"My web designer disappeared." "My site got hacked." "I haven't updated WordPress in three years." Every Irish small-business owner who's been online more than five years has a version of one of these stories. The fix is unglamorous: a small monthly maintenance budget, started the day the site goes live and never stopped.
What a sensible maintenance retainer covers
- CMS, theme, and plugin updates. Applied weekly or fortnightly, with a backup before each update.
- Security patches. Critical patches applied within 48 hours of release.
- Daily backups, kept off-site. Tested restore at least quarterly.
- Uptime monitoring. Alerts to a human when the site is down.
- Performance check. Quarterly Lighthouse audit, action items addressed.
- Broken-link sweep. Quarterly. Outbound links rot; internal links break when pages are renamed.
- Form-submission heartbeat. Confirms contact forms are still delivering email.
- Small content edits. Up to 1–2 hours of edit time per month. New phone number, updated team page, new product photo.
- Annual security audit. Once a year, a deeper review of admin accounts, plugins-no-longer-needed, exposed configuration.
Reasonable budget bands
- €40–€80/month — minimum viable maintenance. Updates and backups. No human content edits. Suits a stable brochure site.
- €120–€250/month — small-business standard. Covers everything in the bullet list above. The honest sweet spot for most Irish SMBs.
- €350–€800/month — content + maintenance retainer. Includes monthly content updates, light SEO work, and the maintenance baseline. Worth it for businesses where the website is a primary revenue channel.
What to do yourself, what to outsource
- Easy to do yourself: updating phone numbers, opening hours, photos. Most CMS interfaces are designed for this.
- Easy to do yourself but easy to forget: running plugin updates, checking backups. Calendar reminders work; better still, pay someone to remember.
- Worth outsourcing: security patches, performance audits, anything involving server or DNS configuration.
- Always outsource: recovering from a hack. Trying to clean a compromised site yourself usually makes it worse.
Red flags in maintenance contracts
- "Maintenance" that doesn't include backups. Read the actual list. "Maintenance" means different things to different vendors.
- Hourly retainers with vague scope. "Up to X hours per month" usually means you'll never quite know what you're paying for. Fixed-fee with a clear deliverable list is cleaner.
- The vendor controls the hosting and refuses to give you direct access. Same lock-in problem as the domain rule. Always have your own credentials.
- "Free with a content retainer" offers. Often the maintenance is genuinely free; equally often, the content retainer is overpriced to cover it.
The single rule
If you can't articulate what maintenance covers, you don't have maintenance — you have a vague hope that someone is paying attention. Pin it down in writing.