Website maintenance plans are everywhere, and most of them are vague. “We’ll keep your site secure” — what does that mean, on which day, and how do you know it happened?
Here’s the checklist we hold our own plan to. If you’re comparing providers, use it as your questions.
1. Updates with a plan, not a party
A real plan includes scheduled updates for the platform, plugins, and dependencies — with staging, a backup before every update, and a rollback plan. “We updated everything and it broke” is a failure mode, not a surprise.
2. Monitoring that alerts a human
Uptime checks are cheap; somebody answering at 3 a.m. is the actual product. The plan should say what happens when the site goes down: who gets alerted, and within what time.
3. Security that’s checked, not promised
- Daily malware and blacklist scanning
- Regular review of who has access and how
- Patching deadlines for critical vulnerabilities
“Secure” isn’t a state you reach once. It’s a sequence of actions with dates.
4. Backups you could actually restore
A backup that was never restored is a theory, not a backup. The plan should include:
- Automatic backups (daily or weekly depending on the site)
- Off-site storage — a backup next to the server is one fire away from useless
- A tested restore procedure, tested at least quarterly
5. Reporting you can read
Every month you should get something a non-technical person can understand: what was updated, what was monitored, what was found, what changed. If the report is a PDF with two sentences and an invoice, that’s not reporting.
Red flags in cheaper plans
- No mention of staging or rollback — updates will be cowboy operations
- No response-time commitment — “we’ll get to it” isn’t a SLA
- Unlimited requests as the main feature — unlimited usually means unprioritized
- The person who sold you the plan isn’t the person doing the work
The one-sentence version
A maintenance plan is a list of recurring technical actions with dates, accountability, and reporting — if the provider can’t tell you exactly what happens each month, the plan isn’t a plan, it’s a retainer for hope.