What Happens After Launch

Most website projects are described as if launch is the finish line. It is closer to the start. A site that nobody touches for three years is not a stable asset — it is slowly becoming a problem, and the moment you notice is usually the moment it costs money.

Here is what should be happening after launch, what it should cost, and how to tell whether anyone is actually doing it.

What maintenance actually covers

Four distinct things, often bundled into one number and worth separating.

Security and updates. Applying patches to whatever the site runs on, and checking nothing broke afterwards. This is the part that matters most and the part most often skipped, because when it is done well nothing visible happens.

Backups and monitoring. Automated, off-site backups that somebody has restored at least once. Uptime monitoring so you find out your site is down from an alert rather than from a customer. Certificate expiry monitoring, because an expired certificate makes browsers show a security warning and takes your site out of business for the afternoon.

Fixes. Things that stop working. A form that silently fails after a mail provider changes something, a payment integration that breaks on an API version bump, a layout that goes wrong in a new browser release.

Content and small changes. New prices, a new team member, a seasonal message. Some agencies include a small allowance, some bill hourly. Either is fine; not being clear which is not.

What it should cost

For a small business site, typically somewhere between 50 and 200 euros a month depending on complexity. A static brochure site with no database sits at the low end and genuinely needs very little. A shop with payments, integrations and a CMS sits at the high end and needs real attention.

What you should expect for that money: updates applied, backups taken and verified, uptime watched, and a named route to reach someone when something breaks. If a plan does not say what happens when the site goes down on a Friday evening, ask.

Be wary of two extremes. A plan that costs almost nothing is usually a plan where nothing is done. A plan that costs a great deal but is only "hosting" is a hosting bill with a nicer name.

What happens when nobody does it

Not dramatic, at first. It accumulates.

Security. Unpatched software is the single largest cause of small business sites being compromised. The exploitation of a published vulnerability is automated and indiscriminate; nobody chose you.

Silent breakage. The most expensive failure we see is a contact form that stopped sending months ago. The site looks perfect. Enquiries simply stop arriving, and because there is no error, nobody investigates until someone happens to mention they never heard back.

Test your own contact form once a month. It takes thirty seconds and it is the highest-value habit in this article.

Slow decay. Images pile up unoptimised, plugins accumulate, third-party scripts get added and never removed. The site that scored well at launch quietly stops doing so.

Legal drift. Rules change. The European Accessibility Act arrived in June 2025 and has a further deadline in 2030. Cookie guidance shifts. A site that was compliant at launch is not automatically compliant two years later.

Beyond keeping the lights on

Maintenance keeps a site working. These are the things that keep it earning, and they are worth separating in your own head so you do not assume the monthly fee covers them.

Look at the analytics quarterly. Not daily — quarterly, properly. Which pages bring people in, where they leave, which enquiries came from where. An hour every three months tells you more than a dashboard nobody opens.

Keep the content current. Prices from two years ago, a team page with people who left, a portfolio whose newest project is from 2023. Every one of those quietly says the business is not paying attention.

Answer the new questions. The questions customers ask change. Each recurring one is a page you have not written yet.

Re-test on a phone, twice a year. Devices change, browsers change, and your site was tested on the phone that was current when it launched.

A realistic schedule

Monthly: submit your own contact form; glance at uptime; apply updates or confirm someone did.

Quarterly: review analytics; check Search Console for coverage errors; update anything that has gone stale; verify a backup restores.

Annually: re-check accessibility and privacy against current rules; review the whole site on a current phone; ask whether the site still describes the business you now have.

Most of that is an hour or two. The annual review is half a day. That is the whole commitment, and it is the difference between a site that keeps working and one that has to be rebuilt in four years because nobody looked at it.

The question to settle before launch

Ask this while you still have leverage, which is before the final invoice:

• Who applies updates, and how often?
• Where are the backups, and when was one last restored?
• How do I reach you when something breaks, and how fast do you respond?
• What is included in the monthly fee, and what is billed separately?
• If I stop the maintenance plan, what happens to the site?

That last one matters more than it sounds. On some arrangements, stopping maintenance means the site simply stops. You want to know that at the start rather than at the moment you were trying to reduce costs.

The short version

A website is a thing you own and operate, not a thing you buy once. The running cost is small — genuinely small compared to the build — and the cost of not paying it arrives all at once, usually at an inconvenient moment.

If you take one habit from this article, make it the monthly contact form test. The number of businesses that have lost months of enquiries to a silently broken form is far larger than anyone in this industry likes to admit.