Here’s something I hear all the time from consultants:
“My website isn’t really a priority right now. I just need to update a few things when I get a chance.”
And then I ask: When’s the last time you actually updated it?
The answer is usually somewhere between “a few months ago” and “honestly, I can’t remember.”
Here’s the thing. It’s not that you don’t care about your website. It’s that every time you sit down to “quickly” update something, it turns into an hour-long rabbit hole. The plugin needs updating. Now something looks weird. Wait, is that supposed to be there? And suddenly you’re troubleshooting instead of working with clients.
So you close the laptop and tell yourself you’ll deal with it later.
Sound familiar?
So how long does maintenance take on a website? For most DIY-ers, way more than they expect.
The time you’re not tracking
Most business owners don’t track how much time they actually spend on website stuff. It doesn’t feel like “real work,” so it doesn’t make it onto the timesheet.
But it adds up:
- 15 minutes here to publish a blog post (that turns into 45 when the formatting breaks)
- An hour troubleshooting why your contact form stopped working
- 30 minutes googling “is this plugin update safe” before clicking the button
- A whole afternoon trying to figure out why your site is suddenly slow
- The mental energy of knowing your site needs attention but not having bandwidth to deal with it
That last one doesn’t show up on any timesheet, but it’s real.
What 20 hours a month actually looks like
One of our clients—a consulting firm that’s worked with Nike, Amazon, and Nintendo—finally added it up.
They were spending roughly 20 hours a month on website tasks.
Not because they were doing anything wrong. They’re smart, capable people running a successful business. But their small team didn’t have WordPress expertise, so every update was a slow, uncertain process.
Updates got delayed. Tasks fell through the cracks. Nobody was quite sure who was responsible for what. And meanwhile, the website—the one place where prospects could learn about them 24/7—wasn’t getting the attention it needed.
Here’s what their CEO said:
“We were using WordPress, but my team doesn’t really know WordPress, so making updates was a slow process.”
Twenty hours a month. That’s half a work week. Every single month.
The real cost isn’t just time
Let’s do some quick math.
If you bill $200/hour (conservative for most consultants), 20 hours of website wrangling costs you $4,000/month in opportunity cost.
That’s $48,000 a year.
Not in actual expenses—in time you could be spending on client work, business development, or honestly just… not working.
And that’s before we factor in:
- The stress of knowing something’s not right but not having time to fix it
- The missed opportunities when prospects visit a slow, outdated site
- The risk of security issues you don’t even know about
Your website is working 24/7, even when you’re not. The question is: is it working for you, or just… sitting there?
How to know if you have a 20-hour problem
You probably don’t track this, so here are some signs:
You’re avoiding your website. When someone asks for your URL, you feel a little embarrassed. You find yourself saying “it needs some updates” or “we’re working on it.”
Updates keep getting pushed. You’ve had “update the website” on your to-do list for weeks. Maybe months.
You’re not sure what’s actually happening. Is your site getting traffic? Is the contact form working? When was the last backup? If you don’t know the answers, that’s a sign.
You’ve had the “should I just hire someone?” thought. More than once. But then you think about the cost, or the hassle of finding someone reliable, and you push it aside.
Small tasks turn into big time sinks. What should take 10 minutes somehow takes an hour. Every. Single. Time.
If you’re nodding along, you’re not alone. This is exactly why we built our Care Plans.
What “handing it off” actually looks like
The consulting firm I mentioned earlier? After their first website redesign, they signed up for a Partner Care Plan.
Two years later, they’ve renewed twice.
Here’s what changed:
Their team doesn’t touch WordPress anymore. Updates, backups, security monitoring—all handled. They email us when they need something changed, and it gets done.
Their site keeps getting better. Not just maintained—strategically improved. In early 2025, we completed an SEO overhaul that increased their services page views by 471%.
They got 20 hours back. Every month. That’s time they now spend on client work and growing their business.
“For the first time in 23 years, I feel like we have a partner to help us leverage the main place where we tell the story of what we do—our website.”
Is a Care Plan right for you?
Not everyone needs one. If you genuinely enjoy managing your WordPress site and you have systems that work, keep doing your thing.
But if your website has become a source of stress—or a to-do item that never quite gets done—it might be time to hand it off.
Or book a free 15-minute call and we’ll figure out together whether it makes sense for your situation. No pressure, no pitch—just honest conversation.
If any of this landed, the next step is a quick call to talk through your own site.
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