What a Website Maintenance Plan Should Include

A website is finished on launch day in the same way a car is finished when you drive it off the lot. From then on, software needs updating, certificates need renewing, forms quietly break and content goes out of date. Nobody notices until a customer says the contact form has not worked for a month.

A maintenance plan is the agreement that someone is watching. Here is what a good one covers, and what to ask before you pay for one.

The essentials

Every plan should cover these, whatever platform the site runs on:

• Backups. Automatic, regular and stored somewhere separate from the site itself. Ask how often they run, how long they are kept and, most importantly, when a restore was last tested. A backup nobody has restored is a hope.
• Software updates. For WordPress, that means core, theme and plugin updates, applied promptly and checked afterwards. For custom builds, it means keeping frameworks and dependencies current. Hosted platforms like Webflow handle their own core updates, though custom code and integrations on top still need care.
• Security monitoring. Watching for malware, suspicious logins and vulnerable plugins, plus a clear plan for what happens if the site is compromised.
• Uptime monitoring. An alert when the site goes down, so you hear about it from your provider before your customers tell you.
• SSL and domain renewals. Expired certificates show visitors a security warning. An expired domain can take the whole site and your email offline. Someone should own both dates.
• Form and integration checks. Test that contact forms, booking calendars and CRM connections still deliver. These break silently more often than anything else.

The things that separate good plans from basic ones

• Performance checks. Pages get slower as images, scripts and plugins pile up. A good plan watches speed and Core Web Vitals and fixes regressions.
• Search and analytics health. Watching Google Search Console for crawl errors, broken pages and indexing problems, and making sure analytics is still recording.
• Broken link checks. Links to pages that moved or sites that disappeared.
• Accessibility upkeep. New content can introduce problems: missing alt text, poor contrast, headings out of order.
• Content updates. A set number of hours each month for small changes: new staff bios, updated prices, a seasonal banner. Clarify what counts as a small change.
• A monthly report. Short and readable. What was updated, what was fixed, how the site performed, and anything you need to decide.

Questions to ask before signing

1. What happens when something breaks? Get response times in writing, and find out whether urgent fixes are included or billed separately.
2. Who owns the accounts? Your domain, hosting, analytics and the site itself should be in your name, with the provider given access. If you leave, you should keep everything.
3. What is outside the plan? New pages, redesigns and new features are usually separate projects. Know where the line sits.
4. Do unused hours roll over? Some plans allow it, many do not.
5. Can you see the backups and updates? A log or report showing the work was done.

How it changes by platform

The work looks different depending on how the site is built, which is one of the trade-offs we cover in Webflow vs custom Next.js:

• WordPress needs the most hands-on care because of plugins. Each one is a piece of third-party code that needs updating and can conflict with others.
• Webflow and other hosted builders take care of hosting, security patches and core updates, so maintenance shifts towards content, forms, integrations and SEO.
• Custom builds need dependency updates, hosting checks and someone who knows the codebase. In return, there are fewer moving parts you do not control.

Do you need one at all?

If your site is a small brochure on a hosted platform and rarely changes, you might manage with a quarterly check you do yourself. If the site takes bookings, captures leads, runs on WordPress or brings in a meaningful share of your business, a plan usually costs less than one bad week of downtime.

How we handle it

At Pinn.Media we maintain the sites we build and take over care of sites built elsewhere, with backups, updates, monitoring and a monthly report in plain language. Book a discovery call and we will run a quick health check on your current site and tell you what needs attention first.