Somebody in your office already looks after the website, more or less. Perhaps it is the marketing executive who knows how to add a blog post, the IT person who also fixes the printer, or the owner who logs in on Sunday evenings. It mostly works. Then a plugin update breaks the enquiry form, and the question comes up at the next meeting: should we keep doing this ourselves, or pay someone?
The in-house vs outsourced website maintenance decision is usually framed as cost against control. In practice it is about which tasks need a specialist and which do not. Very few small businesses should do all of it inside, and very few should hand over all of it. This post breaks the work into its parts so you can decide piece by piece.
In-house vs outsourced website maintenance: what the job consists of
“Maintaining the website” hides several different jobs, with very different skill requirements. Laid out side by side:
| Task | Skill needed | How often it comes up | Cost of getting it wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Editing text, prices, photos, opening hours | Low, with some training | Often | Low and easy to undo |
| Publishing blog posts and news | Low | Often, if you blog | Low |
| Checking forms and enquiries still arrive | Low | Regularly | High if missed, because leads vanish quietly |
| Applying plugin, theme and core updates | Medium, plus judgement about which ones are risky | Every week or two | Medium to high |
| Backups and test restores | Medium | Set up once, checked regularly | Very high, but only on the worst day |
| Security monitoring and clean-up | High | Rarely needed, then urgently | Very high |
| Server and PHP changes, hosting moves | High | A few times over the life of a site | High |
| Diagnosing a site that is slow or broken | High | Unpredictable | Depends on the site |
The top of the table is frequent and forgiving. The bottom is rare and unforgiving. That shape is the whole argument.
What in-house really looks like in a small business
Large companies hire a web developer. Small ones rarely can, so “in-house” usually means a person whose real job is something else. That works well for the top half of the table and badly for the bottom half, for three reasons.
Rare tasks never become familiar
Someone who restores a backup once every two years has to work it out from scratch each time, under pressure, with the site down. Skill at rare tasks comes from doing them often on many sites, which is exactly what an in-house generalist does not get to do.
The website loses to the day job
Updates are easy to postpone. Nobody notices for a while. Then a month becomes six, and the site is far enough behind that catching up is risky in itself. This is not laziness. It is a sensible person prioritising the work their manager actually asks about.
Knowledge leaves with the person
When the one employee who understood the site resigns, the knowledge goes too. Their personal email may even be the admin address. Plan for this before it happens by keeping accounts in the business’s name, not theirs.
The hidden costs on each side
Both options cost more than they first appear to. Be fair to each when you compare.
Hidden costs of keeping it in-house
- The time spent, which is real salary even if no invoice arrives.
- Learning time, every time something unfamiliar comes up.
- Tools: a reliable backup plugin, a security scanner and uptime monitoring may each have a paid tier you end up needing.
- No cover during leave, unless you train a second person.
- The occasional emergency call to an outside developer anyway, at a one-off rate, usually at the worst moment.
Hidden costs of outsourcing
- The monthly fee, obviously.
- Your time writing clear requests and answering questions, which drops sharply once the provider knows your site.
- Small delays on content changes, since they join a queue instead of being done at the next desk.
- The effort of choosing a provider and, if it goes badly, changing one.
Outsource website maintenance tasks selectively: the split model
For most small businesses the practical answer is a split. Keep the top of the table inside, hand the bottom to a specialist.
Keep in-house: content edits, blog posts, product descriptions, checking that enquiries arrive, noticing when something looks wrong. These benefit from being close to the business. Your team knows the prices have changed before any outside provider could. The post on jobs an owner can safely do on their own site sets out which of these are realistic without technical training.
Outsource: updates, backups and restores, security, performance, server changes and anything that needs diagnosis. These benefit from being done by someone who does them daily, across many sites, with a routine. That routine is the core of what a provider of web maintenance services sells.
A split only works if the boundary is clear. Agree in writing who does what. If your marketing executive installs a plugin, they tell the provider. If the provider holds an update because it might affect your booking form, they tell you. Testing changes on a copy of the site first keeps both sides from stepping on each other, and the guide to using a WordPress staging site explains how that copy works.
Training the person who keeps the content side
If content stays in-house, the person doing it needs a little training, and it is worth an hour of somebody’s time to give it properly. A lot of everyday breakage starts with an editor nobody showed the ropes to: an image uploaded straight from a phone camera at full size, a block deleted by accident, a page set to private and forgotten, a plugin installed because a tutorial suggested it.
Cover these points and most of that goes away:
- How to edit an existing page without changing its layout, and how to undo a change using revisions.
- How to resize and compress a photo before uploading it.
- What they should never do without asking: install or delete plugins, change the theme, touch settings pages.
- How to preview a change before publishing it.
- Who to tell when something looks wrong, and how quickly.
Give them an Editor account rather than an Administrator one, so the riskiest options are not even visible. That one setting prevents a lot of accidental damage and costs nothing.
What should never be outsourced
Whatever you decide about the work, some things stay with the business:
- Ownership of every account. Domain, hosting, admin, analytics, email. Providers get access, not ownership.
- Decisions about the site’s purpose. A provider can advise. Only you know what the site is for.
- A copy of recent backups, held somewhere you control.
- A named person inside the business who receives reports and answers questions. Without one, reports go unread and questions sit unanswered.
Making the handover work
If you move from fully in-house to a split, the first month decides whether it sticks.
- Have your current in-house person write down everything they know: logins, quirks, which plugins they never update, anything they fixed by hand.
- Create separate admin accounts for the provider rather than sharing anyone’s password.
- Agree a single channel for requests, so nothing gets lost in personal WhatsApp chats.
- Teach your team how to report a problem well. A message that says “the site is broken” costs everyone time. The guide on describing a website problem so it gets fixed is worth sharing with whoever will be sending those messages.
- Review after a month. What came back quickly, what was slow, what fell through the gap between the two sides?
Deciding for your own business
Ask these questions and the answer usually becomes obvious:
- Does anyone on staff enjoy this work and have time for it, protected from their main job?
- Would they know what to do if the site showed a critical error tomorrow morning?
- If they left next month, could someone else pick it up without a week of guesswork?
- How much does the site matter to sales? A store or a lead-generating site raises the stakes on the bottom half of the table.
If the answers are yes, yes, yes and “not much”, keeping it in-house is reasonable. If any of the first three is no, outsource at least the technical half. And if you are weighing who to outsource to, a solo developer or a firm, that question is taken up in the post on choosing between a freelancer and a maintenance company.
Support for teams that do some of it themselves
If your team wants to keep doing the routine and only needs someone to call when it goes beyond them, that is a reasonable setup, and it is what our on-demand WordPress help is for. You keep control of the day-to-day and bring us in for the parts at the bottom of the table.
Next in this series: How Often Should a Website Be Maintained?
