Four years ago I finished a website for a company in Pleszew. New, fast, properly set up for search. Project closed, invoice paid, everyone happy.
Two years later the same client got back in touch. The site was taking well over ten seconds to load, the contact form had stopped sending email, and the most recent backup was a year old. In those two years nobody had updated the CMS or a single plugin.
Sorting it out took two weeks and cost several thousand złoty. Ongoing maintenance across that whole period would have cost noticeably less — and the problem would never have happened in the first place.
I hear a version of this story regularly. The assumption is that once a site is live, the work is done. It isn't. A website is not a leaflet you print once.
A note on the numbers below: they're in Polish złoty, since that's what I quote in. Divide by roughly four for a rough figure in euros.
What technical support actually is
Technical support is a set of regular, repetitive jobs that keep a site in good shape. Nothing dramatic — somebody is simply making sure everything still works.
In practice it usually covers:
Software updates. The CMS, the plugins, the libraries — all of it ages. WordPress ships fixes almost monthly. Each update patches holes, but any of them can also break something, which is why they're worth testing rather than clicking through blind.
Security monitoring. Has unfamiliar code appeared in the files? Is somebody hammering the login page? The scanning is automatic; the part that matters is that a human responds to the alerts.
Backups. Daily, stored off the site's own server, with at least 30 days of history. Without that, every failure is a permanent one.
Performance monitoring. Is the site still as fast as it was on launch day? When a site slows down, it does it quietly and gradually — you won't notice on your own.
Uptime monitoring. Whether the site responds at all. The point is that you hear about an outage from monitoring, not from a customer.
Small changes. A new phone number, a photo on the About page, an outdated post to remove. Trivial individually, but somebody has to do them.
A person to contact. When something breaks, you know who to write to and how long the answer will take.
What happens to a site with nobody looking after it
"My site has been up for three years and it's fine." I hear that a lot. Usually it isn't fine yet — it just doesn't show.
Security. You don't need to be a big company for someone to take an interest. Bots scan the internet constantly, looking for known unpatched holes. Nobody checks first whether you're worth the trouble.
When an attempt succeeds, the outcomes are predictable: a crypto-mining script lands on the server, the site starts serving a fake bank login page, visitors get a malware warning in their browser, or spam starts going out from your domain and every email you send lands in junk folders.
All of these are fixable. None of them are cheap, and none of them are done in a day — I went through the recovery process in detail in what to do when your website is hacked.
Compatibility. Browsers change, standards change, phones change. A site built four years ago can start breaking on newer devices. Plugins have a lifecycle too — the author stops maintaining the project, and eventually the code simply stops working with a newer version of the CMS.
Performance. Every update, every new plugin, every full-resolution photo uploaded straight from a phone adds a little weight. With nobody watching, the site gets slower month by month. And load time feeds straight into how many visitors stay — Akamai and Google have been publishing the same finding for years: a second of delay measurably costs you conversions.
Content. A two-year-old price list, a photo of a product you no longer sell, opening hours that changed last spring. Not a technical problem, but it costs you credibility — and the owner is usually the last to find out.
The cost of neglect versus the cost of support
Three scenarios.
Scenario 1: no support, infection.
The site gets infected. It's discovered by Google, which flags the site as unsafe; or by a customer; or by nobody, for several months.
The bill tends to look like this:
- restoring a backup: 0–1000 PLN, assuming a backup exists at all
- cleaning the files and database: 1000–3000 PLN
- rotating passwords, keys and certificates: a few hundred złoty
- getting the warning removed from search results: several days of waiting
- lost trust from visitors: not something you can put a number on
Call it 1500–4500 PLN, plus the time and the stress.
Scenario 2: no support, a broken update.
Something stops working. The contact form swallows enquiries, the cart doesn't add shipping, the console is full of JavaScript errors. Somebody has to find the cause — and digging through someone else's neglected installation usually takes two to four hours.
The worse cost is the one you don't see on an invoice: how long the site was broken before anyone noticed.
Scenario 3: the site is maintained.
Updates go in deliberately, after testing. A backup runs every night. Monitoring catches an outage within minutes, usually before any of your customers sees it.
Cost: a few hundred złoty a month, depending on scope.
What maintenance should cost
Mostly it depends on how much is happening on the site.
A brochure site — a handful of pages
- backups and uptime monitoring
- quarterly updates
- email support, answered within a few working days
- roughly 100–300 PLN a month
A mid-sized site — blog, small shop, a substantial service site
- daily backups, uptime and performance monitoring
- monthly updates, applied after testing
- 24-hour response, two to three hours of small changes included
- roughly 300–700 PLN a month
A large site — a real shop, several integrations, custom business logic
- round-the-clock monitoring, backups with a short restore time
- updates tested on a staging copy before they go live
- several hours of work included each month, monthly report
- quarterly performance review
- roughly 700–1500 PLN a month
Worth noticing: a good part of this — backups, monitoring, alerting — is largely automated. What you're paying for isn't the clicking. It's that somebody answers the alerts.
What good maintenance includes
Non-negotiable:
- automatic daily backups, at least 30 days of retention, stored off the site's own server
- uptime monitoring
- CMS and plugin updates
- security scanning
- a stated response time
Should be there:
- performance monitoring
- a monthly report — what happened, what was done
- an allowance of hours for small changes
- an update process: staging copy first, production second
Nice to have:
- ongoing SEO fixes
- Google ranking monitoring
- consulting: what's worth doing next
Questions to ask before you sign
- What exactly is in the package? Ask for a list, not a slogan.
- How often do you take backups, and where are they stored?
- What happens when the site goes down on a Friday evening? What's the response time?
- What falls outside the package, and what does an extra hour cost?
- If I move to another provider, do I get the code, the database and the backups?
- Do I get a report, and how often?
- What's the notice period?
The warning signs are the exact inverse: no specifics about scope, no stated response time, reluctance to say where backups live, no references, and everything agreed verbally.
What you can handle yourself
Not all of it needs outsourcing. You can comfortably do:
- content — copy, new posts, price updates
- small visual changes — swapping a photo, fixing a heading
- analytics — checking where people arrive from and what they read
- SEO basics — thinking about which question a given page answers
Worth handing over is anything that can break the site for good: updates, security, backups, migrations, debugging and performance work.
Is it worth it?
A few hundred złoty a month reads as a cost. Set it against:
- the time you'll lose yourself hunting for the cause of an outage
- the cost of a single incident, which typically lands between 2000 and 5000 PLN
- the risk of your site not accepting enquiries for a week without you knowing
- what a slow site costs you in visitors who never waited for it to load
For me the arithmetic is simple: regular maintenance is cheaper than repair, and — more to the point — it's predictable.
Plenty of the companies I work with start without maintenance and only revisit it after their first real outage. I'd rather that first outage never happened.
If you have a site that nobody has looked at in a while, get in touch. I'll check what state it's in and tell you plainly whether you need ongoing support or just a one-off clean-up.