Website Maintenance Services

Nobody buys website maintenance because they want it. They buy it after something breaks, and usually after it has been broken for a while. This page is an attempt to describe what actually goes wrong on an unmaintained site, so the decision is made on evidence rather than on a vague sense that one ought to.

What actually breaks

The contact form stops delivering

This is the expensive one, and it is first on the list because it is both the most common and the hardest to notice. A form submits, shows the success message, and the email never arrives. The causes are mundane — a mail provider tightening authentication rules, an SMTP password rotated, a plugin update changing how mail is sent, a hosting move, or the destination address quietly starting to file submissions as spam.

There is no error. The visitor thinks they contacted you. You think it has been a slow month. We have seen sites go two months in that state. Every plan we run checks form delivery end to end, monthly, by actually submitting the form and confirming the message lands.

Security patches stop being applied

Every component your site is built on — the CMS, its plugins, its theme, the server-side language runtime, the libraries underneath — publishes security fixes. Publishing a fix also publishes the vulnerability, and automated scanners begin probing for unpatched sites within days. Sites are not usually targeted; they are found by scripts sweeping the internet for a known version number.

What follows is rarely dramatic vandalism. It is more often spam pages injected into your site to sell someone else’s products, malicious redirects that fire only for mobile visitors, or your server quietly conscripted into sending spam — which is how a domain ends up on a blocklist and your ordinary business email starts landing in junk folders.

Plugin and dependency conflicts

Update one plugin and another stops working. That is not a hypothetical; it is Tuesday on any site running a dozen plugins that were each written by different people. The failure is often partial and invisible from the homepage — the booking calendar stops accepting Fridays, the gallery loads empty on mobile, the checkout drops one payment method.

Patching on a schedule, in a staging environment, with the important paths tested afterwards, is the difference between a fifteen-minute fix and a three-week outage nobody reported.

Certificates and domains expire

An expired SSL certificate replaces your website with a full-page browser warning about attackers. Most certificates renew automatically, right up until the automation breaks after a server change and nobody is watching. An expired domain is worse and considerably harder to reverse. Both are trivially preventable with monitoring and impossible to fix quickly once they have happened.

Core Web Vitals decay

Sites get slower on their own. Images uploaded straight from a phone at full resolution, a tracking script added for a campaign that ended, a font added for one heading, a plugin that loads its stylesheet on every page. None of these is significant alone. Together, over eighteen months, they turn a fast site into a slow one, and the decline is gradual enough that nobody inside the business notices — you are loading it from cache, on wifi, on a good device.

Backups that were never tested

Most sites have backups. Fewer have backups anyone has ever restored. A backup that captures files but not the database, or runs to a folder on the same server that just failed, or has been silently erroring for four months, is not a backup. It is a belief. We restore a backup to a scratch environment quarterly, because that is the only way to know.

What website maintenance includes

Concretely, the work is:

• Patching — security and dependency updates on a set cycle, applied to staging first for anything non-trivial, with the key paths tested afterwards.
• Backups — automated, held off-site, covering files and database, with a restore actually tested rather than assumed.
• Uptime and certificate monitoring — automated checks with alerts, plus advance warning on SSL and domain expiry.
• Form delivery checks — a real submission, monthly, confirmed received.
• Performance tracking — Core Web Vitals measured month over month so decay is visible while it is still cheap to reverse.
• Link and redirect auditing — catching internal links that break when pages move.
• Small changes — an hours allowance for content edits and minor design changes, so routine requests do not need a quote each time.
• A report — in plain English: what was updated, what was found, what needs a decision.

What it does not include

Maintenance is keeping what exists working well. It is not a rolling redesign, and we will not pretend otherwise to make a plan look bigger. New pages, new features, new templates, and rebuilds are quoted as projects. If a request will not fit in the plan’s hours, we tell you before doing the work, not on the invoice afterwards.

It is also not a substitute for a rebuild. If a site is running on an abandoned theme and an unsupported platform version, maintenance buys you time and manages risk; it does not fix the underlying problem. In that case we will say so and point you at website redesign services rather than take a monthly fee to maintain something that needs replacing.

What maintenance costs

Plans start at PKR 7,500 a month for a brochure or service site, rise to PKR 18,000 for a site actively generating enquiries, and PKR 35,000 where downtime costs money the same day — stores, booking flows, and web applications. Full detail is in the plans below.

The comparison worth making is not plan cost against zero. It is plan cost against one incident. A fortnight of a silently broken contact form costs most businesses more than a year of the Essential plan. Cleaning up an injected-spam compromise, restoring from whatever backup exists, and getting a domain off a blocklist runs into serious money and weeks of disruption. Maintenance is cheap insurance against a small number of expensive, entirely preventable events.

We maintain sites we did not build

Most of the sites we maintain are not ours. We start with an audit: platform and version, what is out of date, what is exposed, what the backup situation actually is, whether forms deliver, and current performance. You get that written up before committing to anything — sometimes it turns up a problem worth fixing once, after which a smaller plan is enough.

We need administrative access to the site, the hosting, and the domain. If access has been lost with a previous developer, tell us early: recovering it is usually possible but occasionally slow, and it is better handled before an emergency than during one.

How it runs month to month

Patching happens on the plan’s cycle, not whenever someone remembers. Monitoring runs continuously and alerts us, not you. Your allowance of small changes is used whenever you send them — email is fine, no ticket system. At month end you get a short report describing what was done, what was found, and anything that needs a decision from you.

Plans are month to month. There is no minimum term and no cancellation fee, and if you leave, every account stays in your name and nothing needs to be released. The best reason to keep a maintenance provider is that they are doing the work. We would rather compete on that.

The sites we look after best are the ones built to be looked after: consistent templates, no abandoned plugins, and documentation that says why things are the way they are. The IMAAR International build is one we designed, launched, and have maintained since — the case study describes what that ongoing work actually involves.

If you are also weighing up a rebuild, start with web development services — it is worth knowing what a fresh build would cost before committing to maintaining an ageing one.