The seventy-five pound email and the changes you never made

Say a first-floor office comes back to you in March. You write to whoever looks after the website, attach four photographs and a paragraph of copy, and ask for it to go up. The reply arrives next morning: about an hour's work, £75 plus VAT. That seems fair. You pay it, and by Thursday the unit is on the site.

The £75 is not the expensive part.

The expensive part turns up in June, when you notice the fee page still carries last year's figures. And in September, when a member of staff leaves and her photograph stays on the team page. And in November, when the number on the contact page is the old one, because the line moved and nobody thought about the website. Each of those is another email, another hour, another £75. So they do not get sent. The fee page carries last year's figures into the following spring, her photograph is still on the team page at Christmas, and the number stays the one that stopped working in November.

The arithmetic of a year of small changes

Count the changes your firm would make in a year if they cost nothing. A new instruction on the day it is signed. A let unit taken down the same week. Two staff changes. A revised fee schedule. Opening hours over Christmas. A fresh photograph of the office after the front was repainted. A paragraph about the block management side, because that is the work you want more of.

Call it twelve. At £75 a time, that is £900. Most firms never spend the £900. They spend £150 on the two changes that could not wait, and the other ten quietly do not happen. Twelve months of that and the website has stopped describing the business you are actually running.

If nobody in the office can make a change without emailing someone outside it, you are paying this whether or not an invoice ever arrives. It is the same root problem as being unable to edit your own website, just with a price list attached.

What a frozen page says about the firm

No visitor looks at an out-of-date site and concludes that the firm is on a per-change contract. They read it as the firm.

Picture a landlord with three managing agents open in three tabs on a Sunday evening, deciding who to ring on Monday. Two of the sites show properties with recent dates on them. Yours shows a retail unit that was let last spring and a news item from 2023. He has no idea about the £75. He only sees a business that has not touched its own shop window in two years, and he draws the obvious conclusion about how quickly it might answer him.

There is a harder cost underneath that. A unit sitting empty and not listed is a unit that some enquiries will never hear about, while the void carries on costing every week it stands. Putting it on the site will not fill it by itself. Leaving it off narrows the field of people who could.

The half nobody sends you an invoice for

Plenty of good property websites run on WordPress. The software is not the problem. Neglect is, and the per-change model produces neglect by design, because if a content edit costs £75, a security update looks like a luxury.

Very little of the risk sits in WordPress itself. It sits in the plugins. A working property site runs a dozen or more of them, for the listings, the map, the enquiry form, the gallery, and every one is a piece of software written by somebody else that needs updating whenever its author publishes a fix. Break-ins come through those far more often than through WordPress, and they come through the ones nobody has updated.

A vulnerability becomes public at the moment its fix does. That is how the process works. The patch is announced, and the announcement tells every automated scanner on the internet exactly what to go looking for. Those scanners then work through lists of sites hunting for the version that has not been updated yet. Nobody chooses your firm. A site patched whenever somebody remembers is exposed for weeks at a stretch, and nothing on the page tells you so.

Then there is the certificate. If your site has no valid SSL certificate, or had one that lapsed, the browser puts a warning in front of the page before the visitor reads a single word. Some browsers show a full grey screen with a button to continue at your own risk. A landlord who meets that screen while shortlisting agents does not investigate. He goes back and clicks the next result. Certificates expire on a date known months in advance, so a lapsed one is only ever a renewal that nobody owned.

What a maintained arrangement should cover

Updates applied on a schedule, not on request. Core and plugins, at a stated frequency, inside a flat monthly fee. Nobody should have to decide whether a security patch is worth an invoice.

Backups held somewhere other than the site's own server. And restored once, as a test, because an untested backup is only a hope with a filename.

The certificate renewed automatically and monitored. Someone should be told before it expires rather than by a client ringing to say your website is broken.

The changes you make most often, in your own hands. Listings, staff, fees, opening hours. If you have to email a supplier to correct a phone number, the arrangement is wrong regardless of what it costs.

A named contact and a written response time. Not a shared inbox that nobody owns.

Two limits, because plenty of people will sell you past them. A maintenance arrangement can build the alert; it cannot make anyone act on it. If an enquiry lands in your inbox on Saturday morning and nobody looks until Tuesday, no amount of monitoring will change that outcome. A well-built listing form can also put the material information fields in front of whoever writes the listing, so nobody has to remember them unaided. Getting them right remains your firm's job.

Two figures would settle this: what a maintained site costs you a month, and what replacing the one you have comes to. Ask us for both.