A surprising number of small business websites die quietly within 18 months of launch. Not because they were badly built. Because nobody planned for what happens after launch day.
The good news: website maintenance isn’t expensive or complicated. It just has to happen. Here’s an honest look at what real “after launch” actually involves, what it costs, and how to decide whether to do it yourself or hand it off.
Why “set it and forget it” fails
A modern website is a living system. The browsers it renders in update every few weeks. The platform it runs on releases security patches every month. The information it displays — your hours, prices, services, team — changes throughout the year. The links you point to break when other sites move them. And every quiet failure compounds.
Within a year of neglect, a typical small business site shows:
- Out-of-date prices and services
- Several broken external links
- A contact form that silently stopped sending emails
- A noticeably slower load time
- Cookie banners and privacy notices out of legal compliance
- Plugins or libraries with known security vulnerabilities
Within two years, it’s not unusual to see the same site hacked, defaced, or quietly serving pharmaceutical spam pages — without the owner knowing for months.
What basic maintenance actually involves
The unglamorous monthly checklist for a healthy small business website:
Software and platform updates
- Apply CMS updates within a week of release
- Update plugins and themes
- Update any custom-built dependencies
- Test the site after each major update
Backups
- Automated daily off-site backups
- Periodic restore test (a backup you’ve never restored isn’t a backup)
- Retention of at least the last 30 days
Security
- Active firewall and rate-limiting
- Malware scans
- SSL certificate renewal monitoring
- Regular review of admin user accounts
Functionality checks
- Test the contact form once a month — actually submit it and confirm receipt
- Test any payment or booking flow
- Click around on a phone, looking for obvious breakage
Content hygiene
- Update hours, prices, team, services as they change
- Replace any time-sensitive content (expired promotions, old events)
- Refresh stale copyright year in the footer
- Remove anything no longer accurate
Performance and SEO health
- Monthly page speed check
- Broken link scan
- Search Console review for crawl errors
- Check for any traffic anomalies
Reporting
- A short monthly summary so you actually know what’s happening
For most Medicine Hat small business websites, all of this is comfortably 1 – 3 hours of work per month.
What it costs
Honest market rates for ongoing website maintenance in Alberta in 2026:
- DIY — $0, plus a few hours of your time per month. Plus the cost of fixing whatever you eventually miss.
- Basic maintenance plan — $50 – $100 CAD/month. Covers software updates, backups, security, monthly checks, and small text/photo edits (typically 30 minutes of edit time included).
- Maintenance + content — $150 – $300 CAD/month. Adds blog posts, regular content updates, Google Business Profile posts, and basic SEO monitoring.
- Full marketing retainer — $500 – $1,500+ CAD/month. Adds active SEO, ad management, analytics reporting, conversion optimisation.
The single most common pattern we see: businesses spend $3,000 on a beautiful new website, then spend $0 on maintenance, and within 18 months the website is no longer competitive. That’s a brutal return on investment.
DIY vs. hiring
Reasonable rules of thumb:
DIY is fine if:
- You’re tech-comfortable
- You can spare 2 – 3 hours a month, every month
- Your platform makes updates safe (most modern hosted platforms do)
- A short outage wouldn’t seriously hurt your business
Hire it out if:
- Your time is worth more than $50/hour
- The website actually drives business (calls, bookings, sales)
- You’d rather not learn what a “PHP version mismatch” is at 11pm
- You want a single accountable person when something breaks
For most local businesses past the side-hustle phase, paying $50 – $100/month for someone competent to keep the lights on is the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy.
What to look for in a maintenance provider
Not all “maintenance plans” are equal. Before signing up, ask:
- What’s the response time when something is broken?
- How many edit minutes per month are included?
- What’s included vs. extra (e.g. is a new page extra, is a plugin issue extra)?
- Where are backups stored and how do I get a copy?
- Will I get a monthly report, or do I just see the invoice?
- What’s the cancellation policy if I want to leave?
- Who actually owns my site, my domain, and my content if I leave?
Vague answers to any of these are a yellow flag. Vague answers to the ownership question are a red flag.
A reasonable middle path
If you’re cost-conscious but don’t want to gamble, this works for most Medicine Hat small businesses:
- Pay for a basic maintenance plan ($50 – $100/month) covering technical updates, backups, security, and a small amount of edits.
- Handle the content updates yourself — your hours, your team, your prices, your blog posts.
- Re-evaluate every 6 – 12 months and adjust.
This gives you the boring-but-essential safety net while keeping the costs sensible.
What we offer
We include a 30-day post-launch support window with every project we build, so the immediate post-launch tweaks are on us. After that, clients can choose between a basic maintenance plan or self-managing — both are valid choices.
If you’d like to talk through what your specific site needs (or already has), book a free consultation. We’ll do a quick post-launch health check on your existing site at no charge, even if you didn’t build it with us.
