Website Maintenance Checklist: What Your Agency Should Be Doing Monthly

Real website maintenance is more than "checking if site is up." Most ₹5-20K monthly maintenance plans do nothing useful.

What monthly maintenance should include

Security: Core software updates, plugin updates, security scans, malware monitoring, firewall reviews Backups: Daily automated, weekly off-site, monthly full snapshots, tested restore capability Performance: Core Web Vitals monitoring, image optimization audits, cache warming, database optimization Content: Small content updates (1-2 hours), broken link fixes, image alt text, schema updates Analytics: Monthly report with insights, goal tracking setup, event configuration updates Uptime: Monitoring with alerts, immediate response to outages

Red flags in maintenance plans

• "Updates as needed" (vague = nothing done)
• No monthly report
• No access to your own admin panel
• No backup access
• Generic "support" with 48+ hour response time

DIY vs agency maintenance

Capable team: DIY with monitoring tools costs ₹2K/month for tools Non-technical business: Good agency at ₹5-15K/month saves hours and prevents disasters Best value: Maintenance retainer with specific hours (e.g., 5 hours/month guaranteed work)

Pre-maintenance questions

• How many hours of work is included?
• Who owns the work (backups, configurations)?
• Response time SLA for emergencies?
• What happens if you leave?