Who maintains the website once the project ends

94 percent (Bitkom 2025) of trade businesses in Germany use a website of their own. That figure says nothing about the condition of those sites. A website is not a workpiece that stays as it was handed over: it runs on a server that gets updated, behind a domain that has to be renewed, with a certificate that expires, and with content describing a business in a state that may no longer exist. The owner notices none of this as long as the home page appears in the morning when he opens it on his phone.

That is the actual point: there is no feedback. With a leaking roof somebody eventually rings the bell. With an outdated website nobody calls to say that the services page still lists the range from two years ago, or that the contact form has sent nothing since the last server move. The prospect simply clicks on to the next business, and the failure shows up only as something that does not happen — an enquiry that never arrives and that nobody misses, because nobody knew about it.

On top of that comes habituation. Anyone who opens their own website twice a week stops seeing it. Outside eyes notice the year in the footer first, then the photo with the old company van and the reference to a promotion that ended two summers ago. If clicking through your own pages turns up more than a handful of such spots, the question is no longer maintenance but a relaunch that keeps the existing addresses.

A website consists of several layers: the server environment, the admin system, its extensions and the design template. Every layer has its own publisher and its own rhythm. Security-related updates appear irregularly and often at short notice, functional updates at longer intervals. Install nothing and after twelve months you have a website whose components are listed as vulnerable in publicly available registers — and the address of that website is public on the internet.

The practical sequence is unspectacular, but the order matters. First back up, then install, then check. Reverse that order and, when something breaks, you restore a backup that already contains the fault. What gets checked is not the home page alone but the paths that carry money: submitting the contact form, tapping the phone number, opening a services page on a phone, using the search. That check takes a few minutes and finds exactly the cases that would otherwise stay unnoticed for weeks.

A second point concerns volume. Update once a year and you install twenty version jumps at once and, if something breaks, you do not know which one caused it. Update monthly and you have small steps and, in case of doubt, an unambiguous culprit. The total effort is no higher, it is only spread differently — and it avoids the situation where a business has to choose between risking everything at once or never touching anything again.

85 percent (Bitkom 2025) of trade businesses see a clear expectation among their customers of constant availability. For the website that simply means: it should answer when somebody opens it, and in the trades that is rarely during office hours. Enquiries arise in the evening on the sofa and at the weekend after the water damage. At exactly those times nobody is sitting in the office who could notice a blank page. An outage on Friday evening that is only spotted on Monday morning costs a whole weekend of visibility.

The remedy is undemanding: an automatic request to the home page at short intervals from outside the server, triggering a message when the answer fails to arrive or comes back faulty. What matters is that the request actually checks the content and not merely whether the server answers — a server can cheerfully serve an error page. Equally important is that the message reaches somebody who can act. A warning in the mailbox of a business that closes on Friday lunchtime is not monitoring, it is a log.

74 percent (Bitkom 2025) of businesses find that customers have become more critical. You notice it in the small things: somebody opening a website whose latest news item is three years old, listing a person in the team who is no longer mentioned on the phone, draws conclusions about the business — not about the website, but about the care taken in the work. That is unfair, but it is the reaction to expect.

The second reason is recruitment. 80 percent (Bitkom 2025) of trade businesses use digital channels to address young talent specifically. A job advert that has stood unchanged online for eighteen months looks either unfillable or unreal, and both do damage. Anyone who wants applications through their own site needs a current state there — what is being looked for, from when, for which trade. How such a page should be structured is set out in more detail under our services.

The third reason is mundane and expensive: services the business now offers do not appear on the website. An electrical contractor who has been installing charging points for two years but only lists electrical installation will not be found for charging points and will receive no enquiries for them. Every new service that has genuinely arrived in the business deserves its own page with its own text — not half a sentence in a bullet list.

This is the question rarely asked during the quotation meeting and the one that decides everything in a dispute. Three things are at stake. First the domain: it is registered with a registry under a holder, and that holder should be the business, not the service provider. Second the content: text, photos and design, to which usage rights attach. Third the logins: server, admin system, domain management, mailbox, business profile and everything else protected by a password.

If the domain is registered to the service provider, a change of supplier can become awkward — not impossible, but dependent on the goodwill of the other side and, in unfavourable cases, drawn out. The same applies to the business profile in map search, which carries the reviews. Reviews are trust built over years, and they cannot simply be moved. It is considerably easier to settle this before the project starts than to retrieve it later.

A second point concerns usage rights to text and images. Whoever paid for the photos does not automatically hold the rights for every use; whoever wrote the text has not automatically assigned every right. This is not a sign of distrust but a sentence in the contract: the business receives an unlimited right of use, in time and territory, to all content created for it, including after the collaboration ends. Anyone comparing what we offer should look for that sentence in every quote.

With us website maintenance starts at 49 euros per month and hosting at 15 euros per month — both cancellable monthly, with no minimum term. If you also want to work on visibility, local visibility starts at 290 euros per month and SEO support at 490 euros per month, likewise cancellable monthly with no minimum term. The website itself is built for a fixed price from 1,490 euros net, a relaunch of an existing site from 2,900 euros net. An overview is available under our services.

Monthly cancellation is not a detail here but the actual promise of quality. Anyone who has to convince their customers afresh every month has an incentive to do something in that month. An annual commitment reverses that incentive. Other things that should raise doubts: maintenance without named services, a notice period of several months, a contract with no statement about handing over data, and a refusal to hand over the login to the admin system.

It can be weighed against the effort the business otherwise carries itself. Two hours a month in which somebody in the office installs updates, checks afterwards and calls somebody in case of doubt cost more than the flat fee — and they fall due precisely when it does not suit. If you are unsure what makes sense for your business, a short conversation helps more than any list: get in touch.