A website care plan, sometimes sold as website maintenance or website management, is what you pay each month so the site keeps working after launch day. Someone hosts it, keeps it secure, makes the changes you ask for and watches for problems, so you don't have to log into anything.
It's also one of the vaguest things a small business pays for. Some plans are genuinely useful. Others are a monthly fee for a site that never changes, from someone who's hard to reach. Here's what a good plan should include, so you can tell the difference.
What a good plan includes
- Hosting that's fast, secure and handles a busy season without anyone noticing.
- Security, with secure connections, updates applied, and someone watching for problems before you hear about them from a customer.
- Changes, made quickly. New hours, a new price, a new photo, a holiday closure. You should know how to ask and how fast it happens.
- Your domain and email kept healthy. Renewals tracked, and email authentication kept right so your messages don't land in spam.
- An eye on Google. Search Console checked, errors fixed, and a plain-English note when something changes that you should know about.
- Seasonal updates scheduled ahead, so the site is right in February without anyone remembering to touch it.
- A real person who knows your site, not a help desk reading a script.
What to watch out for
- A domain in their name. If you stop paying, can they take your site and your address with them? Your domain should always be yours.
- “Unlimited” changes that take weeks. Ask how fast changes are actually made.
- Vague maintenance. If the plan can't tell you what happens each month, ask what you're paying for.
- Lock-in. You should be able to leave with your site and your accounts, cleanly.
- Plugin treadmill. Some sites need constant updates just to stay safe because of how they were built. That's a cost of the build, not a service.
What a website care plan costs
The price follows how much the site does. A brochure site with a contact form takes less looking after than one that takes bookings, payments or logins, because there's more to keep secure and more that can break. What moves the number: how often you need changes, whether there's an online store or customer accounts, how much email and how many domains are involved, and whether security monitoring and backups are actually included or sold as extras.
Ours grow with the site: $249 a month, $299 for builds of $10,000 or more, $399 from $13,000, and $499 from $20,000. Whatever you're quoted, ask for the list of what happens each month. A price without that list doesn't tell you much.
How ours works
Our care plans start at $249 a month, for sites we built. You text us a change and it's live the same day. Hosting, security, domain and email upkeep, Search Console monitoring and seasonal updates are included, and you deal with the people who built the site. It's optional: you can take your site and run it yourself. See care plans.
When you don't need one
If your site rarely changes, you're comfortable making edits yourself, and you'll keep an eye on your domain renewals and Search Console, you may not need a plan at all. A plan is for owners who'd rather never think about their website, and want it to keep up with the business anyway.
Written by Nikita Huttenlocher, founder and lead engineer at Huttenlocher Technologies, a web design and software company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.