Guides

Straight answers about looking after your website.

No jargon, no scare tactics, nothing you need a web person to translate. Just what actually matters for a small business site — and what you can safely ignore.

BasicsJuly 26, 20269 min read

What Is a Website Care Plan? (And Do You Need One?)

Care plans get sold with a lot of jargon and very little detail. Here’s the plain version — what you’re actually buying, and the honest test for whether it’s worth it.

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More guides

Costs9 min

How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost? (2026 Breakdown)

The honest range is $0 to a few hundred a month, and the reason it’s so wide is that maintenance means two different things. Here’s what each option actually costs — and which one is genuinely right for you.

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Basics9 min

The Small Business Website Checklist

A working checklist, not a wish list. Everything a small business site actually needs — and why a simple site that’s accurate beats an elaborate one that’s stale.

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Basics9 min

11 Signs Your Website Is Quietly Costing You Customers

Your website was accurate the day it launched. Then the business kept moving and the site didn’t. Here’s a fifteen-minute audit you can run yourself.

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Basics9 min

Who Should Actually Be Updating Your Website?

There are only four real options, and the right one depends less on your budget than on how often your site needs to change. Plus the failure mode that catches more small businesses than all the others combined.

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Maintenance8 min

How Often Should You Update Your Website?

Not everything on your website needs updating at the same speed. A practical calendar for content, security and design — plus the details that quietly embarrass a business.

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Maintenance10 min

Why Is My Website Down? A Plain-English Troubleshooting Guide

Nine times out of ten a dead website comes down to one of eight boring problems. Here’s how to work out which one you’ve got — and who to ring about it.

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Maintenance9 min

What Website Downtime Actually Costs a Small Business

Forget industry averages. Four numbers you already have will tell you what an hour of website downtime costs your business — and why the noticing matters more than the outage.

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Security8 min

Website Backups: What They Are and Why Yours Might Not Exist

Most owners believe they have backups. Far fewer can say where they are or who would restore them on a Saturday night. Here is how to close that gap in about ten minutes.

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Security9 min

Website Security for People Who Aren’t Techies

Five unglamorous habits cover most of website security, and none of them require you to understand how any of it works. Plus what to do first if something has already gone wrong.

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Or skip the reading.

Everything in these guides is what a care plan handles for you — the checking, the backups, the updates you keep meaning to get around to.

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