Website Maintenance: A Complete Guide for 2026

Most organisations understand that their website needs to be maintained. But very few understand what that actually means, what they should be paying for, or how to tell the difference between a provider who's genuinely looking after their site and one who's running automated updates across hundreds of clients with minimal oversight.

I've been building and maintaining websites for over 15 years, and this is a conversation I have regularly with both new and existing clients. Recently, a client questioned whether the server-level items on their maintenance plan even applied to their setup, and the answer was absolutely yes, because those are the items that keep WordPress running properly underneath, and without them, you end up with a well-maintained CMS sitting on a crumbling foundation.

This guide covers what website maintenance actually involves, the different types, how often it should happen, what it costs, and what to look for when choosing a maintenance provider.

What Is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance is the ongoing work required to keep a website secure, performant, up to date, and functioning correctly. It goes well beyond clicking "update" in your CMS dashboard.

A properly maintained website is looked after across the entire stack, from the content management system (WordPress, Laravel, Statamic, Shopify) through to the server infrastructure it runs on. This includes the web server (Nginx, Apache), the programming language (PHP), the database (MySQL, MariaDB), the operating system, and the networking and firewall configuration.

Most people think of website maintenance as plugin updates. In reality, that's just one layer of a much deeper picture.

Types of Website Maintenance

Not all maintenance work is the same. Here are the main categories that a comprehensive maintenance plan should cover.

WordPress, CMS and Plugin Updates

This is what most people think of when they hear "website maintenance." It includes updating your CMS core (WordPress, Statamic, etc.), plugins, themes, and extensions. These updates often contain security patches, bug fixes, and new features.

But updates are not risk-free. A plugin update might deprecate a feature your site relies on. A WordPress core update might introduce a compatibility issue with a critical plugin. A theme update might override customisations.

This is why I manually review every update before applying it. I read changelogs, check for known compatibility issues, and test on a staging environment where available. The difference between clicking "update all" and doing this properly is the difference between proactive maintenance and playing roulette with your live site.

Server and Infrastructure Maintenance

This is the layer most agencies neglect, and the one that causes the most problems when it's left behind.

Your website runs on a server, and that server has its own software stack that needs regular attention. PHP, Nginx, MySQL, Redis, and the operating system all need updates, security patches, and configuration management.

Here's a real scenario I see regularly with new clients: their WordPress site is fully up to date, but the server is running PHP 7.4 (end of life since November 2022) and MySQL 5.7 (end of life since October 2023). The CMS looks fine on the surface, but the entire foundation is outdated and vulnerable.

The cascading effect is particularly painful. Plugins start requiring newer PHP versions. Updating PHP breaks older plugins that haven't been maintained. Updating those plugins might require a newer version of WordPress. And if you try to do it all at once on a server that's years behind, you're almost guaranteed to break something.

This is why my maintenance plans include server management as standard. I don't believe you can properly maintain a website without maintaining the infrastructure it runs on.

Security Maintenance

Security maintenance covers everything that protects your website from threats. This includes:

• Proactive security scanning, including regular automated and manual scans for malware, vulnerabilities, and suspicious activity
• Malware removal with immediate remediation if a threat is detected
• Two-factor authentication enforcement to ensure admin accounts are properly secured
• Firewall and intrusion detection for server-level protection against brute force attacks, DDoS, and known exploit patterns
• SSL certificate management to keep HTTPS certificates current and correctly configured
• Debug mode verification to confirm production environments aren't exposing sensitive error information

Security is not a one-time task. New vulnerabilities are discovered daily, and your website needs to be actively monitored and hardened against them.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Backups are your safety net. But not all backups are created equal.

A WordPress-only backup (database and wp-content) won't help you if the server itself has an issue. Server-level configurations, cron jobs, Nginx rules, PHP settings, and SSL certificates are not captured in a WordPress backup.

I run daily off-site backups of the full server, not just the WordPress database. These backups are stored on separate infrastructure and are tested regularly to confirm they can be restored. In a worst-case scenario, I can restore a complete working environment, not just a database dump that still needs a server to run on.

Performance Monitoring and Optimisation

Website performance degrades over time. Databases accumulate bloat, plugins add overhead, images aren't optimised, and caching configurations go stale. Meanwhile, Google continues to use Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor, and visitors expect pages to load in under three seconds.

Ongoing performance maintenance includes:

• Speed optimisation and advanced caching, including server-level and application-level caching for fast load times
• Image and media optimisation, compressing and serving images in modern formats
• Database optimisation, cleaning up post revisions, transients, spam comments, and orphaned data
• Core Web Vitals monitoring, tracking LCP, INP, and CLS to ensure your site meets Google's performance benchmarks

Uptime Monitoring and Error Log Analysis

Uptime monitoring ensures your site is checked around the clock. If your site goes down, you should know about it before your customers do.

But uptime monitoring alone isn't enough. Many website issues are invisible to visitors but silently cost you customers. A payment integration that's failing for a specific card type. A redirect loop on a key landing page. A slow database query that adds three seconds to your checkout page.

These are the kinds of issues that only get caught by someone reviewing server and application error logs, not by a tool that checks whether your homepage loads.

SEO and Content Maintenance

Search engines penalise slow, insecure, and broken websites. Regular maintenance supports your SEO by ensuring:

• Fast page load times and strong Core Web Vitals scores
• No broken links, crawl errors, or mixed content warnings
• XML sitemaps and structured data remain valid
• Google Search Console is monitored for indexing issues and ranking drops
• SSL certificates and redirects are correctly configured

Some maintenance plans also include content updates and minor design changes, which is useful for organisations that need regular tweaks but don't have the volume to justify a dedicated developer.

How Often Should You Maintain Your Website?

The answer depends on the type of maintenance.

The key takeaway is that website maintenance is not a quarterly or annual task. It's an ongoing commitment that requires regular attention across multiple areas.

How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?

Website maintenance costs vary significantly depending on the provider, the scope of work, and the complexity of your website.

Budget Providers ($50-150/month)

At the low end, you'll find providers offering automated plugin updates and basic uptime monitoring. These plans are essentially software running updates in bulk across hundreds of client sites with minimal human oversight. You'll get a notification if your site goes down, but that's about it.

For a simple brochure website that doesn't generate leads or process transactions, this might be acceptable. For anything business-critical, it's a risk.

Mid-Range Agencies ($200-500/month)

Most agencies sit in this range. You'll get some degree of manual review, regular backups, and basic email support. Server management is typically not included, or is billed separately.

The quality varies enormously. Some agencies in this range do excellent work. Others are running the same automated tools as the budget providers, just with a higher price tag and a nicer report.

Comprehensive Maintenance ($500-1,000+/month)

For hands-on maintenance that includes full server management, manual update review with changelog analysis, staging environments, security hardening, performance optimisation, and dedicated support from someone who actually knows your site, you're typically looking at $500/month or more.

My website maintenance packages start from $540/month + GST for the Stability plan, which covers the core security, update, backup, and server management work I've described in this article. I also offer a Care plan ($4,950/month) for organisations that need ongoing development, priority bug fixes, sprint planning, and a weekly delivery cadence, and an Enterprise plan ($9,900/month) for full-scale development partnerships with strategic governance, custom integrations, and quarterly business reviews.

Why the Range Is So Wide

The difference in pricing comes down to scope and depth. A $100/month plan might cover 30 minutes of automated tooling. A $540/month plan covers three or more hours of manual, hands-on work per month across the full stack, plus the cost of premium monitoring tools, off-site backup infrastructure, and staging environments.

When you see a provider offering "full maintenance" for $99/month, ask yourself: how much individual attention is your website actually getting?

What to Look for When Choosing a Maintenance Provider

Not all maintenance plans are equal. Here's what to ask before committing.

Do They Cover the Full Stack?

If a provider only covers CMS updates but not server management, you're leaving half of your infrastructure unmonitored. Ask specifically whether PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, Nginx/Apache, and the operating system are included.

How Are Updates Applied?

Ask whether updates are applied in bulk via automated tools or reviewed manually. Do they read changelogs? Do they test on a staging environment? What happens if an update breaks something?

Who Does the Work?

Will you be dealing with the person who actually maintains your site, or will your requests go through an account manager to a rotating team of developers? When something goes wrong at 5pm on a Friday, who picks up the phone?

What's Included in Backups?

A WordPress database backup is not the same as a full server backup. Ask what's being backed up, where it's stored, and whether it's been tested. If your server died tomorrow, could they restore everything, or just the database?

Are They Proactive or Reactive?

A good maintenance provider should be catching issues before you notice them. Ask whether they review error logs, monitor uptime, and actively scan for security threats. If they only fix things once you report them, that's support, not maintenance.

Do They Understand Your Platform?

If your site runs on WordPress, your provider should understand WordPress at a deep level. Not just how to click update, but how WordPress interacts with the server, how to diagnose plugin conflicts, and how to optimise for performance. The same applies to Laravel, Statamic, Shopify, or any other platform.

Website Maintenance FAQs

Do I need a maintenance plan if my website is new?

Yes. A new website is just as vulnerable to security threats, plugin updates, and server issues as an older one. In fact, the first few months after launch are critical for catching any issues that weren't apparent during development and ensuring everything is configured correctly for the long term.

Can I do website maintenance myself?

You can handle some aspects yourself, like content updates, basic plugin updates, and checking for broken links. But server management, security hardening, performance optimisation, and error log analysis require technical expertise. For most organisations, the risk of something going wrong outweighs the cost of having a professional handle it.

What happens if I don't maintain my website?

In the short term, probably nothing visible, which is exactly why so many organisations let it slide. But behind the scenes, your software is falling further behind with every update you skip.

Think of it like your phone's operating system: when you stop updating, your apps still work for a while, but eventually newer versions of those apps drop support for older OS versions, features start breaking, and you're left with an increasingly unstable experience that you can't easily fix without upgrading everything at once. Your website works the same way.

Plugins and frameworks release updates that expect the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, and other server software, and once you fall a few versions behind, a single update can break your site in ways your customers will notice before you do. A contact form stops sending emails, a checkout page throws an error, or a page layout breaks on mobile, and because nobody is monitoring it, the issue sits there quietly costing you leads and revenue.

In the longer term, you're looking at security vulnerabilities that leave your site exposed to malware and data breaches, search rankings that drop as Google penalises slow and insecure sites, and a website that eventually needs a significant investment just to bring it back to a safe, functional state. That recovery cost is almost always far more than ongoing maintenance would have been.

My website is on shared hosting. Do I still need server maintenance?

Shared hosting providers manage the underlying server infrastructure, but that doesn't mean your server-level software is being kept up to date. Most shared hosts use cPanel, which gives you access to change PHP versions and database settings, but they won't proactively update those for you. I regularly see shared hosting accounts still running end-of-life versions of PHP and MySQL years after support ended, simply because nobody changed them.

You still need CMS updates, security scanning, backups (don't rely solely on your host), performance monitoring, and someone reviewing your site for issues. If your site is business-critical, managed hosting or a dedicated server with proper maintenance is worth considering, because it gives you full control over the entire stack rather than working within the limitations of a shared environment.

How is working with a freelance developer different from an agency?

When you work with me, you deal directly with a senior developer with over 15 years of experience. There are no account managers, no junior developers, and no ticket queues. I know your site, your business, and your technical environment. When something goes wrong, you're talking to the person who built and maintains your site, not someone reading a ticket for the first time.

This also means faster decisions, clearer communication, and no miscommunication between you and the person doing the work.

Get Started

If your website generates leads, processes transactions, or represents your organisation to the public, you need a maintenance plan. The cost of not maintaining your website is almost always higher than the cost of maintaining it.

You can view my website maintenance packages here or get in touch to discuss your specific needs. I work with organisations across Brisbane and Australia on WordPress, Laravel, Statamic, and custom web applications.