A website rarely breaks all at once. More often, it gets slower, a form stops sending, a plugin goes out of date, or your contact details quietly become wrong. If you have ever wondered what does website maintenance include, the short answer is this: all the ongoing work that keeps your site secure, accurate, fast, visible, and useful for your customers.

For small businesses, that matters more than most owners realise. Your website is often the first place someone checks before calling, booking, or visiting. If it loads poorly, looks outdated, or gives people a dead end, it can cost you leads without making much noise about it.

What does website maintenance include in practice?

Website maintenance is not just one task. It is a mix of technical upkeep, content updates, performance checks, security monitoring, and business-focused improvements. Some of it happens in the background, and some of it is customer-facing. Together, those tasks help your site stay healthy and keep doing its job.

A good maintenance plan usually includes software updates, plugin and theme checks, backups, uptime monitoring, security scans, speed improvements, form testing, broken link checks, content edits, and basic SEO upkeep. Depending on the type of business

You sign up at a new website, and, being security-conscious, you use a password creator to give you a nice long, secure password. I use Nordpass to create ours at 16 characters with upper and lower case, numbers, and symbols. Helpfully, your browser throws up a pop-up, offering to save your new login so you won't have to remember that long password. Cool! Or not....

I follow a Facebook user called "Ethical Hacking". Today, a post from them crossed my feed, which highlighted how a simple, easy-to-find tool can be used to hack into your browser-saved passwords. One hack, and ALL your saved credentials are open to view!

What can you do? At the VERY least, you need to stop saving any sensitive credentials in your browser. However, the best option is to STOP using your browser as a password vault. Rather, you really should be using a 3rd-party program such as 1Password, LastPass, or NordPass. You can check out a good list at PCMag's Password Manager reviews for 2026. I'm not going to say which we use, nor do I promote one over another - every person needs to do their own due diligence.

How expensive are

We all used to do our pre-purchase "research" using the Yellow Pages, but no more.  Well over 1/2 of all pre-purchase research is now done online, with as high as 83% when it relates to books, music, movies, computers & electronics according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers study in March 2012.  In today's buying world, people are looking at specs, at prices and at recommendations.  Recommendations can be from authority sites - Cnet, PC World, etc - or in the form of testimonials.  And that's why testimonials are so very important to your website.

I always tell clients, "We need a testimonials page" when I'm talking about their new site.  A sadly overwhelming number fail to see why or have even considered it.  I figure the only reason this is so common is because 20-30 years ago you could trust almost anyone in business.  Everyone knew about the bad ones because they were uncommon.

Getting great testimonials for your business

1. Ask for them!

I know this sounds obvious, but when did you last ask for a testimonial from a client?  Just having a testimonial page on your site with an "Add a testimonial" button will not cause a flood of

This week I got a very timely reminder about the value of backups, and being on top of your internet security.  Despite the best efforts and intentions, if you don't know, don't assume!  When one buys space of a reputable, respectable and established host, it's reasonable, but very dangerous, to assume they would have put into place all the necessary security measures, right?  Wrong!

This week - well it came to a head this week; the actual damage had been done around Valentines Day - our server got hacked.  Not as badly as it could have been, but enough to be more headaches than a mild irritation.  Obviously I've seriously tightened up security - things which I foolishly assumed would have automatically been put in place already.  That was my mistake, and I am grateful only 1 client suffered anything (2 days without a site) due to my mistake.

The great thing was I did have backups of everything, so it was just a time thing to restore the sites that were badly damaged, and then go through and scan, and clean, all the junk that the hacker or hackers had dropped in there.  Yep, we changed logins and passwords

I've recently gotten back into Radio Control modeling after a 35+ year absence. My home club is AMOS RC and you can see their site (which we designed and maintain) here. It's a really fun hobby, cheaper than golf, but it  teaches some hard lessons - like New Years day this year.

Being a novice (I was never terribly proficient in the 70s), it's easy to get confused about your plane's attitude in the air and what appropriate control responses are required.  Such was Wednesday... confused pilot, plane too close to the ground - the inevitable happened!  So it's now waiting for the arrival of some new parts so we can get airborne again!

The point of the story is this.  We all go through various circumstances in life and we have the ability to choose to grow from them or to wither because of them.  Don't let anyone try to fool you - there is no status quo!  Everything changes us for good or for bad.

So, at the beginning of a New Year, all business owners should stop and learn a lesson like I did at the field last week.  Look at what worked and improve on

I had the misfortune of having Windows grind to a complete halt on me this week necessitating a total reinstall. To lighten the mood, read this amusing piece - thanks to annoyances.org. Now back to the gloomy stuff. After spending hours trying to fix it by applying numerous "fixes" off the net, I gave up and resigned myself to the reinstall which ended up taking a day to complete. Happily, I had the disks to reinstall, and backups of my important data. Oh, but, of course, backups aren't needed right?

REASON 1 - Computers are reliable now.

Yeah right! The fact that computers run at all, given the permutations of hardware sometimes astounds me. And while they are more reliable than before, they certainly aren't infallible - especially netbooks and laptops which suffer from "heat exhaustion"! Then throw in a whole bunch of software and there's a good recipe for an impending breakdown.

REASON 2 - I don't have anything important.

Really? What about your email, photos, and letters you've written? Could you really afford to lose them? What about free software you've downloaded (because you wouldn't be piratig would you??!!)? Remember where you got it; can you find it