How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost? A Straight Answer
What actually drives the price of a website maintenance plan, what you get at each level, and the questions to ask before you sign anything.
When people say a website looks dated they usually mean the design. Rounded corners from a decade ago, a sliding banner, a font nobody chooses any more. That is the version of outdated everybody notices, and it is rarely the version that costs money.
The expensive kind is invisible. The site looks perfectly respectable and quietly tells visitors the wrong price, sends their enquiry into a mailbox nobody opens, and links to a supplier who closed in 2022. Here are seven signs, all checkable this afternoon.
Signs one to three: content that stopped being true
One: the prices are not what you charge. This is the most common and the most damaging. A driving school lists a lesson at RM90 and quotes RM120 on the phone, and the caller either argues or quietly books elsewhere. It usually happens because prices live in three places (a rate page, a packages section, a downloadable sheet) and only one of them gets edited.
Two: the services list describes an older business. Somewhere on the site is a service you dropped two years ago because it was more trouble than it was worth. And somewhere else, missing, is the thing that now brings in most of your work. Sites grow by addition; nobody removes anything, so the page becomes a history of the business rather than a description of it.
Three: the people and dates are wrong. A team page with someone who left, an "established 2019, now in our third year" line that has aged past accuracy, a footer copyright still reading 2023, a news section whose latest post is a long-finished promotion. Individually these are trivial. Together they tell a visitor the site is unattended, and a visitor who thinks that wonders whether the business is too.
Signs four and five: things that are broken and silent
Four: the enquiry form does not reach anyone. Forms break in ways that leave no trace on the page. The address they forward to belonged to someone who has left. A mailbox filled up. A filter started treating the notifications as spam. The visitor sees "thank you, we will be in touch", so nobody complains, and no complaint is exactly what a broken form produces. If enquiries have gone quiet without an obvious reason, rule this out first.
Five: links go nowhere. Internal links break when a page gets renamed or removed during a tidy-up, and nothing warns you that four other pages pointed at it. Outbound links break on their own schedule when the supplier, association or venue you linked to rebuilds their site. The Facebook icon in the footer that points at a page you stopped using counts too. Each dead link is a small dead end at the exact moment someone was following you somewhere.
Signs six and seven: the phone experience and the speed
Six: the site is awkward on a phone. Not broken: awkward. Two buttons close enough together that a thumb hits the wrong one. Body text you have to pinch to read. A popup with a close button half off the edge of the screen, so the only escape is the back button, which takes them off your site entirely. A floating call button that dials a number you gave up. These are faults you never encounter yourself, because you look at your site on a laptop.
Seven: the pages are slow, and the images are why. A page built years ago with sensible photographs gets slower each time someone adds a full-size image straight from a phone camera. A gallery of twenty of those is a heavy page, and on mobile data it appears in pieces, or as a white screen for long enough that some people leave before they see it. Nothing looks wrong when you load it at the office on fast broadband from a cached copy.
How to check each one yourself, free
Prices. Open your price page beside your current quotation template or your last three invoices and read them against each other. Then search the whole site for the currency symbol so you catch the figures hiding in a packages block or an old blog post.
Services. On paper, list what you actually sold in the last three months. Compare that list to your navigation menu. Anything in the menu that is not on your list, and anything on your list that is not in the menu, needs attention.
People and dates. Read the team page next to your current staff. Then use your browser’s find function (Ctrl+F or Command+F) on each main page for "202" to surface every year you have written down, and check the footer.
The form. Submit it properly, with a real message, from your phone rather than your office computer. Then check the inbox, check the spam folder, and check that replying to the notification actually reaches the sender. Do this for every form on the site, not just the main one.
Links. Click every link on your homepage, main service page and footer. For the rest, paste your address into any free broken link checker and let it crawl; it will list what returns an error faster than you can click.
The phone. Turn off wifi, open the site on your own phone, and complete an enquiry one-handed. Better still, hand the phone to someone who has never seen the site and watch where they hesitate without helping them.
Speed. Run your busiest page through Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which is free and shows a mobile result. Then do the human version: load the page on mobile data and count the seconds out loud until you can read something.
Which to fix first
Fix the form today, because every day it stays broken costs enquiries you never know about. Then prices and business details, which mislead people. Then dead links, which are quick. Phone problems and speed come next, and they are usually one job rather than several. The design refresh you were worried about goes last, because it is the only thing on this list that is a matter of taste rather than accuracy.
Most of this is small work, an edit here and a replaced image there, which is exactly the kind of thing that never gets scheduled. We handle it on a monthly plan, so the fixes happen in the week you notice them rather than the quarter you get around to them.
