What does website care include, and what does it not?

A website is not finished at launch. Domains need renewing, hosting needs to stay secure, software changes, forms need to keep working and the business itself moves on. Opening hours change, a price rises, a menu is updated or a photograph is replaced.

Website care is the name for the routine work of looking after a site once it is live. Suppliers use the term differently, so the useful question is not whether a plan is called care or maintenance but what exactly it covers, who does it and what it costs. This guide explains the usual parts and the boundaries worth checking.

Hosting and security certificates

Hosting is where the website files live and from where they are served to visitors. Good hosting for a small business site is fast, reliable and secure, and it comes with a security certificate (SSL) so that browsers show the site as secure and the connection is encrypted.

Someone has to be responsible for that. Questions worth asking:

• Who pays for the hosting, and is it included or billed separately?
• Who renews the security certificate, or is it renewed automatically?
• In whose name is the hosting account held?

Page & Place’s care plan includes managed Cloudflare hosting and SSL. Because Page & Place sites are predominantly static, with pages prepared in advance rather than assembled on every visit, there is less running software to look after than on many traditional content-managed sites.

Domain administration

The domain is the web address, such as a business’s own name followed by .co.uk. It is registered for a set period and has to be renewed, and its settings (DNS records) tell the internet where to send web traffic and email.

Care normally includes keeping an eye on renewals and managing the DNS settings. The important point is ownership: the domain should be registered to the business, and the business should be named as the registrant, even if a supplier manages the settings on its behalf. Page & Place’s plan covers domain administration and renewal coordination, and the domain remains registered to the client.

Software and configuration updates

Every website depends on software, whether that is a content-management system and its plugins or the tools used to build and publish a static site. Updates fix faults and close security holes. Skipping them is how many small business sites end up broken or compromised.

A care plan should say who applies updates, how often and what happens when an update breaks something. Page & Place’s plan includes routine software and configuration updates.

Monitoring and fixes

Monitoring means that someone notices when the site goes down or stops working, rather than the business finding out from a customer.

Page & Place’s plan includes basic uptime monitoring, basic enquiry-form monitoring where the website contains an enquiry form, and technical fixes to existing Page & Place functionality. “Basic” is the operative word. It is routine checking of whether the site and form are working, not a guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong.

Backups and version history

Backups are a common point of confusion. For a traditional database-driven site, a backup is a copy of the database and files that can restore the site after a failure. For a static site the position is different, because the site is built from source files.

Page & Place’s care plan does not list backups as a separate item. Instead, changes to the website go through a source repository with version history, so deployment, testing and history stay controlled. If backups matter to your business, ask every supplier to explain exactly what is kept, where, for how long and who can restore it.

Content changes

This is the part of care that most small businesses actually use. Typical routine changes include:

• updating opening hours;
• editing a menu or a price list;
• swapping an image;
• changing a few lines of text.

Page & Place’s plan includes one consolidated request each month and up to 30 minutes of routine content work. That covers menu, image, opening-hour and small text changes. Sending changes as a single monthly request keeps the work organised and means deployment, testing and version history stay controlled.

The allowance does not roll over. If a month passes without a request, the unused time does not carry forward to the next.

What is not routine care

Equally important is what falls outside. In Page & Place’s plan, new pages, redesigns, new features, integrations, substantial copywriting and larger changes are quoted separately before work begins. More complex websites, such as online shops, CRM integrations and bespoke systems, may need a project-specific support and maintenance plan agreed during scoping, because the standard plan does not automatically cover that infrastructure.

Where an approved change falls outside the care allowance and an hourly scope suits it, Page & Place’s additional work is £50 per hour.

This division is healthy. Care keeps a site healthy and current. Anything that changes what the site is or does is a project, and should be scoped and priced as one.

Editing the site yourself or using another developer

A business should not feel locked out of its own website. Page & Place’s approach is that clients can have access to the source repository where appropriate. Most clients send routine changes to Page & Place while care is active, which keeps deployment, testing and version history controlled.

There is a practical consequence to be aware of with any supplier. If you or another developer change the site directly, the care provider cannot automatically take responsibility for problems those changes introduce. In Page & Place’s case, reviewing or repairing them may sit outside the care allowance and be quoted at £50 per hour.

Contract terms to read carefully

Whatever the provider, read the terms around how care starts and ends. Things to look for include:

• the minimum term and what happens at the end of it;
• whether payment is monthly, annual or both, and whether there is a saving for paying annually;
• what happens to hosting and support if the plan stops;
• whether the website and domain remain yours;
• whether a standard handover to another provider is included and what an extra migration would cost.

At Page & Place, Website Care is required with every new website for an initial 12-month term. It costs £25 per month, or £250 per year paid annually in advance, which saves £50, equivalent to two months free. After the initial term the client can choose monthly rolling care or another annual renewal. Managed hosting, support and maintenance stop when the care plan ends, but the website is not held to Website Care. Once the website has been paid for, the client keeps the domain and can receive the complete website source code so another developer or hosting provider can take over, and a normal source-code and account handover is included. The full wording is on the Website Care page.

A checklist for comparing care plans

When comparing plans from different suppliers, ask:

1. What exactly is included in hosting, updates and monitoring?
2. How are backups or version history handled?
3. How much routine content work is included, and how is a request made?
4. Does unused time roll over?
5. What is quoted separately, and how is that priced?
6. What is the minimum term, and what happens when it ends?
7. Who holds the domain, hosting account and source code?
8. What happens if you want to move to someone else?

Clear answers to those questions matter more than the price alone. A plan that is slightly cheaper but vague about boundaries often costs more once the first change is requested.

Summary

Routine website care is the day-to-day responsibility that stops a site from ageing badly: hosting, domain administration, updates, monitoring and small content changes. It works best when its boundaries are clear. Anything larger is a project in its own right and should be quoted as one.

To see how Page & Place approaches it, read about Website Care, compare the plan with the rest of the packages on the pricing page, or ask a question about a website project.