Website maintenance — six ways into this section and where to start

Website maintenance isn't one task but four jobs: keeping the site running, keeping it fast, making someone accountable for it and making it survive change. Each has its own article in this section. This page repeats none of them — it tells you where to start.

If you only do one thing

Answer three questions. Each takes a minute, and if you can’t answer one of them, that tells you which article to start with. These aren't technical questions — a business owner should be able to answer all three without calling the provider, because each concerns something that will be needed within a quarter of an hour on the day of an outage.

1. Who is the domain registered to, and who gets the renewal reminders? If the answer is "the agency, I think" — website maintenance services, with the list of accesses that should be in your company's name.
2. How will you find out the site is down? If the answer is "from a customer" — website monitoring.
3. When did someone last restore a backup of the site? If nobody ever has — backups, in the security section.

Six ways into this section

"We're signing a website maintenance contract — what should we watch for?"

Offers describe tasks and say nothing about three things: what you get when the provider breaks a promise, who owns what they build, and who holds the keys when you part. An SLA of 99.9% allows 44 minutes of downtime a month, and the compensation is often a partial fee refund, not your loss. The article also helps when the site is looked after by an employee — it explains why one person cannot provide on-call cover — and before changing provider, because it ends with five steps for handing a site to another firm.

→ Website maintenance services

"PageSpeed shows a red score — is it urgent?"

The score you see in PageSpeed and what Google measures are not the same list. Three thresholds, the difference between a test and data from real users, and the order in which to spend money on speed: first a layout that doesn't jump, then the images at the top of the page, the server last. Useful to anyone who has received an offer to "optimise to 90+ in PageSpeed" and wants to know what to ask before accepting it — and to anyone whose site gets too few visits for Google to measure it at all.

→ Core Web Vitals

"We hear about outages from our customers"

What to check beyond whether the server responds, what free monitoring gives you, who should get the alert, and why the length of an outage is decided by the response rather than by how often you check. It applies to every site that collects enquiries or sells, and to every company whose provider assures it that it is "keeping an eye on things" — because your own monitoring is the only independent measure of whether the contract is being kept.

→ Website monitoring

"The site shows a 500, 502 or 503 error"

A server error code tells you which segment failed — and whether to call the hosting company or the developer. With a "code — place — who to call" table and WordPress's critical error message. It applies when the error is already there, or appears now and then and disappears before anyone investigates — in the first minutes, "who should fix it" matters more than "how".

→ 500, 502, 503 and 504 errors

"After a redesign, Google is reporting 404 errors"

Where they come from, when to redirect and when to leave the error, what 403, 401 and 400 mean — and a map of all response codes. Most often needed after a redesign, a menu change or a content clean-up, when addresses that used to work multiply. It also explains why our own site answers non-existent addresses with a 200 code — and why that is a deliberate choice.

→ 404 Not Found, 403, 401 and 400

"We're changing hosting, domain or platform"

Three different operations called by one name, each with a different risk. Domain transfer, DNS propagation and a 301 redirect map — and why Google keeps seeing the old address for weeks. Best read before the decision, not during it: if the changes come together, separate them in time, because after a drop following three simultaneous changes you can't tell which one caused it.

→ Website migration

What order to read this in

Three paths, depending on what brought you here.

Nothing has happened and you simply want to put things in order. Start with the three questions above, then monitoring — the only article in this section after which something starts working without your involvement. Finally, maintenance services, if you have a provider, so you know which items on this list they handle and which stay with you.

Something is already happening. The site is down or showing an error — go straight to server errors and the "who to call" table. Pages are disappearing from Google, or customers land on "not found" — go to 404 not found. Both articles start with what to check in the first minutes.

You're preparing for a change or a conversation with a provider. Before a move — migration. Before signing a contract or changing firms — maintenance services. Before accepting an offer to "speed up the site" — Core Web Vitals. Each of these three articles gives you a list of questions you can ask at the meeting.

Why it's continuous work, not a one-off

It shows most clearly in speed, because that is the one thing measured publicly across the whole web.

According to the Web Almanac 2025, a good result is achieved by 48% of sites on mobile and 56% on desktop, and home pages do worse than inner pages. The home page is usually the most frequently changed part of a site — and every change can spoil a result that used to be good. That is why maintenance is a rhythm, not a project. We break down what this means for your site in the article on Core Web Vitals.

Website maintenance on the calendar

Every row missing from your provider's offer is a job that stays with you — which is fine, as long as someone in the company knows it.

What this section does not cover

• Updates and backups — they belong to the security section, because that is where their purpose lies: they protect against break-ins and data loss.
• The cost of maintenance — the bill for hosting, domain, licences and labour is broken down in the article on website maintenance costs.
• Google rankings — a fast, working site is a precondition, but Google states plainly that good Core Web Vitals don't guarantee rankings. That is separate work.
• Redesigning the site — maintenance preserves what exists; a decision about redesign or optimisation is a different conversation.