Your site has been live for two years and looks exactly the same

What your retainer is actually paying for

Monthly retainers usually cover three things: keeping the site online, keeping it secure, and making changes when you need them. The first two happen quietly in the background. The third is the bit you should be able to see.

Over two years on a £100-150/month retainer, you have handed over somewhere between £2,400 and £3,600. For that money, the agency should have updated your services, refreshed your photos, added new pages when your business changed, and improved the bits that were not working.

If none of that has happened, the retainer has been pure profit for them. Hosting a small business site costs the agency about £5 a month. The rest is meant to be your time.

Why nothing has changed in two years

The honest answer is usually one of these:

• You never asked, so they never offered.
• You asked, but every request became a quote for extra work on top of the retainer.
• The person who built the site has left, and no one wants to touch it.
• They are quietly hoping you forget you are paying them.

The retainer model works for the agency whether you ask for anything or not. The bill goes out, the direct debit goes through, and silence is the most profitable outcome they can hope for.

What a site should look like after two years

Two years is a long time in a small business. You have probably added services, dropped services, taken on staff, lost staff, raised prices, won awards, moved premises, or shifted what you focus on. Almost none of that will be on your website if no one has been updating it.

A site that has had real attention over two years will have:

• Recent photos that match what the business actually looks like now
• Up-to-date service descriptions and pricing
• New pages or sections reflecting changes in the business
• Recent reviews or testimonials
• Better page speed than launch (browsers and standards have moved on)
• Tidier copy where the original launch text was rough

If your site has none of this, it has been frozen in time. Whether that matters depends on whether your competitors' sites have moved on. They almost certainly have.

How to check if anything has actually been done

There is a free tool called the Wayback Machine. Go to web.archive.org, paste in your site address, and pick a date from around when the site launched. Compare it side by side with the site today.

If the two screenshots are identical, you have your answer. Two years of retainer payments have bought you no visible change to the thing you were paying them to look after.

The work an agency does that you cannot see - security patches, software updates - takes a competent developer a few hours a year on a small site. It does not justify a four-figure annual bill on its own.

What to do next

First, email your agency and ask for a list of every change made to your site in the last 24 months, with dates. Make it a polite, direct request. The reply will tell you everything you need to know.

If the list is short or vague, you have two options. Renegotiate the retainer down to a fair hosting-only price, or move to someone who treats updates as included rather than as extras to quote for.

SkipTheAgency's Maintained plan is £65/month and includes up to 10 content changes every month - new photos, new services, copy tweaks, the lot. The Hosted plan at £40/month covers a small number of changes for sites that genuinely do not need much. Either way, you should not be paying £150/month for a site that has not moved in two years.