A site that sleeps still rots
Nothing about a website pauses because bookings do. Software needs its updates all winter; the certificate renews, or fails to, on its own calendar; the email provider behind your booking form changes something at their end. On a year-round business those faults surface quickly because someone notices the enquiries stop. On a Wexford site in January, nobody is watching, and the faults keep. The fix is not a bigger plan. It is making sure someone, or something, checks the site in the months you do not.
What upkeep should cost a Wexford business
Take a holiday let near Curracloe: the site carries the photos, the calendar and an enquiry form, with bookings confirmed by email. That is squarely the freelancer band, roughly €50 to €150 a month, and honestly, for a single-property site, the bottom of it. The two things the money must actually buy: the form test-submitted through the winter, and the certificate watched, because a browser security warning on a booking site does not slow bookings, it stops them. A Wexford business taking card payments online belongs a band up. The calculator answers it in five questions.
Does your web person need to be in Wexford?
For maintenance, no: the work is done over the internet and is the same from any county. The genuinely local parts of web work are the photographs, and in a county that sells itself on strand and coastline, they matter; buy them locally, by the day, when the season is at its best. A maintenance contract does not become better value by having photography bundled into it, and a good local photographer does not need to also be your web person.
The pre-season check
The €79 Website Health Report examines the whole site at once: certificate, forms, dead links, speed on a phone, whether email from your domain arrives, each finding with its evidence. Run in early spring, it is the website equivalent of walking the property before the first guests: an hour of attention that catches what the winter did. The examination is remote and identical in every county; this page is written for Wexford because the season gives the question its deadline here, not because the check differs. Nothing follows the report: no pitch, no plan, no calls.