Website maintenance plans: what they should cover

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 Pagecog plans there is no separate maintenance line: hosting, domain, SSL and upkeep sit inside the one monthly price, and on Growth we also make your edits. The sections below cover what each part should involve, whoever you use.

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 Growth plan.

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 Pagecog plans

Every Pagecog plan includes the hosting and upkeep. What changes between plans is who makes changes to the site and how much support you get.

Our sites run on Cloudflare with no plugins, so there is very little to patch. On Instant and Local the upkeep is ours to do in the background: keeping the site online, secure and fast. If you want someone making regular changes, that is what Growth is for. Every plan has a 12-month minimum term, then runs month to month, and you own your site throughout. 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.

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, send us a short brief and we'll tell you which plan fits the site.