[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-post-what-does-website-maintenance-include":3,"blog-post-adjacent-what-does-website-maintenance-include":70},{"id":4,"title":5,"slug":6,"excerpt":7,"cover":8,"coverAlt":13,"datePublished":14,"dateModified":14,"category":15,"author":20,"tags":27,"answerFirst":34,"keyTakeaways":35,"body":41,"faqs":42,"sources":61,"relatedServices":62,"seo":66},"mgjgmcj64wzjin2e93gubon0","What Does Website Maintenance Include? A Monthly Checklist","what-does-website-maintenance-include","What website maintenance includes, who owns each part, and a monthly checklist you can copy: updates, backups, security, uptime, speed, content and forms.",{"url":9,"width":10,"height":11,"alt":12},"https:\u002F\u002Fmedia.drieverse.com\u002Fdrieverse-media\u002Fcms\u002Fwhat_does_website_maintenance_include_cover_6cfe82f0ef.jpg",2400,1350,"A calm weave of violet and blue ribbons lit from one side, with the words \"Maintenance is why nothing happens.\" and six chips, for a website maintenance checklist.","A calm weave of violet and blue ribbons lit from one side, with \"Maintenance is why nothing happens.\" and six chips, on website maintenance.","2026-11-10",{"name":16,"slug":17,"description":18,"seo":19},"Infrastructure and Operations","infrastructure-and-operations","DevOps, hosting, reliability and the operational work that keeps a system running once it is live.",null,{"name":21,"slug":22,"entityType":23,"role":24,"bio":25,"credentials":19,"photo":19,"profiles":26},"DrieVerse Tech","drieverse-tech","organization","Engineering Team","DrieVerse Tech is a software design and engineering studio. Case studies and posts published under this byline reflect the team's collective work, reviewed before publication.",[],[28,30,32],{"name":29,"slug":29},"risk-management",{"name":31,"slug":31},"observability",{"name":33,"slug":33},"process-design","Website maintenance includes seven areas of routine work: software updates, backups with restore tests, security and access, uptime monitoring, performance, content accuracy, and forms and other paths that bring in business. Each needs a named owner, usually split between the business, the developer and the host, and a monthly check that leaves evidence. Done well, maintenance is invisible: the site stays up, stays fast, and every enquiry reaches a person.",[36,37,38,39,40],"Website maintenance covers seven areas: updates, backups and restore tests, security and access, uptime, performance, content, and forms. Most sites have some of them covered and nobody can say which.","Every check needs a named owner, split between the business, the developer and the host. A check without a name next to it is a hope.","A check counts when it leaves evidence: a restored file, an alert that reached a person, a test enquiry that landed in the right inbox.","Test your own contact form every month, all the way to the inbox of the person who replies. It is the check most sites skip, and a broken form fails silently.","Before holiday traffic, finish updates early, then freeze the code but keep running the checks.","What does website maintenance include? Seven kinds of routine work that keep a site updated, recoverable, secure, online, fast, accurate and still taking enquiries. None of it is visible when it is done well, which is the point.\n\nMaintenance is why nothing happens. The site does not go down on a busy morning, the certificate does not expire over a weekend, and the enquiry sent at 10pm on a Sunday reaches someone. Because success looks like nothing, maintenance is the first thing to drift: the work stops, nothing breaks for a while, and the gap only shows on the day something does.\n\n## What website maintenance includes, area by area\n\nWebsite maintenance is the same seven areas on every site, whatever it is built with. What changes from site to site is how much work each one takes.\n\n- **Updates.** The content management system, plugins or modules, libraries, and the language runtime underneath, kept on supported versions.\n- **Backups and restores.** Copies of the database and uploaded files, stored away from the site, and proof that they can be restored.\n- **Security and access.** Who can log in, with what rights, and whether anyone who left still can. Certificates, domain renewal, and the alerts that flag something suspicious.\n- **Uptime.** Something outside your network checking that the site answers, and an alert that reaches a person when it does not.\n- **Performance.** Key pages loading quickly on a phone, and the error log staying quiet.\n- **Content.** Opening hours, team pages, policies, offers and dates that are still true.\n- **Forms and conversion paths.** Contact forms, quote requests, bookings and checkout, tested by actually using them.\n\nA list of tasks is the easy part. What decides whether they happen is who owns each one.\n\n## Who owns website maintenance: the business, the developer, the host\n\nWebsite maintenance is usually split three ways, even on a small site. The business owns what only the business can judge: content, access decisions, renewals and whether enquiries arrive. The developer owns the code and its updates. The host owns the server, backups and monitoring.\n\nOne company can hold two or all three roles. That is fine. The failure is a check that falls between roles. Updates are the developer's job, but nobody told them the host changed the runtime version. Backups are the host's job, but the business never asked whether the uploads folder is included. The contact form belongs to everyone, so it belongs to no one.\n\nWhen we take on a site, the first useful document is often a single page listing each check and a name next to it. If you have inherited a site and nobody can fill in that page, start with [what to verify at an infrastructure handover](\u002Fblog\u002Finfrastructure-handover-what-to-verify).\n\n## A monthly website maintenance checklist you can copy\n\nThis monthly website maintenance checklist gives each check an owner and says what \"done\" looks like, so the result is evidence rather than a tick. Copy it into a spreadsheet, put a real name in the owner column, and add a column for the date each check was last done.\n\n| Area | Monthly check | Done looks like | Owner |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| Updates | Apply CMS, plugin and library updates, on a copy of the site first where possible | Updates applied, site retested, a line in the log saying what changed | Developer |\n| Updates | Look for anything unsupported or abandoned: a plugin with no recent release, a runtime nearing end of support | A dated replacement plan for each one found | Developer |\n| Backups | Confirm the latest backup finished and is stored away from the site | Date and location of the last good copy written down | Host |\n| Backups | Restore one file or one page from backup | The restored item opens and matches the live one | Host |\n| Security | Review everyone with admin or editor access | Former staff and old suppliers removed, list dated | Business |\n| Security | Check the certificate and domain expiry dates and the card that pays for them | Both dates known, the card is current, the renewal emails go to someone who still works here | Business and host |\n| Security | Read the security and failed login alerts for the month | Each alert explained or acted on | Host |\n| Uptime | Review the month's downtime and every alert raised | Every outage has a cause written next to it | Host |\n| Uptime | Send a test alert | It reached a named person, not a shared inbox nobody reads | Host |\n| Performance | Load the home page and the main service or product page on a phone, on mobile data | No slower than last month, or a note on why | Developer |\n| Performance | Scan the error log and the list of missing pages | Recurring errors fixed or ticketed, broken links redirected | Developer |\n| Content | Read the pages that go out of date: hours, team, policies, offers, anything with a date | Out of date lines corrected | Business |\n| Forms | Submit every form on the site as a customer would | Each test enquiry arrived in the right inbox, and someone noticed it | Business |\n| Forms | Run checkout, booking or sign up end to end, where the site has them | A test transaction completed and was cancelled or refunded | Business and developer |\n| Records | Write the month's entry in the maintenance log | One dated paragraph: what was done, what was found, what is waiting | Whoever runs the review |\n\n### Using the checklist as a website maintenance checklist template\n\nTreat the table as a website maintenance checklist template rather than a finished list. Delete the rows that do not apply (a brochure site has no checkout), add rows for anything specific to yours (a booking integration, a members area, a feed to another system), and keep the owner column honest. If a row has no name, it is not being done, whatever the plan says.\n\nThe log row matters more than it looks. A year of dated entries tells a new developer or an auditor more than any policy document, and shows what changed before the next problem.\n\n## The website maintenance check most sites skip\n\nThe check most sites skip is the simplest one: filling in your own contact form and confirming the message arrives. A form can look perfect on the page and deliver nothing, and the site gives no sign of it. The visitor sees a thank you message. The enquiry goes nowhere.\n\nForms fail quietly for ordinary reasons. The address they send to belongs to someone who left. A plugin update changed the mail settings. The domain's email records (SPF and DKIM) were never set up, so the messages land in spam. A spam protection key expired. The form still saves submissions to a database table nobody opens. A form that stopped delivering is one of the quiet failures we find most often when we take on a site, and it is usually discovered when a customer phones to ask why nobody replied.\n\nSo test it as a customer would: from a phone, with a real email address, using every field. Then check that the message arrived where the person who replies will see it, not in a shared mailbox that someone checks on Fridays. What happens to the enquiry after that is a separate question, covered in [the lead follow up workflow](\u002Fblog\u002Flead-follow-up-workflow). When did someone last test your contact form?\n\n## Checks that sit outside the monthly website maintenance rhythm\n\nSome maintenance work is too heavy to run every month and too important to leave to memory. Put these on a calendar with the same owner column.\n\n- **A full restore test, a few times a year.** The monthly single file restore proves the backups are readable. Restoring the whole site into an empty environment proves you could recover. What makes that test count is set out in [backups and restore readiness](\u002Fblog\u002Fbackups-and-restore-readiness).\n- **An access review of every account, twice a year.** Not just the website admin: the hosting account, the domain registrar, the DNS provider, the email service, analytics. Each should have at least two people who can get in, and nobody who has left.\n- **A major version upgrade plan, once a year.** Minor updates are monthly work. Moving to the next major version of the CMS or runtime is a small project, and it is cheaper planned than forced by an end of support date.\n- **A walk through the alert path after any change of staff or supplier.** When an alert fires, who gets it, and what do they do? If the answer depends on someone who has gone, fix it now. What the person receiving the alert should have in front of them is in [what an incident runbook should actually contain](\u002Fblog\u002Fwhat-an-incident-runbook-should-actually-contain).\n\n## Website maintenance before holiday traffic: freeze the code, not the checks\n\nIf your business sells online, the weeks around Thanksgiving, Black Friday (27 November) and Cyber Monday (30 November) may be the busiest of your year, and the worst time for a surprise. The usual answer is a code freeze: a date after which no new features, design changes or non-urgent updates go live until the rush is over.\n\nA freeze only works if the maintenance is done before it starts. Apply pending updates early enough to watch them for a week or two. Run the full monthly checklist, including every form and the checkout, a few days before the freeze. Confirm who receives alerts over the holiday weekend and that they know they are on call. Then freeze the code, not the checks: keep watching uptime, alerts and the inbox every day through the peak. Decide in advance who can approve an exception, because a critical security patch may still need to go in, and that decision is easier made calmly this month than at midnight on Black Friday.\n\n## What drives website maintenance cost per month\n\nWebsite maintenance cost per month depends on how much work the seven areas above take on your site. There is no honest figure without looking at the site. These are the things that move it.\n\n- **How many moving parts there are.** Each plugin, module or library is something to update and something that can break when it is updated. A site with a few is quick to maintain; one with dozens takes testing every month.\n- **How much is custom.** Custom code has no vendor shipping fixes for it. Someone who understands it has to keep it working with every update underneath it.\n- **What the site does for the business.** A brochure site, a lead generation site and a store with checkout carry very different consequences when something breaks, so they need different depth of testing and monitoring.\n- **How fast someone has to respond.** Business hours cover is a different arrangement from someone ready to act at 2am on a holiday weekend.\n- **Whether content work is included.** Checking content is maintenance. Writing new pages is a separate piece of work, and it helps to say which one you are paying for.\n- **The state it starts in.** A site that has missed a year of updates needs catching up before the monthly rhythm can begin.\n\nWhen we scope maintenance, we start with the checklist above: which rows apply, who holds each one today, and what the site has missed. The cost follows from that.\n\n## Review your website maintenance\n\nTake the monthly checklist above and put a name next to every row. The rows you cannot fill in, or the ones where the honest answer is \"probably the developer\", are where your maintenance actually stands. If several of them land with nobody, [review your website maintenance with us](\u002Fservices\u002Fmanaged-hosting): we run the hosting side, the updates and the checks as managed hosting work, and the first month usually tells you which rows had quietly stopped.",[43,46,49,52,55,58],{"question":44,"answer":45},"What does website maintenance include?","Website maintenance includes software updates, backups with regular restore tests, security and access reviews, uptime monitoring, performance checks, keeping content accurate, and testing forms and checkout. Each area needs a named owner, usually split between the business, the developer and the host, and a monthly check that leaves evidence, such as a restored file or a test enquiry that reached the right inbox.",{"question":47,"answer":48},"What should be on a monthly website maintenance checklist?","A monthly website maintenance checklist should cover applying updates, flagging unsupported plugins, confirming the latest backup and restoring one file, reviewing admin access, checking certificate and domain dates, reviewing downtime and alerts, testing page speed on a phone, scanning the error log, correcting outdated content, submitting every form, and running checkout end to end. Give each check an owner and a definition of done.",{"question":50,"answer":51},"How much does website maintenance cost per month?","It depends on the work the site needs, so an honest answer starts by looking at it. The main drivers are how many plugins and libraries need updating, how much custom code there is, what the site does for the business, how fast someone must respond to problems, whether content work is included, and how far behind on updates the site already is.",{"question":53,"answer":54},"How often should a website be maintained?","Most checks belong on a monthly rhythm: updates, a backup check with a small restore, access, alerts, speed, content and forms. Security updates for actively exploited problems should go in as soon as they are released, not wait for the monthly review. Heavier work, such as a full restore test, a complete access review and major version upgrades, belongs on a calendar a few times a year.",{"question":56,"answer":57},"Who is responsible for website maintenance?","Responsibility is usually shared between three roles. The business owns content, access decisions, renewals and checking that enquiries arrive. The developer owns the code and its updates. The host owns the server, backups and monitoring. One company can hold several roles, but every individual check needs a named person, or it tends to fall between them and stop.",{"question":59,"answer":60},"What happens if you don't maintain a website?","Usually nothing at first, which is why maintenance drifts. Over months, plugins and libraries fall behind and become easier to attack, certificates or domains lapse, backups stop covering new data, and forms stop delivering without anyone noticing. Problems then arrive together and at the worst time, and catching up on skipped updates takes longer than keeping current would have.",[],[63,64,65],"managed-hosting","web-development","devops-infrastructure",{"metaTitle":5,"metaDescription":67,"ogImage":68,"canonicalPath":19,"noindex":69},"What website maintenance includes and who owns each part, with a monthly checklist for updates, backups, security, uptime, speed, content and forms.",{"url":9,"width":10,"height":11,"alt":12},false,{"prev":71,"next":85},{"id":72,"title":73,"slug":74,"excerpt":75,"cover":76,"coverAlt":78,"datePublished":79,"dateModified":79,"category":80,"author":81,"tags":82},"dtqh25drtwl3mctvwqrls4fu","Backups and Restore Readiness: A Backup Notification Is Not a Recovery Test","backups-and-restore-readiness","A green backup report proves a file was written. Whether the business can be running again depends on four more things: the application, the credentials, the dependencies, and a check.",{"url":77,"width":10,"height":11,"alt":19},"https:\u002F\u002Fmedia.drieverse.com\u002Fdrieverse-media\u002Fcms\u002Fdays_day_09_export_blog_16x9_d78f47b196.jpg","Dark cover reading \"Backed up is not restored.\" beside five rings of light ticks with only the inner ring lit, for a post on backup and restore readiness.","2026-09-24",{"name":16,"slug":17},{"name":21,"slug":22},[83,84],{"name":29,"slug":29},{"name":33,"slug":33},{"id":86,"title":87,"slug":88,"excerpt":89,"cover":90,"coverAlt":93,"datePublished":94,"dateModified":94,"category":95,"author":96,"tags":97},"uyxlw17pi8zcqsxx52x6g350","Docker Compose vs Kubernetes: Do You Actually Need Kubernetes?","docker-compose-vs-kubernetes","Docker Compose vs Kubernetes for a small team: what each solves, running Compose in production, zero downtime deploys, and three signs you have outgrown it.",{"url":91,"width":10,"height":11,"alt":92},"https:\u002F\u002Fmedia.drieverse.com\u002Fdrieverse-media\u002Fcms\u002Fdocker_compose_vs_kubernetes_cover_e8b9ebecc5.jpg","A single lit disc hanging on one line beside a balanced mobile of many discs, with the words \"Do you need Kubernetes?\", comparing Docker Compose and Kubernetes.","A single lit disc on one line beside a balanced mobile of many discs, with \"Do you need Kubernetes?\", comparing Compose and Kubernetes.","2026-11-12",{"name":16,"slug":17},{"name":21,"slug":22},[98,100,102],{"name":99,"slug":99},"architecture",{"name":101,"slug":101},"decision-frameworks",{"name":29,"slug":29}]