legal notice and privacy policy still accurate for the way you actually handle data? Is the SSL certificate renewing? Does the PHP version still match what WordPress and the plugins expect?

All of it rarely takes more than one or two hours a month. It just needs someone to do it.

Plans and prices

Ongoing maintenance starts at 49 Euro a month. Comprehensive care is 249 Euro.

Three tiers, so you are not guessing.

Basic is 49 Euro a month. That covers updates for WordPress core, plugins and theme, a daily backup, a monthly function check and 30 minutes of change time.

Standard is 129 Euro a month. Everything in Basic, plus 2 hours of change time per month. That covers most small content work.

Comprehensive is 249 Euro a month. Everything in Standard, plus 4 hours per month, and a regular conversation about what makes sense to publish next.

Unused time expires at the end of the month. Larger jobs are billed separately at 95 Euro per hour, and you get an estimate before anything starts.

For context on the bigger numbers: building a small site starts at around 1.500 Euro, while multi-page company sites usually land between 4.000 and 9.000 Euro. There is more detail on the web design price comparison page.

Hosting is not billed through me. You stay the customer of your provider. I only need the access credentials.

Response times and support

Response to problems within 24 hours on business days. Faster if the site is down completely.

Support without a stated time frame is worth very little. So the commitment is written into the agreement.

Normal requests get an answer within 24 hours on business days. That applies to all three plans, not just the most expensive one. If the site is offline or compromised, I start immediately. Usually the backup goes back first. We talk about the cause afterwards.

The route to me is short. Email or phone. No ticket number, no call centre, no hold music. You write to the person who also does the work.

Planned changes need a little lead time. Two to three business days is realistic. For anything tied to a fixed date, a campaign, an event, a product launch, get in touch earlier. A week is usually enough.

Weekends are not committed time. But if a shop goes down on a Saturday, I will still look at it.

In the end the paperwork is not what matters. What matters is that someone answers.

One-off job or ongoing plan

A one-off job solves a problem. A maintenance plan prevents the next one.

Both have their place.

A one-off job fits when something specific is on the table. An update went wrong. A plugin has to go. Twenty new products need to be added. Billed by the hour at 95 Euro, with an estimate up front.

The drawback is obvious. In between, nobody is watching.

A maintenance plan fits when the website is part of how you sell. It is cancellable monthly. Price changes are announced with notice, and never mid-term.

Here is the pattern I see most often. A company has a site built. Then nothing happens for a year. By then the PHP version is outdated, three plugins have stopped working, and the contact form has been silently swallowing enquiries for months. Nobody noticed.

The cleanup after that often costs more than twelve months of care would have. Sometimes the old theme cannot be saved at all.

If you are building something new, plan the upkeep into it from the start. What a setup without plugin sprawl looks like is described on the page about WordPress websites.

Working with one person instead of a department

Maintenance is remote work. The difference is who you actually reach.

Technically, this can be done from anywhere. I am based in Fürth, next to Nuremberg in southern Germany, and I work with clients well beyond that.

For clients nearby, an in-person meeting is a short drive. That helps when someone would rather talk content through than type it out. It also helps for training: two hours together, and afterwards your team edits simple text themselves. For everyone else, the same thing happens over a call and a shared screen.

Most enquiries come from the same kind of company. Five to twenty people, one WordPress site, nobody in house who feels responsible for it.

I work alone and have been doing this on the web for over 20 years. No project manager in the middle, no handover chain, no agency overhead. How the collaboration runs day to day is described on the page about hiring a freelance web designer.

Does that sound like your situation?