How often should a website be maintained?

Websites fail quietly. A contact form stops delivering, a certificate expires, a plugin update breaks a layout on mobile — and nobody notices until an enquiry that should have arrived never does.

Weekly

• Confirm the site is up and loading correctly on mobile
• Submit a test enquiry through your main form and confirm it arrives
• Check that backups ran
• Review security alerts for anything your site actually runs

Monthly

• Apply core, plugin and theme updates — on staging first
• Check page speed on a real mobile connection, not just a desktop test
• Fix broken links and 404s appearing in Search Console
• Review analytics for pages that suddenly stopped receiving traffic

Quarterly

• Actually restore a backup to verify it works
• Review user accounts and remove access nobody needs any more
• Check domain, SSL and licence renewal dates
• Review content that has gone stale — pricing, team, service descriptions

Annually

• Full accessibility and performance review
• Review hosting plan against actual usage
• Check legal pages still reflect how you handle data
• Assess whether the site still matches what the business now sells

Is your current arrangement working?

Three questions answer this. When was the last update applied? When was a backup last restored, rather than merely taken? Who gets alerted when the site goes down at 2am? If any answer is "I am not sure", the arrangement is not working, whatever it costs.