Website maintenance explained (and what it costs)

What does website maintenance actually cover?

Maintenance is an umbrella term for several distinct activities that happen after a site launches. At the core: hosting and deployment (the site needs to be somewhere, served reliably); security and software updates (plugins, frameworks and dependencies need patching — an unpatched site is a liability); uptime monitoring (you need to know if the site goes down before a customer tells you); form and integration checks (a broken contact form is invisible until someone mentions they tried to get in touch); and small content updates (changing hours, updating a price, swapping a team photo).

Beyond the basics, maintenance can extend to performance monitoring (page speed, Core Web Vitals), analytics review, and proactive fixes before they become problems. The scope determines the cost.

Social Spark care plan tiers

**Website Care — from £49 per month.** Covers the essentials: hosting and deployment, security monitoring and updates, uptime checks, form checks, and a small allocation of content updates each month. This is the right level for most small business sites that need to stay live, safe and current without a retainer that scales beyond the need.

**Website Care + Lead Handling — from £149 per month.** Everything in the standard care plan, plus enquiry capture, organisation and automated follow-up via ViralDesk — our CRM and automation platform. This tier is for businesses where the website is generating enquiries and the gap between receiving a lead and responding to it is losing business. Missed-call text-back, follow-up sequences and lead tracking are included.

**Full ViralDesk Growth System — scoped separately.** The full CRM and automation stack: custom pipelines, AI agent, SMS and email follow-up sequences, team inboxes, reporting. This is scoped after a review because the configuration varies significantly by business type and volume.

What happens if you do not maintain your website?

The risks are concrete. An unpatched site is vulnerable to security exploits — a small business site is not too small to be a target. An unmaintained contact form that stops delivering emails is a silent lead drain. A site that loads slowly because its framework has not been updated will lose visitors before they read a word.

Beyond the technical risks, an unmaintained site goes stale. Wrong hours, old team photos, a service you no longer offer — these are trust signals working against you. A care plan is not a luxury; it is the cost of keeping the asset functioning.

Do you need lead handling built into your care plan?

If your website's job is to generate enquiries — and for most small businesses, it is — then what happens after the enquiry arrives matters as much as what the site looks like. Response speed is one of the biggest factors in whether an enquiry converts. A missed call or an enquiry that sits unanswered for 48 hours is a lost customer.

The Care + Lead Handling tier (from £149 per month) addresses this by connecting your enquiry forms and calls to ViralDesk — so leads are captured, organised and followed up automatically. For businesses where enquiry volume is significant, the Full ViralDesk system provides a more complete CRM pipeline scoped to your specific workflow.

How care plans connect to the build routes

Every Social Spark website build includes a care plan recommendation based on the complexity of the build and the business's enquiry volume. A Website Starter build (from £1,500) is managed from £49 per month. A Website Plus build (from £3,000) is managed from £99 per month. Bespoke builds have ongoing support tailored to the build.

The care plan is not a separate product bolted on after the fact — it is how the website stays working, current and effective after launch. If you are bringing an existing site into a care plan, the starting point is an audit to understand what the site needs and which tier makes sense.