Website Updates and Maintenance: DIY or Pay Someone? A Letter From One Owner

Yolanda owns a small yoga studio in Phoenix. Two years ago, to save money, she took over her own website updates and maintenance. Last month her friend Inés, who is about to open a pottery studio across town, asked whether she should do the same.

Yolanda wrote back a long email. With her permission (she is fictional, so she was very relaxed about it), here it is, lightly edited, with a few notes from us along the way.

"Dear Inés, here is what I thought it would be"

Dear Inés,
When I fired my web person, I pictured myself on Sunday evenings with a cup of tea, changing the class schedule, maybe writing a little blog post about breathing. Ten minutes a week. I would save a nice bit of money every year and feel very capable.
I want you to know that the tea part was accurate.

That picture is not wrong, by the way. The everyday updates on a small business website, like changing text, swapping a photo or adding an event, really can be that easy on a modern site. The trouble usually lives in the other half of the phrase: maintenance.

"What it actually turned out to be"

The schedule changes were easy. Then, about three months in, I logged in and saw a little red number telling me there were fourteen updates waiting. I clicked "update all," because that seemed responsible.
The booking calendar disappeared. Not broken. Gone. It was a Friday night, and Saturday morning is my busiest class.
I spent four hours on forums written by people who seemed very angry at each other. In the end my nephew fixed it on a video call by "rolling back a plugin," which I still do not fully understand.

This is the most common DIY story there is. Updates are important, but they occasionally clash with each other. Professionals usually take a backup first, update one piece at a time and check the site afterwards. Clicking "update all" on a Friday night is the website equivalent of rewiring your kitchen during a dinner party.

"The things I was genuinely good at"

I do not want to scare you. Some parts I loved, and I still do them myself:

Changing class times and prices.
Writing short posts and announcements.
Swapping in new photos of the studio.
Answering messages that come through the contact form.

Nobody knows my studio better than me, so these sound like me when I write them.

Yolanda is right here. Content is often better when the owner writes it. A good website should make these jobs easy for you, without needing to call anyone.

"The things I should never have touched"

Here is my list of regrets:

Updates to the plugins and the theme, which broke things twice.
Backups, which I believed were happening automatically. They were, until the storage filled up and they quietly stopped.
Security. I found out a bot had been trying to log into my site thousands of times only because the hosting company emailed me.
Speed. My site got slower every month and I had no idea why. It was my photos. I had been uploading them straight from my phone at full size.

These are the technical jobs that do not show up until they go wrong. None of them are hard for someone who does them every day. They are easy to get wrong for someone who does them once in a while.

DIY website updates and maintenance: the honest scorecard

Pulling Yolanda's letter together, here is how the two options usually compare:

• Doing it yourself costs less money and more time. It suits owners who enjoy the tech side, have a simple site and are willing to learn backups and safe updating properly.
• Paying someone costs a predictable monthly fee and saves the evenings. It suits owners whose site takes bookings, payments or leads, where a broken page costs real business.
• The middle path, which is what Yolanda landed on: you handle the content, a professional handles the technical upkeep.

There is no shame in either choice. The only bad choice is the one nobody actually makes, where the updates pile up and everyone assumes someone else is watching.

Whichever way you go, write it down. Make a simple list of every part of your website updates and maintenance, from class times to backups to the domain renewal, and put one name next to each item. Yours, or someone you pay. If a line has no name next to it, that is the job that will bite you, probably on a Friday night.

"So here is what I would do if I were you"

Inés, get your site built properly from the start, so that changing your own class times and photos is easy. Then pay someone to handle the boring, dangerous stuff. I resisted that for a long time because it felt like admitting defeat. It was not. It was admitting that I teach yoga, and I am good at it, and that is where my hours should go.
Also, never click "update all" on a Friday.
Love, Y.

Build a site that is easy to keep up

The way a website is built decides how painful its website updates and maintenance will be for years afterwards. A tidy site with a simple editor and a sensible number of plugins is easy to look after, whoever does it. A cluttered one is hard work for everybody. At Web Design Studios, we build clean, fast websites for small businesses, set up so you can edit everyday content yourself. Look through our services and find the one that fits your business.

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