Monthly Website Maintenance: What Should Actually Happen Every Month

Your website didn't break overnight. It's not going to fix itself overnight either. Monthly website maintenance is what keeps a site running, ranking, and actually doing its job — bringing you customers. But most business owners have no idea what "maintenance" means in practice, because the companies selling it don't bother explaining.

So let me break it down. Here's what should happen to your website every single month, what actually matters, and what's just filler that maintenance companies use to pad their invoices.

Why Monthly Matters

Websites aren't static. Even if you haven't touched your site in weeks, the world around it keeps moving. Browsers push updates. Security vulnerabilities get discovered. Google tweaks its algorithm. Your SSL certificate inches closer to expiration. A plugin you forgot existed stops getting security patches.

Skip maintenance for a month, and you probably won't notice anything. Skip it for three, and things start to creak. Skip it for six, and you're looking at a site that's slower, less secure, and sliding in search results. You won't know why until it's already a problem.

The point of monthly maintenance isn't to prevent some dramatic crash. It's to keep the small problems from becoming expensive ones.

What Monthly Website Maintenance Actually Includes

Not every maintenance task needs to happen every month. Some are weekly, some quarterly, some annually. But here's what a solid monthly routine covers.

Software Updates

If your site runs on WordPress, Joomla, or any CMS with plugins, this is the big one. Plugins, themes, and the core CMS all need updates. These updates patch security holes, fix bugs, and keep things compatible with modern browsers.

The tricky part: updates can break things. A plugin update that conflicts with your theme can take down your entire site. That's why you don't just click "Update All" and walk away. You update, you test, you verify nothing exploded.

If your site is custom-coded, there are far fewer moving parts. Updates are limited to server software and a handful of dependencies, which is a much shorter list with far fewer surprises.

Security Scans

Every month, your site should be scanned for malware, unauthorized file changes, and known vulnerabilities. This isn't paranoia. According to Sucuri, over 60% of CMS-based sites that get hacked were running outdated software at the time of compromise.

A quick security scan takes minutes and catches problems before they become data breaches.

Backup Verification

Backups should run automatically, either daily or weekly depending on how often your content changes. But here's what most people miss: the monthly task isn't just "make sure backups are running." It's verifying that your backups actually work.

I've seen sites with 12 months of "successful" backups that were all corrupted. The backup ran, the log said everything was fine, but nobody ever tested a restore. One bad database export repeated 52 weeks in a row. Monthly maintenance means testing at least one recent backup to confirm it would actually save you in a disaster.

Performance Check

Pull up Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix and run your site through it. Compare the numbers to last month. If your scores dropped, figure out why.

Common culprits: someone uploaded a 4MB photo to a blog post. A new third-party script is loading that wasn't there before. Your hosting provider quietly migrated you to a busier server.

Speed matters for SEO and for keeping visitors on your site. A page that takes 5 seconds to load loses roughly half its visitors before they see a single word. Monthly performance checks catch degradation before it becomes a ranking problem. We covered specific fixes in our speed optimization guide if you want the technical details.

Broken Link Check

Links break. Pages get moved. External sites go down. A broken link is a dead end for your visitor and a bad signal to Google.

Run a broken link checker (Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or a free tool like Dr. Link Check) once a month. Fix or remove anything that 404s. This takes 15-20 minutes for most small business sites.

Uptime Review

Your site should be monitored around the clock, but the monthly review is when you look at the bigger picture. Were there any outages? How long did they last? What caused them?

Tools like UptimeRobot (free for basic monitoring) will email you when your site goes down. The monthly check is about patterns. If your site dips every Tuesday at 3am, that's worth investigating before it starts happening during business hours.

Analytics and SEO Check

Open Google Search Console and your analytics tool. Look for:

• Traffic trends — up, down, or flat compared to last month?
• Crawl errors — anything Google can't index?
• Top queries — are you ranking for the keywords that matter to your business?
• Core Web Vitals — passing or failing?

You don't need a 40-page SEO report every month. You need a 10-minute check to make sure nothing is going sideways. A sudden drop in impressions is worth investigating now, not three months later when you realize the phone stopped ringing.

Content Freshness

This one's easy to skip, but it matters. Are your hours correct? Is your phone number right? Do you still offer that service listed on your homepage?

Outdated content erodes trust. If a potential customer sees "2024" on your site in 2026, they're wondering if you're still in business. A quick monthly scan of your key pages takes 10 minutes and keeps your site from looking abandoned.

Form and Contact Testing

Fill out your own contact form. Click your phone number link. Test your appointment booking widget. If any of these are broken, you're losing leads and don't even know it.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen businesses run a broken contact form for weeks. Nobody tested it, so nobody knew. Monthly testing takes 5 minutes and could save you thousands in missed opportunities.

What Most Monthly Maintenance Plans Leave Out

Here's where I'll be honest with you. A lot of website maintenance plans sound great on paper but are light on actual work.

Watch out for plans that list "24/7 monitoring" as a line item but don't explain what happens when monitoring detects a problem. Monitoring without response is like having a smoke detector with no fire department.

Also watch for "unlimited content updates" with fine print that limits you to 30 minutes of work per month. That's not unlimited. That's barely enough to swap out a photo and update your hours.

The best maintenance plans are specific about what they include, how much time you actually get, and what the response process looks like when something breaks.

How Much Time Does Monthly Website Maintenance Take?

For a typical small business site (5-15 pages, no e-commerce), monthly maintenance takes roughly 2-4 hours if you're doing it properly.

Here's a rough breakdown:

• Software updates and testing: 30-60 minutes
• Security scan and review: 15 minutes
• Backup verification: 15-30 minutes
• Performance check: 15 minutes
• Broken link scan and fixes: 15-20 minutes
• Analytics review: 15-20 minutes
• Content freshness check: 10 minutes
• Form testing: 5 minutes

That adds up to about 2-3 hours of actual work. More complex sites with e-commerce, user accounts, or lots of integrations will take longer.

If you're wondering what that costs when you hire someone, our breakdown of maintenance costs covers the full range from DIY to agency pricing.

How Red Rock Handles Monthly Website Maintenance

I'll be upfront: this is the pitch section. But I think it's relevant because our approach is different from what most agencies sell.

Our maintenance service is $150/month. That covers everything listed above, plus hosting, SSL, content updates, and direct access to me. Not a ticket system, not a chatbot. You text or email me directly.

Because we build custom-coded sites, the codebase is lean. Just the code your site actually needs. That means faster updates, fewer conflicts, and more of your $150 going toward actual improvements to your site instead of just keeping things from falling apart.

When we're not the right fit: If you're running a large e-commerce store with hundreds of products and complex integrations, you need a bigger team. If you need 24/7 phone support with guaranteed 15-minute response times, that's an enterprise-level service that costs more than $150. We're built for small businesses that want their site handled by one person who actually knows their site inside and out.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens if I skip monthly maintenance for a few months?

Your site won't immediately crash, but risk builds quietly. Security vulnerabilities go unpatched, which is the biggest concern. Performance degrades as browsers and standards evolve around a static site. Search rankings can slip as Google notices slower load times or outdated content. The longer you wait, the more expensive the catch-up work becomes. A few months of neglect might take a full day to remediate. A year of neglect might mean starting over on some things entirely.

Can I do monthly website maintenance myself?

You can, especially if your site is simple and you're comfortable with the technical side. The checks I described above are all learnable. Where most people run into trouble is consistency. They do it for two or three months, then life gets busy and it drops off the radar. The other risk is updates breaking things. If you update a plugin and your site goes down, you need to know how to roll back. If that sounds manageable, DIY is a valid option. If it sounds like another item on a list that's already too long, hiring someone is worth the money.

How do I know if my maintenance provider is actually doing the work?

Ask for a monthly report. A good provider should be able to tell you exactly what they did, what they found, and what's coming up. If the answer is vague ("everything looks good") with no specifics, that's a red flag. Ask to see backup logs, security scan results, and performance numbers. If they can't produce those, they might not be doing the work.

Is monthly maintenance different for WordPress sites vs custom sites?

Yes, significantly. WordPress sites have more moving parts. The core CMS, themes, and plugins all need updates, and those updates frequently conflict with each other. A custom-coded site has far fewer dependencies, which means less time spent on updates and troubleshooting. The security profile is different too. WordPress powers about 40% of the web, which makes it a bigger target for automated attacks. Custom sites aren't immune to security issues, but they don't have the same surface area. Neither approach is universally better, but the maintenance workload is measurably different.

How much should monthly website maintenance cost?

For a typical small business site, expect somewhere between $50 and $300 per month depending on what's included. Plans under $50 are usually too thin to be meaningful. They might monitor your uptime and send you an email if something breaks, but that's about it. Plans over $300 for a basic brochure site probably include services you don't need yet. The key is matching the plan to your actual site. An e-commerce store with 500 products has genuinely different needs than a 5-page service business site.

Keep Your Site Working, or Keep Fixing It Later

Monthly website maintenance isn't glamorous. It's the website equivalent of changing your oil. Skip it long enough and the engine seizes. The tasks themselves aren't complicated, but doing them consistently is what separates sites that work from sites that slowly fall apart.

Whether you handle it yourself or hand it off to someone, the important thing is that it actually gets done every month. Not just promised. Done.

Ready to stop thinking about it? Let's talk about what your site actually needs.