A pattern we see constantly: a business gets a lovely website built, the designer hands it over, and eighteen months later the site is outdated, slow and slightly broken — and the designer has stopped replying. It’s worth understanding why, because it’s not personal.
Building and maintaining are different businesses
Designers earn by building — project fees, defined scope, an end date. Maintenance is the opposite: small unpredictable interruptions, forever, for modest money. To a builder, your “quick 10-minute fix” is a context-switch that torpedoes a design day. Most aren’t staffed for it, don’t price it properly, and quietly dread it.
What actually happens after handover
Months 1–3: the designer answers small requests free, out of goodwill. Months 3–12: replies slow down; goodwill is being spent. Year 2: the requests feel like impositions on both sides, and the relationship fades — while the site quietly decays underneath.
Neither of you is wrong
You reasonably assumed “the website person” handles website things. They reasonably assumed the project ended at launch. The gap is structural: someone has to own updates, backups, security and small fixes, and by default nobody does.
How to fill the gap
- Ask your designer for a paid care plan. Some offer one — if theirs is good and priced fairly, that continuity has value.
- Use a dedicated maintenance service. This is all we do at WP Hero: flat fee, unlimited small tasks, and we’re happy working on sites we didn’t build. We’d rather your designer keeps designing.
- DIY with a checklist — genuinely fine, if you’ll actually do it monthly, forever.
One thing to do this week regardless
Make sure you own your hosting account, domain, and an admin login — not your designer. The saddest support tickets we see are owners locked out of their own websites by a vanished builder.