Why Is a Website Maintenance Plan Important for Site Performance

Posted on February 11th, 2025

Releasing your website isn’t the last step in establishing your online presence. To build trust and grow your business, you need a website that’s secure, loads quickly, and offers a great user experience.

To keep your site in top shape, regular maintenance is necessary. Whether you handle it yourself or hire a service, having a website maintenance plan that clearly outlines the steps to keep everything updated and running smoothly is important.

In this article, we’ll discuss what should be included in a maintenance plan and provide tips and tools to help you create an efficient one.

What Is a Website Maintenance Plan?

A website maintenance plan is a simple guide that shows the steps needed to keep your site working smoothly and make it better. It covers things like fixing security problems, backing up your site, updating programs, checking how fast the site loads, and noting any changes made.

Creating a web maintenance plan usually involves developers, marketing teams, and security experts. Since website maintenance is an ongoing task, it’s a good idea for small businesses without an IT team to buy maintenance services.

Most companies offer maintenance services in monthly or yearly packages. These services usually cover security, updates, backups, and sometimes design or SEO. The cost depends on how big, complex, and functional your website is.

If you’re handling maintenance on your own, having a plan will help you set a budget and estimate the overall cost of maintaining your website.

Why Is a Website Maintenance Plan Important for Site Performance?

A website that isn’t regularly maintained often has outdated software, which can lead to slower loading times, errors, and crashes. This can cause you to lose visitors and potential customers, or even make your site stop working altogether.

On top of that, neglecting maintenance makes your site more vulnerable to security threats like malware, which can result in data being stolen.

Routine maintenance helps website owners make sure everything on their site is running well. This includes updating plugins, themes, links, forms, images, payment systems, and adding security updates.

However, it can be tough to keep up with all these tasks without a clear plan. This is where having a website maintenance plan comes in handy.

A maintenance plan also acts as a record of any changes or updates made to the site. If the person or team handling the site leaves, the process of maintaining it will be much easier with the plan in place.

What Does a Website Maintenance Plan Consist Of

Key parts of a website maintenance plan include security, updates, backups, site performance, user experience, content updates, and SEO.

Security

To lower the chances of your website getting hacked, it’s important to find weaknesses and take steps to protect it. Security problems can hurt a brand’s reputation and damage its relationship with customers, leading to long-term harm to its online presence.

To start, make sure you’ve added a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate to encrypt data and protect your customers’ personal details.

Perform security audits every few months to protect customer data and fix any security issues. A good website security audit should include:

• Running security scans: Use tools like Sucuri and WordFence to remove harmful files and find weaknesses. If you use Interserver, you can use their Malware Scanner.
• Mind your login credentials: Keep your login information safe by creating a strong, unique password and changing it often. You can use tools like 1Password to store your passwords securely. Also, turn on two-factor authentication whenever you can for extra security.
• Checking default CMS settings: Control spam comments and hide sensitive details, like the version of WordPress you’re using, to avoid attacks.
• Managing user permissions: Limit access to sensitive data and review user access every few months. Be sure to remove users who no longer need it.

Updates

Outdated website components can lead to compatibility problems, bugs, poor performance, and security risks. To prevent this, your website maintenance plan should include the following steps:

• Check for updates to your CMS every few months. These updates usually fix security issues, bugs, and add new features.
• Update your plugins and themes every month. Also, remove any that are no longer needed.
• Renew your hosting plan and review the available resources. It may be time to upgrade.
• Renew your domain name every year, and make sure it’s active. You can easily do this through your domain dashboard.

Although some software updates automatically or send notifications, it’s a good idea to check manually every so often.

It’s also a good time to find and fix any server or website errors. Regular troubleshooting helps catch issues early, which can save you money on repairs later. It’s an affordable way to keep your website running smoothly.

Since server maintenance is technical, it’s best to hire an IT professional or choose a maintenance package that includes server updates. If you’re using shared, cloud, or managed hosting, your provider will handle this for you.

Backups

Downloading a backup of your website helps protect against data loss. If something goes wrong, you can easily restore an earlier version of the site, so you won’t have to rebuild it from the beginning.

Your website maintenance plan should include regular backups, either automatic or manual. For small websites with little content, monthly backups are usually enough. But for larger sites, like eCommerce stores that update content often, it’s a good idea to back up the site every week.

Site Performance

Keeping an eye on your website’s performance is important to make sure it’s always available to visitors and loads quickly. Here are some simple monthly tasks to add to your maintenance plan:

• Run a speed test on your site to check how fast it loads. You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to get helpful details.
• Track your Core Web Vitals, including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
• Minify your files by removing unnecessary spaces and unused code. This makes the files smaller and helps your pages load faster. You can do this manually or with plugins like Fast Velocity Minify for WordPress.
• Compress images to speed up load times, improve delivery, and provide a better experience for users.
• It’s also important to keep track of your website’s uptime to ensure it’s always accessible.

Since this is an ongoing task, it’s a good idea to use an uptime monitoring tool. Tools like SiteUptime check your website every few minutes, depending on your plan, to make sure it’s always up and running.

User Experience

A good user experience is key to building trust and credibility with customers. Studies show that 88% of visitors are less likely to return after a poor experience.

To avoid bad design and keep your website user-friendly, here are some things to check every few months:

• Review the website design. It should not only look good but also be easy to use, fast to load, and simple to navigate.
• Make sure your site is accessible to everyone. For example, add alt text for images and improve keyboard navigation.
• Test all page elements, such as buttons, pop-ups, and contact forms, to make sure they work correctly.
• Make sure your site works well on mobile. Run a mobile-friendly test and follow the tips it gives.
• Run usability tests to see how users interact with your site before making any changes to the design. This will help ensure your website stays effective and welcoming.

Content Marketing

A good maintenance plan should include regular content updates to stay current with industry trends and keep users interested. Here are a few ideas:

• Create fresh content. Plan to publish at least one new article every week.
• Review your content. Every three to six months, go through old posts and decide what needs updating, removing, or rewriting.
• Update posts and pages each month. Add the latest information to product pages, About Us sections, and other important areas.
• Check for broken images. Monthly, replace any blurry or pixelated images with higher-quality ones.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important strategy for getting your website noticed online. The higher your site ranks in search results, the more visitors it will attract, which can lead to more leads.

So, a good website maintenance plan should include regular checks and improvements to your SEO, such as:

• Review backlinks every three months. Remove any harmful links and find new ones to improve your site’s authority.
• Improve meta descriptions, tags, and titles. Make sure they match what users are searching for and include the right keywords.
• Check your site’s structure. Group related pages together, link them where needed, and make sure your URLs are clear and simple.
• Update your sitemap and robots.txt file. This helps search engines crawl and index your site more easily.
• Remove broken pages and links. Make sure everything loads correctly, and if necessary, set up redirects.

Helpful Tools for Website Maintenance Plans

If you choose to handle website maintenance on your own, here are some helpful tools to assist you throughout the process.

Google Analytics – Web Analytics Tool

Best for: tracking website performance
Price: free (premium version available for large businesses, starting at $150,000/year)

Google Analytics gives detailed reports on your website’s visitors and their behavior. It helps you find areas that need improvement when planning maintenance.

For example, you can see which pages visitors visit most or which ones have high bounce rates. The Traffic Source report shows which channels bring the most traffic.

The Content Drilldown report shows how users interact with specific content, helping you spot underperforming pages.

The Funnel Visualization report helps you see where visitors fail to complete tasks on your site, which can help improve the design and guide your maintenance plan.

While the premium version is expensive and designed for large businesses, the free version has plenty of features for small and medium-sized businesses.

Pingdom – Site Monitoring Tool

Best for: website monitoring
Price: free version available (paid plans start at $10/month)

To keep your website running smoothly, a site monitoring tool is important.

Pingdom is a simple tool with great features. It offers uptime monitoring to check if your site is available from different locations and browsers.

It also provides real-time monitoring, which helps you understand how visitors behave and spot trends.

Pingdom includes free page speed testing to track how fast your site loads and find problems that affect user experience.

If there are any issues, like pages being down or content changes, Pingdom will alert you right away via SMS, email, or in-app notifications.

Ahrefs – SEO Tool

Best for: SEO management
Price: starts at $99/month

Ahrefs is a powerful tool designed to help maintain your website’s SEO performance. Its site audit feature scans your site for technical and on-page SEO problems and gives you advice on how to fix them.

The backlink checker looks at your site’s backlinks, offering insights into the quality of those links and how they affect your rankings.

For future SEO planning, the Keyword Explorer suggests keywords to target and shows how hard it will be to rank for them in search results.

Ahrefs also lets you analyze your competitors by providing details about their content, backlinks, keywords, and ads. This helps you create a strategy to outrank them.

Since Ahrefs is a paid tool, you’ll need to purchase a plan to access all its features. However, you can use some of Ahrefs’ free SEO tools to save on website maintenance costs.

FileZilla – File Management Tool

Best for: file management and backups
Price: free version available (premium starts at $19.99 per download)

FileZilla is an FTP client tool that helps you back up your website for maintenance.

It’s open-source software that’s easy to set up and allows you to quickly find and transfer large files. You can also make transfers more secure by using the SSH protocol.

With the transfer queue feature, you can manage both uploads and downloads easily.

FileZilla works on Windows, Linux, and macOS. The premium version also connects to cloud storage services like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Google Cloud Storage.

Sucuri – Website Security Tool

Best for: detecting malware
Price: free version available (premium starts at $199.99/year)

Sucuri is a tool designed to help with website security. It can scan for malware, blocklisting, suspicious DNS changes, and other issues like link injection and core file changes. It also offers unlimited malware removal, website cleanup, and protection from DDoS attacks.

If there’s a problem, Sucuri will notify you right away through email, SMS, RSS, or Twitter.

For WordPress users, there’s a free Sucuri Security plugin. Along with scanning for malware, the plugin tracks site activity, such as login attempts, file uploads, and changes, helping to prevent security threats.

Sucuri also provides a free remote security scanner, Sucuri SiteCheck. You just need to paste your site’s URL to get a quick report on its security status.

Conclusion

A website maintenance plan helps website owners keep their sites secure, fast, up-to-date, and user-friendly.

Some key tasks include adding an SSL certificate, improving digital marketing efforts, checking for malware or viruses, and making sure the site works well on mobile devices.

Since website maintenance often involves fixing technical issues, it’s a good idea to hire maintenance services if you don’t have the technical skills.

Lastly, whether you’re using a maintenance package or managing it with an IT team, be sure to track the progress of the work.