By Aurélien Debord · · updated on November 9, 2025
When creating a website, the professional often offers the client site maintenance. Website maintenance is sometimes listed as an option, and from experience, I've noticed that when it's not mandatory, it's only chosen about half the time. Why? Because initially, when you want to create a website, you might not fully understand what maintenance entails and, more importantly, you might not grasp its importance. There's a fear that it might involve paying for an opaque or unnecessary service. This is not the case. Here is a brief overview of the advantages that make website maintenance indispensable.
Unless you're a bit unconventional, if you're creating a site, it's because you want it to succeed. Who would say "no" to more visitors? Success means traffic. Therefore, you need to ensure that your site's hosting can handle an increase in load, in other words, that it can cope if your traffic doubles. And if you can't ensure this, at least answer this question:
What do we do if the site crashes? Is there a backup?
You might say that traffic doesn't double overnight, so there's always time to prepare. And yet... It's not uncommon for a site's traffic to spike following a well-performing blog post, especially due to increased sharing on social media. In the event of a crash, if you don't have a maintenance guarantee, you might find yourself without a site, possibly for an extended period. Then, you'll have to call in a professional for an ad hoc service, which will likely be more expensive.
Today, most websites are built with scalable solutions (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.). What does this scalability mean? It means that the content management of your site and its modules can be updated (to improve their performance, make them more secure, etc.). This is an undeniable advantage as it extends the lifespan of your site. However, if you do not perform these updates, this advantage disappears. These updates are not always as straightforward as they might seem. Often, an update is carried out smoothly and without issue. In fact, since the latest versions of WordPress, the plugin update process has become even more seamless. But should you encounter an incompatibility, it immediately becomes more problematic, especially if it occurs on the live site. In such cases, the importance of having a backup to recover from or deploying updates on a test version becomes clear. During website maintenance, these procedures are implemented to ensure the integrity of the live site.
In content management, there are three types of elements to update:
The theme must also be updated because, depending on the developed functionalities, they need to be aligned with the new version of the core or the modules.
During a website's lifespan, it's not uncommon for it to change hosting, moving from one server to another. In this case, a "migration" is performed. When your site arrives in a new environment, it's best if it is "clean," meaning it's not overly complex. This is simply to avoid any compatibility issues, errors, or other unforeseen problems.
Over the years, I've sometimes seen websites that, with the addition of new features, start to resemble complex systems. Occasionally, new features are installed to replace old ones that have become deficient or less advanced. In such cases, website maintenance is crucial as it allows for the site's evolution and helps decide what to keep and what to discard. This prevents having obsolete modules and helps maintain a stable system. It's important to remember that a large number of plugins installed on a site can slow it down. And a slower site means a site with penalized search engine optimization.
A maintenance contract is also the best insurance against hacking. Contrary to popular belief, website hacks are very rarely targeted. Most of the time, a site is hacked because it was detected by a script searching for vulnerabilities.
So what actually happens when your site gets hacked? The most visible thing first: your site starts displaying something it shouldn't. Phishing pages, redirects to shady websites, links to online pharmacies... Your customers land on that, and your credibility takes a hit. Good luck convincing them their data is safe with you after that.
The financial side adds up quickly. You need to pay an expert to clean the site, find the vulnerability, and put everything back in order. If personal data was leaked, you may also face fines under GDPR. And while all this is going on, your site is offline, so you're losing revenue.
There's also something people often forget: a hacked site can be used as a relay to send spam or launch attacks on other sites. Your hosting provider eventually notices and shuts everything down. You end up with no site at all, sometimes blacklisted by Google.
A hack isn't just a technical inconvenience. It's a real commercial, financial, and legal problem.
Maintaining your site means protecting your business. Plain and simple.
The adjective attached to the word "maintenance" holds great importance. If you subscribe to application maintenance, it means that your site and its components will be updated. This is also known as TMA (third-party application maintenance).
When we talk about corrective maintenance, it means that in addition to updating the site, any new bugs will also be fixed. A browser update can introduce a display bug, for example. Corrective maintenance guarantees those issues get resolved. The scope is broader, so this kind of contract is generally more expensive.
The first thing to do is hope that nothing unfortunate happens to you :) More seriously, you can subscribe to one with any webmaster or web agency; or most simply with the person who created your site. I especially recommend choosing a company that truly masters the technical solution you are using. Avoid companies that sell maintenance regardless of your technical solution. When aiming to do good work, it's not possible to master everything perfectly, even if one can dabble in everything.
For example, even though I'm comfortable with Joomla and Drupal, I don't provide maintenance for sites built on those CMSs. I've created sites with both solutions in the past, but that's not enough. I only maintain WordPress sites, because WordPress is THE platform I work with daily, the one whose updates I track closely, the one whose strengths, weaknesses and compatibility traps I genuinely know. To be done well, maintenance has to be a specialist's job.
If you decide to forgo maintenance packages, you'll have to call a service provider whenever something goes wrong. They'll run a quick diagnosis and send you a quote. If they don't know your site and need time to get up to speed, the bill will reflect that. And if you're in a hurry, you'll have less room to negotiate.
Maintenance is a kind of insurance. It keeps your site in good shape, and it extends its lifespan. Creating a site is an investment, and like any investment, it needs to be looked after. Website maintenance is part of a risk economy: it's not mandatory, but it's worth thinking twice before you skip it.
And at Madori
€1,400/year excl. tax: tested updates, 24/7 monitoring, monthly report. We even take over sites built elsewhere. our WordPress maintenance service.
See our maintenance service →Whether you need a new site, a takeover of an existing one, or expert maintenance, we help your marketing and communications teams rely on a reliable, high-performing WordPress that's easy to manage.
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