DIY Website Maintenance vs Hiring a Professional: An Honest Comparison

I sell website maintenance services, so you'd expect me to tell you that you absolutely must hire a professional and that doing it yourself is reckless and irresponsible. That would be easy, but it wouldn't be honest.

The truth is, some businesses should handle their own website maintenance. Some absolutely shouldn't. Most fall somewhere in the middle. Let me give you a genuinely balanced comparison so you can make the right call for your situation — even if that means you never hire someone like me.

What You Can Realistically Do Yourself

Let's start with the good news. There are meaningful maintenance tasks that most business owners can handle without technical expertise.

Content Updates (On Simple Platforms)

If your website is built on Squarespace, Wix, or a well-configured WordPress installation with a visual editor, you can probably update your own content. Changing text, swapping photos, adding a blog post, updating your hours — these are drag-and-drop or WYSIWYG editor tasks on most platforms.

Time required: 15-30 minutes per update, depending on complexity. Skill level: Basic computer literacy. If you can format a Word document, you can handle this. Risk level: Low. You might mess up some formatting, but you won't break anything critical.

Basic Monitoring

Setting up free monitoring tools and checking them periodically is something anyone can do.

• UptimeRobot (free) — Monitors whether your site is online and emails you if it goes down
• Google Search Console (free) — Shows crawl errors, indexing status, and search performance
• Google Analytics (free) — Tracks visitor behavior and traffic sources
• Google PageSpeed Insights (free) — Tests load speed

Time required: 30 minutes to set up, then 15 minutes per week to review. Skill level: Moderate. Setting up the tools requires following some instructions, but nothing you can't Google your way through. Risk level: None. You're just looking at data.

Simple Backup Verification

If your hosting provider or CMS has automatic backups, you can verify they're running by checking your backup dashboard. You're just confirming that timestamps are current and file sizes look reasonable.

Time required: 5 minutes per week. Skill level: Basic. Risk level: None — you're checking, not changing anything.

Image Optimization Before Upload

Before uploading images to your site, running them through a free tool like TinyPNG or ShortPixel can prevent performance degradation. This is a habit more than a skill.

Time required: 2 minutes per image. Skill level: Basic. Risk level: None.

What You Probably Shouldn't Do Yourself

Now for the tasks where DIY gets risky. Not because they're impossible for a non-technical person, but because mistakes can be expensive, time-consuming, or invisible until they cause real damage.

Security Patching and Updates

Applying updates sounds simple — click the "Update" button, right? Sometimes. But sometimes updates break things. A WordPress plugin update conflicts with your theme and the site goes blank. A PHP version upgrade makes your contact form stop working. A core update changes how something renders and your homepage looks wrong on mobile.

Professional maintainers test updates in a staging environment before applying them to the live site. They know which updates are safe to apply immediately and which need careful testing. They have backups ready in case something goes wrong and know how to roll back quickly.

The risk of DIY: You click "Update All," your site breaks, and you're Googling "how to fix WordPress white screen of death" while your website is down and customers can't reach you.

Server Configuration

Your server has settings that affect security, performance, and functionality: PHP versions, memory limits, file permissions, SSL configuration, .htaccess rules, caching headers, GZIP compression, and more.

Touching these without understanding what you're doing can take your site offline, create security holes, or cause subtle performance issues that are hard to diagnose.

The risk of DIY: You follow a tutorial to "speed up your site," change a server setting, and unknowingly disable a security feature or break your site for specific browsers.

Speed Optimization

Real speed optimization — not just compressing images, but actual performance tuning — involves understanding how browsers render pages, how servers handle requests, how code is loaded and executed, and how caching works at multiple levels.

It's the difference between changing your car's air filter and rebuilding the transmission. One you can do in your driveway. The other requires someone who actually knows what they're doing.

The risk of DIY: You install a caching plugin without configuring it properly, and now different visitors see different (sometimes broken) versions of your pages. Or you defer a critical JavaScript file and break your site's functionality.

Code Changes

If something on your site needs custom code — a layout change, a new feature, fixing a display bug, integrating a third-party service — this is firmly in professional territory. Even "small" code changes require understanding HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and potentially PHP, Python, or Node.js, depending on your platform.

The risk of DIY: You paste a code snippet from a forum into your site's header, and now every page loads a cryptocurrency miner (yes, this has happened).

Database Management

WordPress sites, e-commerce platforms, and other database-driven websites accumulate data over time. Cleaning, optimizing, and managing that database requires understanding SQL, knowing which tables can be safely modified, and having a solid backup in case something goes wrong.

The risk of DIY: You delete the wrong database table and lose all your blog posts, customer data, or site settings.

The Honest Comparison Table

When DIY Makes Genuine Sense

I'm not being sarcastic here — there are real situations where maintaining your own website is the right call.

You Have a Simple Brochure Site on a Managed Platform

If your entire website is 5 pages on Squarespace and you update it maybe once a quarter, paying someone $150/month to maintain it might genuinely be overkill. Squarespace handles hosting, security, SSL, and platform updates. Your job is just keeping the content current. A few hours per year might be all it takes.

You're a Technical Person Who Enjoys It

If you're a developer, designer, or just someone who's genuinely comfortable with technology and finds this kind of work interesting — go for it. You'll probably do it well, and you'll save money.

Your Budget Is Genuinely Tight

If you're a brand-new business and every dollar matters, DIY maintenance is better than no maintenance. Set up the free monitoring tools, learn how to run backups, and keep your content current. It's not comprehensive, but it's infinitely better than ignoring your site entirely.

Your Website Is Not Revenue-Critical

If your website is supplementary — maybe most of your business comes from referrals or foot traffic — the consequences of a maintenance issue are lower. You have more room for imperfection.

When Professional Makes Clear Sense

Your Website Generates Leads or Revenue

If your website is how customers find you and contact you, downtime and broken functionality directly cost you money. A professional who catches and fixes issues before they affect visitors pays for themselves many times over.

You're on WordPress

I keep coming back to this because it's the most common scenario I see. WordPress is powerful and flexible, but it has a lot of moving parts. Every plugin is a potential point of failure. Every update is a potential compatibility issue. The attack surface is large because WordPress powers 40% of the web. If you're on WordPress and you're not a developer, professional maintenance isn't a luxury — it's a practical necessity.

You've Been Meaning to Do It for Months

If your maintenance "plan" is a vague intention that you've been putting off since last quarter, be honest with yourself. It's not happening. The longer you procrastinate, the more risk accumulates. Hire someone and redirect that mental energy toward things you'll actually do.

You Value Your Time

This is the math that most business owners need to do but don't.

Proper website maintenance takes 3-6 hours per month if done thoroughly. Let's say 4 hours on average. If your time is worth $75/hour to your business (either your billable rate or the value of what you'd otherwise be doing), that's $300/month in time cost to DIY.

Professional maintenance costs $100-$200/month for a good service. (See our full cost breakdown for what those prices actually include.) You're saving $100-$200/month by hiring it out, AND the professional is probably doing a better job because it's their core competency.

The only way DIY wins this math is if your time has no opportunity cost — meaning there's nothing more productive you could be doing with those 4 hours per month. For most business owners, that's not the case.

Your Site Has Complex Functionality

E-commerce, membership portals, booking systems, customer portals, API integrations, custom forms — the more your site does, the more can go wrong. These systems need monitoring by someone who understands how they work and can diagnose issues across the full stack.

The Hidden Cost of DIY Nobody Talks About

Beyond the time math, there's an invisible cost to DIY maintenance: the cost of what you miss.

A professional catches things you wouldn't know to look for:

• A slow database query adding 2 seconds to every page load
• A redirect chain hurting your SEO
• An improperly configured robots.txt blocking Google from indexing important pages
• A security header missing from your server configuration
• A Core Web Vitals failure that's quietly tanking your search rankings
• An SSL certificate about to expire in 9 days

You don't know what you don't know. And with websites, the things you don't know can cost you customers without you ever realizing it. No error message, no alert, no obvious symptom — just a slow leak of traffic and credibility that you'd never attribute to a technical issue because you didn't know the issue existed.

A Hybrid Approach

Here's what I actually recommend for budget-conscious small business owners: a hybrid approach.

Handle yourself:

• Content updates and minor text changes
• Basic monitoring (check uptime and analytics weekly)
• Image optimization before uploading
• Content planning and writing

Hire out:

• Security monitoring and patching
• Software updates and compatibility testing
• Performance optimization
• Backups and disaster recovery
• Technical troubleshooting
• Quarterly audits

This gives you the cost savings of handling routine tasks while getting professional expertise for the technical work that can go wrong. Some website management providers even offer tiered plans designed for exactly this split — they handle the technical side while you handle the content side.

How Red Rock Handles It

For full transparency, here's our approach: We offer monthly website maintenance at $150/month that includes everything — technical maintenance, content updates, security, backups, hosting, and direct support.

But here's the thing that changes the equation: our sites are custom-coded, not built on WordPress or page builders. That means significantly fewer things can break, fewer updates to manage, and fewer security vulnerabilities to patch. The maintenance workload is inherently lighter, which is how we can offer comprehensive service at this price point.

If you've already got a WordPress site and aren't looking to rebuild, we can still help — but I'd recommend making sure whoever maintains it understands WordPress specifically, because the maintenance needs are genuinely different.

FAQ

Is it safe to maintain my own WordPress website?

Safe is relative. You can handle content updates and basic monitoring safely. But applying updates, managing security, and troubleshooting technical issues carry real risk if you don't know what you're doing. The most common DIY disaster I see is someone clicking "Update All" on their plugins, triggering a compatibility conflict, and taking their site down. If you maintain your own WordPress site, always take a backup before updating anything, and never update everything at once.

How many hours per month does website maintenance take?

For a basic small business website: 2-4 hours per month if you're covering the fundamentals (monitoring, updates, content review, backups). Our maintenance checklist breaks down exactly what those hours look like. For a more complex site or one running WordPress with many plugins: 4-8 hours per month for thorough maintenance. This doesn't include the time spent learning how to do tasks you're unfamiliar with, which adds significantly to the actual time investment in the first year.

What's the minimum I should do if I can't afford professional maintenance?

At the absolute minimum: set up free uptime monitoring (UptimeRobot), verify your hosting provider has automatic backups enabled, keep your software updated (carefully), and test your contact form monthly. If you do nothing else, these four things will prevent the most common and most damaging problems.

Can I start with DIY and switch to professional later?

Absolutely. Many of our clients started by maintaining their own sites and eventually decided their time was better spent elsewhere. The transition is straightforward — we audit the current state of the site, address any accumulated issues, and take over ongoing maintenance. The only caution: don't wait until something has gone seriously wrong to make the switch. It's cheaper to prevent problems than to fix them.

What questions should I ask a website maintenance provider before hiring them?

The big ones: What exactly is included? What's NOT included? What's the response time for routine vs. urgent requests? Do I own my website and domain? Is there a long-term contract? Can I see examples of sites you currently maintain? How will you communicate with me — ticket system, email, phone, text? And critically: if I decide to leave, what happens? A good provider has clear, confident answers to all of these.

Make the Right Call for Your Business

There's no universal right answer here. The best choice depends on your technical comfort, your available time, your budget, and how critical your website is to your business.

What I can tell you is this: the worst option is doing nothing. Whether you maintain it yourself or hire someone, your website needs regular attention. Pick the approach that you'll actually follow through on — because a perfect maintenance plan that you never execute is worse than a basic one that you stick with consistently.

If you've been going back and forth on this decision, maybe it's time to just have a conversation about what your site actually needs. Reach out and let's figure it out together.