What a website maintenance plan should include (9 failures)
What a website maintenance plan should do each month, nine failures we have seen on real sites that a plan should have caught, and how our plan handles them.
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What does a website maintenance plan include?
A website maintenance plan should cover five things every month: software updates, backups that have been test restored, monitoring for downtime and broken forms, small content edits, and a written split of who holds which accounts. If a plan can't show you each of those, ask what the monthly fee is paying for.
Most quotes list maintenance as one line item with no detail, and the gap only shows up once the site goes down or a form stops arriving and nobody notices first. Agencies usually sell it as a monthly fee on top of hosting. On the Pagecog plan there is no separate maintenance line: hosting, domain, SSL and upkeep sit inside the one monthly price, and we also make small edits when you ask. The sections below cover what each part should involve, whoever you use.
What failures should a maintenance plan catch?
These nine happened on sites we run or manage. In each one the site looked fine to a quick check. The right column is the item a plan should contain so that someone notices.
| Failure | What happened | What a plan should contain |
|---|---|---|
| Domain lapsed with auto-renew on | Three domains went dark in eight weeks while auto-renew was switched on. One failed because the reseller account balance was too low. Deploys kept succeeding while the sites were down. | A renewal check against the registrar's expiry date and the payment balance, each month |
| One hosting subscription lapsed | A paid hosting plan on our side lapsed on 28 August 2026. The free allowance was about 100,000 requests a day against about 597,000 actually served, and 14 sites returned an error page until we moved most of them to other hosting. | Billing and quota monitoring on the account, not only the site |
| Static pages up, forms dead | After the lapse, pages stayed up but the contact form function on two sites was cut off for roughly nine hours a day for seven weeks. | A daily test that submits the real form and checks the email arrives |
| A host move broke lead delivery | After a move, one builder's enquiries went to the wrong inbox for four days and a sign-up form reported success while sending failed. | An end to end form test after every host or environment change |
| A security header blanked the booking form | A content security policy missing the booking widget's host rendered an empty box from 2 July to 1 October and stopped Google Analytics. The page returned 200. | A real browser check that reads security policy violations, not only the status code |
| Audits that cannot see it | Eight automated site audits ran in that period and none flagged the blank form. | Treat audits as one input, and also watch the enquiry counts for a sudden fall |
| http not redirecting to https | Five of ten sites served plain http with a 200, and one post was indexed twice. | A check that every http address redirects with a 301 |
| A sitemap whose dates never change | A builder's blog lost most of its impressions because the sitemap told Google nothing had been edited. | A sitemap check that dates move when pages change |
| Phone numbers typed as plain text | Phones made them tappable, but taps were not recorded on five sites, so call counts were low. | A phone tap test on a real phone after every layout change |
Several of these were our own mistakes or our own incidents, and we list them because a plan that has never recorded a failure is not evidence of a plan that catches them. The fixes were a renewal check, a form test after any host move, a security policy check in a real browser, and redirect and sitemap checks.
Updates and patches
Software that runs a website needs updating the same way software on a phone does, and it matters more the longer it's left. The Australian Cyber Security Centre's small business guide lists updating your software as one of the basic steps and recommends turning on automatic updates wherever that's an option. A maintenance plan should be doing this as a matter of course, not as a callout job after something's already gone wrong.
Backups worth testing
A backup nobody has restored is a hope, not a backup. Files existing somewhere is the easy half; the other half is someone actually pulling a backup down and checking it opens, ideally every few months rather than the day disaster strikes and everyone finds out at once whether the process worked.
Someone watching it
A site going down without anyone noticing until a customer mentions it is the most avoidable failure on this list. Uptime monitoring, an expired certificate warning, a server error that starts appearing on a specific page: someone should be watching for all of it, and hearing about it before you do. The same logic applies to the contact form. We've covered testing your own enquiry pipeline in detail elsewhere, and it belongs inside a maintenance plan, not as a separate thing you remember to do occasionally. Our security and monitoring page covers how we watch the sites we run.
The small edits
A phone number changes. Hours change for a public holiday. A finished job gets added to the gallery. These shouldn't need a ticket, a quote and a wait each time. A working maintenance arrangement absorbs the small stuff as part of what you're already paying for, which is the model behind our own plan, where small edits are included.
Who's actually responsible for each part
Hosting, the site's code or platform, and the content on it are three different jobs, and a maintenance plan should say clearly who does which. It should also never mean only one person holds every login. We've written about who should hold the actual accounts in full, and it applies here as much as anywhere: the business holds the logins, and whoever's doing the maintenance gets invited in as a user, not the other way around.
How maintenance works on the Pagecog plan
The Pagecog website plan includes the hosting and upkeep.
| Website plan | |
|---|---|
| Price | $298 a month |
| Term | 12 months |
| Hosting, domain and SSL | Included |
| Kept fast, secure and online | Yes |
| Dashboard login and monthly report | Yes |
| Small content edits | Made when you ask |
Our sites run on Cloudflare with no plugins, so there is very little to patch. The upkeep is ours to do in the background: keeping the site online, secure and fast. If you want ongoing search work or ad management on top, SEO and Google Ads management are month to month add-ons at $549 a month each. The website plan runs for 12 months, and early exit means paying out the rest of the term. All prices are GST inclusive and listed on the pricing page, and the website cost guide shows how they compare with paying for a build and maintenance separately.
Maintenance keeps the site working. Ranking work is a separate job, and what should be in a monthly SEO retainer covers that side.
What we've seen across our client sites
Most of the failures in the table were silent. None produced an alert on its own, and each was found by someone looking at a number that did not fit: a fall in enquiries, a domain that would not load, a form email that never arrived. That is the practical test of a plan. Ask what it checks that does not depend on the site visibly breaking, and how often.
How to tell whether it's actually happening
Ask for a plain list covering the last three months: updates applied and when, the last date a backup was actually restored and checked, and any downtime and what caused it. A real maintenance arrangement can produce that list in a few minutes, because someone is already keeping it. If nobody can produce it, ask for it in writing before renewing.
If you'd rather have all of this handled as part of one plan, get started and we'll set up the plan that fits the site.
Common questions
- Do I need a website maintenance plan?
- If the site brings in enquiries or sales, yes. Someone has to apply updates, keep backups, watch for downtime and make small changes, and it is cheaper to have that agreed in advance than to pay for it after something breaks.
- How much does website maintenance cost?
- Agencies usually charge it as a separate monthly fee on top of hosting. On Pagecog it is not a separate line: upkeep, hosting, domain and SSL are part of the monthly price, which is $298 for the website plan, GST inclusive, with no upfront build fee.
- What is the difference between hosting and maintenance?
- Hosting is where the site lives and how it is served to visitors. Maintenance is the ongoing work on the site itself: updates, backups, monitoring and edits. Some providers sell only one of the two, so check which one a quote actually covers.
- Who makes changes to my site on the Pagecog plan?
- Small content edits are included: ask and we make them. Larger additions, such as a new section or a bulk content job, are quoted separately before any work starts. SEO and Google Ads management are optional month to month add-ons at $549 a month each.
- Can I leave a website maintenance plan?
- The base plan has a 12 month term, then runs month to month. If you leave inside the term you pay out the rest of it: (12 minus the months already paid) times your monthly rate. We hold your domain, and if you leave after the term we transfer it to you on request.
Want maintenance handled inside the plan?
The Pagecog plan includes hosting, domain, SSL and upkeep in one monthly price. Check the pricing page, or get started.