Upkeep you can check
Most maintenance is invisible. You pay monthly and trust the work is happening. The only way to know is to measure what it is supposed to produce: a valid padlock, forms that deliver, no dead ends, a page phones do not wait on, email that arrives. That measurement costs €79, once.
Six things a plan must produce
Written as outcomes, not activities. Activities are what get billed. Outcomes are what can be checked.
The site is awake
Every page that matters answers, not just the home page. An inner page can be dead for weeks while the home page looks fine.
The padlock holds
The browser padlock (the SSL certificate) is valid and its renewal is verified, not assumed. When it runs out, visitors see a warning instead of your site.
Enquiries arrive
Forms get sent test messages and the messages land. Forms fail silently. An empty inbox looks exactly like a quiet month.
Backups restore
Taken daily and tested by actually restoring one. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope.
Phones don’t wait
The site stays quick on a phone. Speed decays with every added photo, so it is measured monthly and compared, not measured once at launch.
Google is told the truth
No leftover setting hiding the site, a reachable page list, and the business described in the form machines read. The things a redesign quietly breaks.
Maintenance in Ireland, answered
How much does website maintenance cost in Ireland?
Freelancers typically charge €50 to €150 a month for updates and backups. Structured agency plans run €500 to €1,450 or more. The band you need depends on how much the site earns you. The cost calculator on this site walks through it in five questions, and will happily tell you the cheapest option is fine.
What should a maintenance plan actually include?
Hosting and domain records minded, software kept up to date, daily backups tested by restoring them, the site and its forms watched by a machine, the browser padlock renewed before it runs out, and small fixes. The test of any provider is whether they can show you what was checked last month.
How do I know if my current provider is doing the work?
Ask for last month's check list. If the answer is a shrug, you are paying a standing order rather than buying a service. Failing that, measure the site yourself: the €79 Website Health Report checks the outcomes a plan is supposed to produce, from a valid padlock and working forms to a page phones do not wait on and email that arrives, with the evidence for each.
What fails most often on Irish small-business sites?
Consistently: padlocks that ran out because an automatic renewal quietly stopped; contact forms that stopped delivering with no error; pages getting heavier as photos are added straight from a phone; and email landing in spam because the records that prove it is really yours were never set up. All four are checkable from outside the site, which is what the report does.
Do you do the maintenance work yourselves?
No. This site sells one thing: an examination of your website for €79. What you do with it is genuinely up to you: fix things yourself, hand the list to your existing web person, or use it to choose a provider. The report is written so any of those work.
Plain answers, in depth
Everything the checks look for, explained so you can hold any provider to it. Including us.
The same standard, where you are
The checks are done over the internet and are identical everywhere. What differs by county is what you get quoted and what your site's one fatal fault tends to be.