What a website costs after launch

A quote for a website covers design, build, launch, and the invoice. It usually leaves out what starts the day after, and in our experience most of what a site costs is there, whether or not anyone budgeted for it.

The domain renews. The hosting renews. The paid plugins the site depends on usually renew too, sometimes on a card that belongs to the person who built it. Ask who owns each of those accounts before the build starts. Sometimes the account belongs to the person who built the site, and that matters the day that person stops answering email.

The bigger cost is maintenance. Your site gets updates on a schedule, and so does every plugin on it. Most of them change nothing you can see. Occasionally one changes the form your intake runs through, and nobody notices until someone asks why the submissions stopped two months ago. Skipping updates is worse. A site that has not been patched in a year can end up hosting something it should not, and the cleanup costs more than the maintenance would have.

Ask whether a backup has ever been restored. Most hosts will tell you they take one nightly; fewer can tell you the last time anyone pulled a site back out of it and checked that the forms still worked. We make ourselves answer that question for the sites we host.

A site that passed an accessibility check at launch can stop passing when someone adds a page in a hurry, with an image that has no description or a PDF uploaded where a page should be. That is ordinary use, and it is why a one-time audit says less than it seems to; we wrote about earlier. For a grant-funded organization or a public agency, the obligation is to the site as it is today.

The last cost is your staff's time. Changing the hours or moving an event takes someone's afternoon. If the only person who can make that change bills by the hour, small edits get postponed and the site goes stale a little at a time. If the site was built so your team can make those edits, the cost is smaller, but it still exists, and someone should own it.

Before you sign, these are the questions to ask:

We treat the build and the years after it as one engagement: the site stays hosted, updated, backed up, and checked as its content changes, and there is one person to email when something is wrong. The details are on the services page. These questions are worth asking whoever you hire, including us.