The short answer is no.

The long answer is yes.

Let me explain the difference via a short story about a beautiful 3-story restaurant with a huge stage, and played only live music, often from big music stars.

This restaurant and musical venue had a great website, showcasing not only the menu, but the luxurious venue style and decor, seating, and photos/videos of all the artists that have played there, as well as sold tickets to the upcoming shows.

Over time, the website was breaking, slowly, and in small ways. First, the menu section code broke, and needed repairing. Then later, the photos that used Flash to create animated galleries stopped working. Finally, videos stopped displaying, losing cherished performances from great artists, some that have since passed away, and that was their last live performance.

This website wasn’t maintained, and we were contacted to help fix things. Some could be fixed easily, some not so easy, and some sections were lost due to how technology always changes over time. Thankfully, the website never got hacked – because it’s on good servers that are built with security in mind. But, some of these things were easily preventable, if the website was on a maintenance plan, and was cared for like the restaurant itself.

If someone has a website and they don’t care if it breaks over time, things stop displaying, and it may or may not get hacked and defaced or infected with malware, then no, it does not need a maintenance plan.

If that person is paying for the domain name, the hosting of the website, and cares about their reputation, how they look online, and what visitors see, then yes, that website deserves a maintenance plan.

If you’re a website owner, you should have a maintenance plan of your own that you manage and execute on daily, like you would clean a restaurant you own, have someone washing the dishes, sweeping the floors, cleaning the windows.

The restaurant, sadly, eventually went out of business… but it’s website lives on as a tribute to the musicians that played there years ago, with the video performances still online for everyone to watch. It may reopen in a different city someday, but for now it lives online, and we take care of it. (Visit our maintenance plan site, WP Site Dr.)

Who’s taking care of your website today?