Website Maintenance Contracts for Irish Businesses

We sell maintenance, so take the recommendation with that in mind. What follows is what the work actually involves and what goes wrong without it, drawn from the sites we look after and the ones we have taken over from other people.

What a maintenance contract covers

A maintenance contract is a standing arrangement for someone to keep your site updated, backed up and monitored, and to fix what breaks. On WordPress that means core, theme and plugin updates, scheduled backups held somewhere other than the same server, uptime and security monitoring, and the SSL certificate and PHP version being someone’s responsibility rather than nobody’s.

The part that varies between providers is what happens after an update goes wrong. Automated services apply updates and move on. They have no view of whether your booking form still submits afterwards. That gap is where most of the damage happens.

The failures that do not announce themselves

Nobody rings us because a plugin needs updating. They ring because something is wrong and they cannot work out when it started.

The worst case we deal with regularly is a host restoring an old backup without telling anyone. The site comes back up looking fine. Weeks of content changes are gone, and there is nothing on screen to say so. A business owner who does not audit their own pages line by line has no way to detect this. We now write a version number into two separate places on every site we look after and email ourselves whenever it changes, purely so a silent rollback shows up the same day rather than three months later.

The same restores bring back things that were deliberately removed. We have deleted an analytics plugin from a site, confirmed it gone, and found it running again weeks later, collecting data the client had decided to stop collecting. Under GDPR that is the client’s problem, not the plugin’s.

Then there is the well-meant DIY intervention. Someone reads that a caching plugin makes sites faster and installs one, not realising a different caching plugin is already running. The two fight, pages serve stale or half-styled, and the site is slower than before. We see this often enough that it is one of the first things we check on a handover.

PHP end of life is the one that catches people out entirely. It is not a WordPress update, so no update screen mentions it. Your host eventually forces the version forward, an old plugin is not compatible, and the site goes white. Anyone watching PHP versions sees this coming months ahead.

When you do not need a contract

If you are technically confident, run updates yourself, hold backups off the server and would notice within a day if the site went down, you do not need to pay anyone for this. Some of our clients handle their own upkeep and only call us for specific jobs. That is a reasonable arrangement and we will say so.

The businesses that genuinely need cover are the ones where the site does commercial work. Bookings, payments, enquiry forms that generate real revenue, customer data sitting in a database. If a fortnight of downtime or a broken form would cost you actual money, the maintenance question is not really about the website.

Questions worth asking before you sign anything

Most maintenance pages list the same features, so the features are not what separates providers. These four questions do:

• Where are the backups held, and have you restored one recently? A backup nobody has ever tested is a hope, not a backup.
• Who checks the site after updates run, and how? If the answer is that updates are automated, ask what happens when one breaks a page.
• Am I told when something is fixed? Silent maintenance is indistinguishable from no maintenance, and it makes renewal feel like paying for nothing.
• Does this include the hosting layer? PHP versions, SSL renewal and DNS sit outside WordPress and outside most plugin-based maintenance plans.

Ask a cheap automated service those questions and the answers get vague quickly.

How we handle it

You deal with the person doing the work. Updates are applied and then the site is actually looked at, with particular attention to forms, checkout and anything custom, because those are what break. Backups are held away from the server. You get told what was done.

If your site was built by someone you have lost contact with, that is a normal starting point for us and not a problem. Our website maintenance services page sets out what is included, and the cost of web design explains how we price ongoing work. If it is easier to talk it through, ring 085 105 7555.