Who maintains your website after launch?

Six months after launch, your opening hours change. Who edits the website?

It is a small question that quietly decides whether you have a website or an archive. Most sites that look neglected were not neglected on purpose — nobody was ever clearly responsible for the second version.

The three answers, and what each one costs

You do it. Cheapest in money, and it works as long as changing something stays easy. The test is not whether you can do it, but whether you can do it in five minutes eighteen months from now, without notes.

A maintenance contract. A freelancer or agency keeps the site current for a monthly fee, usually with a bundle of hours. This works well and has one failure mode: small changes feel like they are not worth spending an hour on, so you save them up, and "save them up" becomes "never".

A subscription where changes are included. You ask for the change and it happens. Costs more per month than doing nothing and less than an hour of anyone's time. The thing to check is the limit: how many changes, and how fast.

The costs nobody quotes you

Maintenance is not only edits. A live website has a background hum of obligations:

• Hosting and the domain — annual, small, and easy to forget until the renewal fails.
• Software updates — if your site runs on a CMS with plugins, this is a real monthly task and a real security risk when skipped.
• Broken things you did not touch — an embedded map changes its terms, a form stops delivering, a payment provider updates an integration.
• Your own drift — prices, services, the team, the photograph of a shop that has been repainted since.

Only the last one feels like your job. The first three are why "the website hasn't changed, why am I paying?" has an answer.

A test for your current setup

Try this today: change one sentence on your website.

Time it from deciding to done. If it took under five minutes, your setup is fine. If it took an hour, you will not do it again. If you could not do it at all without asking someone, find out right now what that request costs and how long it takes — before you need it urgently.

Decide it before you need it

Write down two things and keep them somewhere you will find them: who makes changes to the website, and what a change costs in money and in days.

If you cannot answer both, that is the gap. It will not show up at launch — it shows up the week you change your prices, or the month a product goes away, and the site keeps advertising it.

Choosing who builds the site in the first place is a related decision, and we walked through it in build it yourself or hire someone. For what happens before launch, see how long it actually takes.

Frequently asked

What should website maintenance include?

At minimum: hosting and domain renewal, software and security updates, fixing things that break on their own, and applying your own content changes. Ask which of those four a quote covers, because the word maintenance is used for all four and sometimes only one.

Is it cheaper to make changes myself?

Only if you actually make them. The real cost of doing it yourself is not the hour, it is the changes you postpone because the hour is inconvenient — which is how a site becomes out of date while nobody decides to let it.