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.
Somebody has decided the site needs a popup: for the mailing list, a seasonal offer, or because a competitor has one. Your first thought was of every popup that has ever made you close a tab.
Keep that instinct. Popups do work (they are why plenty of small businesses have a mailing list at all), but the ones that work and the ones people resent are separated by three settings rather than by the offer: timing, targeting and frequency. Almost every popup you have hated got one of them wrong.
Why popups have a bad reputation, deservedly
The popup you remember appeared two seconds after the page loaded, before you had read a sentence, asking you to subscribe to a newsletter from a company you had not decided you cared about. It covered the text, and the close button was a pale grey cross in a corner. On a phone the box did not fit the screen, so the cross sat off the edge and the only way out was the back button.
That is four decisions, each defensible alone, stacked into something hostile: show it immediately, show it to everyone, show it every visit, and make it awkward to dismiss.
Search engines have taken a public position on the worst of it, treating interstitials that cover what a mobile visitor came to read as a mark against the page. Set that aside and the plainer objection remains: someone who arrived for your opening hours and got a discount code is not a visitor you have improved.
Rule one: timing and trigger
The trigger answers when. There are four reasonable ones and one bad one.
The bad one is immediately. A popup on page load interrupts a decision the visitor has not begun to make. They cannot judge the offer, having read nothing. It gets dismissed on reflex.
Time on page is the simplest improvement. Fifteen to thirty seconds is long enough that the reader has settled, short enough that they are still there. On a long article, longer.
Scroll depth is better still, because it measures interest rather than patience. Somebody who has scrolled halfway down is reading. Interrupting an engaged reader sounds worse than interrupting a curious one, and behaves better.
Exit intent fires when the cursor moves towards the browser controls, on the assumption that the visit is ending anyway. It interrupts nothing. It also does not exist on touchscreens, where there is no cursor to follow, so it is a desktop-only option, and phones need a separate answer.
A click is quietest of all: a small link that opens the form when somebody asks.
Rule two: which pages, and which visitors
A popup set to fire everywhere will fire where it makes no sense.
Match the offer to the page. A discount on garden furniture belongs on the furniture pages, not the careers listing. A visitor halfway through your contact form does not need an invitation to join the mailing list. Exclude the contact page, any checkout, and the thank-you page somebody reaches after acting.
Exclude people who have already done it. Most tools can suppress the popup for anyone who has subscribed or arrived from a customer email. Asking an existing customer to sign up tells them you do not know who they are.
Think about where the visitor came from. If you are paying for clicks to a landing page built around one action, a popup competes with the thing you paid for. The page asks a clear question; a second one splits the answer.
Most tools handle this with page rules. It is ten minutes of setup that removes most of the irritation.
Rule three: frequency capping
Capping is the setting people skip, because the default looks sensible and is not. Once per session means somebody who visits three times this week sees it three times.
Set three limits instead. Show it once, then wait. If a visitor has seen the popup, do not show it again for a week or two. Stop after two refusals. Somebody who has closed it twice has answered. Suppress it for several months, or permanently. Never show it again after they act. A subscriber who keeps being asked to subscribe is watching your site fail to notice them.
These limits live in the visitor’s browser. They reset if somebody clears their data or switches device, which is fine. When you test your own popup, use a normal window rather than a private one, so you can confirm the cap works rather than seeing a fresh visitor every time.
Making it accessible and safe on a phone
A popup takes over the page, so it has to hand control back cleanly.
The Escape key must close it. So must a click on the dimmed area outside the box. Both are what people try first.
Keyboard focus should move into the popup when it opens and back to the page when it closes. Otherwise a keyboard user tabs into a form they cannot see, or lands back at the top of the page.
Never cover the whole screen on a phone. A panel across the lower half, or a bar along the bottom, tells the visitor they are still on your page.
Make the close button big enough for a thumb. A small cross in the corner of a phone-sized box is a target most people miss at least once, and the second miss loses them. Give it real padding, put it where a thumb reaches, and keep it clear of the browser’s own controls.
Measuring whether it is worth keeping
Your popup tool will tell you how many people saw it and how many acted. That ratio is the first thing to look at, not the only one. Watch the pages it appears on: if visitors are leaving them sooner than they used to, the popup is costing you something the sign-up count does not show.
Put a date in the diary a month out and decide. A popup that has collected almost nobody while sitting over your best page has failed, and switching it off is a fair outcome.
Timing, targeting, capping and a test on a real handset take an afternoon to get right and twenty minutes to get wrong. If that afternoon is not yours to spend, it is one of the things we set up on a maintenance plan.
