What a website care plan actually covers

Part one: keeping the thing alive

This is the floor. It is not exciting and it is not optional, and when it is missing you find out at the worst possible moment.

Hosting

The server the site runs on, and somebody responsible for it. Ask where it is and whether you could move it.

The SSL certificate

The padlock. It expires. When it lapses, browsers put a full-page warning in front of your site, and most owners hear about it from a customer.

Software updates

Whatever the site is built on gets patched. Skipping this is the single most common way a small business site gets defaced or starts serving spam.

Backups

Copies, kept somewhere other than the server itself. The question worth asking is not whether backups exist but whether anyone has ever restored one.

Uptime monitoring

Something that notices the site is down and tells a human. Otherwise the first alert is a customer who could not reach you.

Security

Login protection, spam filtering on forms, and someone watching for the obvious. Most attacks on small sites are automated and generic.

If a monthly fee covers only this list, that is a hosting plan with a person attached. It is a legitimate thing to buy. It is not the same product as the plans below it, and it should not cost the same.

Part two: keeping it true

A website is a description of your business that ages. Prices change, a service gets dropped, the hours change for winter, a staff member leaves, you start doing something new. Every one of those is a small edit, and small edits are exactly what nobody gets around to.

This is the part of a monthly plan that most affects whether the site is worth having in year three, and it is the part with the most weasel room in it. Three things to pin down:

1. How many changes, and measured how? A count of edits, a number of hours, or “reasonable use”. All three are fine. Not knowing which one you bought is not.
2. What counts as an edit rather than a project? Swapping a price is an edit. A new service page with photos is usually not. Get the line drawn before you need it.
3. How fast? A change that takes three weeks is functionally the same as no change at all when your hours are wrong today.

On “unlimited” anything: unlimited edits usually means small edits, at whatever pace the queue allows. That can be perfectly reasonable. It is only a problem when it is sold as a promise and delivered as a queue, so ask what the last few requests actually took.

Part three: keeping it found, which is a different product

Maintenance keeps the site healthy. It does not try to make it perform. That second job is a separate service, whatever it is bundled with, and the honest quotes say so.

• Google Business Profile management. For a local business this is usually the highest-value ongoing work there is, because the map results are ranked on the profile rather than on your website. If you are not in the three businesses shown on the map, this is why.
• Search work on the site. Titles and descriptions, structure, internal links, page speed, fixing what broke. Slow, cumulative, and measurable if somebody bothers to measure it.
• New content. Service pages, location pages, answers to the questions customers actually ask. This is the work that adds surface area rather than polishing what exists.
• Reporting. Someone reading the analytics and telling you what changed and what they did about it, in language you can act on.
• Conversion work. Changing what the page asks people to do, and where. Cheap to try, and usually the fastest thing to move.

None of this comes with a promised number. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. Local search in particular moves over months, not weeks, and it moves fastest for whoever has been consistent longest.

How to compare two monthly quotes in five minutes

1. Ask each one to write down what happens in a normal month with no requests from you. If the honest answer is “nothing much”, that is fine, but it should be priced like nothing much.
2. Ask what happens when you send a change on a Tuesday morning. Who does it, and by when.
3. Ask whether backups are tested and whether anything is monitored.
4. Ask which parts are maintenance and which parts are marketing. Then compare those two halves separately, because they are two different purchases.
5. Multiply both quotes by thirty-six and add the build fee. That number is the actual comparison, and it frequently reverses the ranking.

One more, which people find awkward and should not: ask what it costs to stop. A plan you can leave in thirty days with your site intact is a very different risk from one that ends with a rebuild.

What ours includes, since it would be strange not to say

Our lowest plan is the part one list plus a set number of content changes a month, and the managed plans add the profile work, email and content on top. The exact inclusions and the exact prices are on the pricing section of the homepage, where they are also what we charge everyone. There is no negotiated rate and no discount for asking twice, other than the published annual prepay.

We are also a small operation, which cuts both ways and you should know both. You deal with the person doing the work, so nothing is lost in a handoff. There is no overnight support desk, and we say so rather than implying one exists.