Website maintenance after launch: the monthly list, and what it costs

Handing over a website and leaving it alone is normal, and it runs fine for quite a while. The problem is that when something does go wrong it tends to go badly wrong, because nobody has looked at it for a year.

Here is the monthly list, in order of importance. Most of it you can do yourself in an hour.

The monthly list

1. Restore a backup

The most important item, and the one almost nobody does.

"Automated daily backups" does not mean you have backups. It means files are being created. Until you have restored one, you do not know whether they work.

Once a quarter is enough, but it has to be real: download the backup, rebuild on a test environment, and see whether the site runs.

2. Check Search Console

Open the Pages section and look for pages that moved from indexed to error. This is where you catch SEO problems before they affect revenue.

Five minutes, and it is the best early-warning system you have, free.

3. Test the contact form

Fill it in and submit, using a real address of your own. Confirm the message arrives.

A contact form failing silently is one of the most expensive and hardest-to-spot faults — no error message, simply no enquiries any more. We have seen it discovered after four months.

4. Check the SSL certificate

With Let's Encrypt and auto-renewal this is usually fine, but auto-renewal can also fail. Open the site, look at the padlock, click it and read the expiry date.

An expired certificate shows a red browser warning, and visitors close the tab.

5. Check speed

Paste the home page into PageSpeed Insights, Mobile tab. Compare with last month.

Speed usually degrades over time as content is added — uncompressed images, a new tracking script, a new plugin. A monthly check catches the trend. See the Core Web Vitals article for what to fix.

6. Look for stale information

Are the prices still right, the opening hours still right, the staff on the about page still here, and are discontinued products still showing?

Small work, and the thing customers notice most. A website showing last year's prices makes people call to ask, then be disappointed.

7. Update dependencies

This one needs a technical person. On a Next.js site it means updating packages and retesting. On WordPress it means core and plugin updates — and there it matters far more, because most compromised WordPress sites are breached through an un-updated plugin.

Sensible frequency: monthly for WordPress, quarterly for a site with no plugins.

8. Look at analytics

No deep analysis needed. Just: is traffic up or down on last month, and where are visitors arriving from?

If traffic dropped sharply and you changed nothing, go back to item 2.

What it actually costs

Doing it yourself: about one to two hours a month for items 1–6, plus a technical person for item 7.

Outsourcing: 500,000–2 million VND a month is the market rate for an ordinary business website. Above that it should include content updates, not just maintenance.

The question to ask a maintenance provider: "what report do I receive each month?" With no report, you are paying for work you cannot verify.

Set once and forget

Three things you do once and they run themselves:

• Automated daily backups, stored somewhere other than the main server
• Downtime alerts — several free services check every five minutes and email or text you
• A domain renewal reminder in your own calendar, a month before expiry

The second is the most valuable of the three. Knowing the site is down within five minutes rather than two days later when a customer calls is a very large difference.

With our products

Our templates include free updates for the life of the product, so item 7 is mostly downloading and applying a release. Six months of technical support over Zalo covers questions along the way.

Those six months are finite and we say so up front. After that, if you would like us to keep handling maintenance, that is a separate service priced monthly — but most clients handle it themselves once they are used to it, and we encourage that.