Before you sign anything, make sure whoever you are hiring has talked to you about both:
- What maintenance and management they offer
- What they are actually good at when it comes to marketing
Those two questions matter because:
- Websites are technical, and they need someone technical looking after them.
- "If you build it, they will come" is a line from a film. It is not true of websites.
You do not want a team that launches your site and wishes you luck. Left alone, a website quietly degrades — plugins go stale, forms break silently, and nobody notices until an enquiry that never arrived turns out to have been failing for a month.
Management
Most agencies offer some level of management or maintenance. These are better kept separate from marketing packages, so you can change or stop marketing without disturbing the thing keeping your site alive.
A basic plan should cover:
- Hosting that is actually fast
- Performance monitoring and upkeep
- Backups, tested rather than assumed
- DNS management
- General maintenance and updates
- Security
- Handling small changes and edits
More advanced plans add:
- Higher-tier hosting for larger or busier sites
- Analytics, monitoring and regular reporting
- Ongoing accessibility work
- Development hours for continued improvement
- Conversion rate work
Ask to be walked through the options. A good answer helps you pick the right one for your business rather than steering you to the most expensive.
Two things to check before you sign a management plan. First, does it include backups you can actually restore from, held somewhere other than the same server? Second, what happens if you leave — do you get the site, the database, and the domain, without an argument? If either answer is vague, that is the answer.
Marketing
Most agencies have one or two things they are genuinely good at — search, paid ads, content, digital PR. If you sign up for a campaign, give it at least six months. Traffic takes time to build and results take time to settle.
The common ways of getting people to a website:
- SEO (search engine optimisation). Search has changed more in the last two years than in the previous ten. AI answers and zero-click results mean plenty of searches never produce a visit at all, and the cheap tactics that used to work — thin pages, keyword stuffing, bulk content — are finished. What still works is being the source that genuinely answers the question, in the words people actually use, with specifics nobody else will publish. That is harder, slower, and it is the only version worth paying for. Be sceptical of anyone selling SEO as a monthly package of “content” without being able to say what question each piece answers.
- Paid search. The fastest way to find out whether your offer converts. You pay to appear above the organic results for searches that matter. Good campaigns send traffic to a page built for that specific promise, and most of the work goes into the offer, the copy and the conversion rate rather than the ads. Budget thousands a month, and expect to be able to see exactly what each enquiry costs.
- Social media. Not usually worth paying for unless the team is genuinely excellent at it, which is expensive. The alternative worth considering is paying once for a plan and training so it can be handled in-house. Avoid cheap social media retainers — they are generic and they do nothing.
- Email. Efficient and high return, but only once you have either a list or enough traffic to build one. If you have a list you are not using, that is usually the cheapest win available to you.
- Video and YouTube. Very effective for some businesses, and subject to the same difficulties as social generally.
- Paid advertising elsewhere. Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube and others all sell advertising. Whoever runs it needs to be expert in the specific platform — the skills do not transfer as well as agencies imply.
- Sponsorship and influencer work. Effective in some markets, and a specialist discipline. Make sure whoever you hire actually does this rather than adding it to a list.
- Content marketing. Using genuinely useful material to bring people in and earn their trust. Done properly it is expensive, because it requires someone who knows the subject. There is a great deal of thin, AI-generated content being sold as content marketing. It does not work, and it is increasingly obvious to readers.
- Offline and local. Not digital, but still capable of sending the right people to your site. Worth considering, especially for a business with a physical catchment.
Two things to hold on to:
- Let people who know what they are doing look after the site.
- A website with no marketing behind it will not produce a return, no matter how good it is.
The team that builds your site does not have to be the team that looks after it, and does not have to be the team that markets it. Often it is simplest if they are, because they already know how it is put together. But that should be a decision you make on the merits, not something you are locked into. Make sure both jobs are covered by someone.
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