When it comes to maintaining your business website, you broadly have two options: do it yourself or pay a professional to do it for you. Both have merit depending on your situation — and the right answer depends on your technical confidence, the type of site you're running, and how much time you realistically have.
What DIY Website Maintenance Involves
If you choose to maintain your own website, here's what the job actually entails:
Regular plugin and theme updates — Ideally monthly, you need to log into your WordPress dashboard, check for updates, and apply them. This sounds simple, but updates can occasionally break things — particularly when a plugin update conflicts with your theme or another plugin. You need to know how to identify and fix these conflicts.
Taking and storing backups — You need a backup solution in place and you need to verify that it's actually running. A backup plugin that silently fails is worse than no backup at all, because you believe you're protected when you're not.
Security monitoring — You'll need a security plugin installed and configured correctly, and you need to actually check its reports and act on alerts.
Performance checks — Periodically running speed tests, identifying slow pages, and addressing the causes takes time and some technical knowledge.
Staying informed — When major vulnerabilities are discovered in common plugins, you need to know about them quickly and take action fast.
Troubleshooting problems — When something breaks — and eventually something will — you need the knowledge and time to diagnose and fix it.
Who DIY Maintenance Works Well For
Doing your own maintenance makes sense if:
- You're technically comfortable with WordPress and understand how the platform works
- You have genuine time to allocate to it consistently each month — not just when you remember
- Your website is relatively simple, with few complex plugins or integrations
- You're prepared to invest time learning when problems arise
For a developer, a technically confident business owner, or someone who genuinely enjoys managing their site, DIY maintenance is viable. The key is consistency — a sporadic approach to maintenance is arguably worse than none at all, because it creates a false sense of security.
The Risks of DIY Maintenance
The most common DIY maintenance failures aren't caused by incompetence — they're caused by time. Running a business is demanding, and website maintenance is exactly the kind of task that gets pushed back when things get busy.
A plugin update skipped for a month becomes two months, then six. The backup plugin sends a failure notification that gets buried in email. A performance issue develops gradually enough that it isn't noticed until it's significantly affecting rankings.
There's also the question of what happens when something goes wrong. If an update breaks your site and you don't know how to fix it, you're looking at an emergency call to a developer — at emergency rates, with your website offline in the meantime.
What Professional Maintenance Offers
A professional website maintenance service removes the dependency on your time and technical knowledge. Updates are applied consistently, by someone who knows what to do when they cause a problem. Backups are taken, stored, and verified. Security monitoring runs continuously. Performance is tracked and addressed proactively.
The other significant benefit is accountability. When your site is being maintained professionally, someone is responsible for knowing what's happening with it. Problems don't slip through the cracks because no one was paying attention.
For a full breakdown of what professional maintenance covers, see what does a website maintenance package actually cover.
Making the Decision
The honest question to ask yourself is: over the last six months, have you consistently done all the things in the DIY list above? If the answer is no, and you're running an important business website, a maintenance package is likely worth considering.
Our website maintenance packages are built for small business owners who want their website properly looked after without having to think about it. Get in touch and we'll give you an honest picture of what level of support makes sense for your site.