The sixty-second answer
Yes. Any honest arrangement lets you update your own website. The question worth asking is not whether you can, but what a change costs, how fast it happens, and who else can make one. Settle those three in writing before the build, not after.
Why this is the wrong question, asked for the right reason
"Can I update it myself?" is rarely about wanting to learn web software. It is a question about being trapped. The owner asking it has usually heard a story — a friend whose developer stopped answering email, a shop whose prices were wrong for eight months, a contractor who paid $200 to change a phone number. The fear is reasonable. The fix is not learning to code.
The fix is settling three numbers before anyone builds anything: what a small change costs, how long a small change takes, and what happens if the person who built it disappears. Everything else about site maintenance follows from those answers.
This matters at scale. As of December 2024 there were 1.10 million employer businesses in Canada, and 1.08 million of them — 98.2 per cent — were small businesses [1]. In New Brunswick alone, 20,256 of 20,631 employer businesses are small [1]. Almost none of them has a staff member whose job is the website. Maintenance has to survive being nobody's job.
The three kinds of update
Lumping every change into "an update" is how quotes become unpredictable. Separate them:
Content edits. Text, hours, prices, a phone number, a staff name, a new photo. These are the changes you will actually make, over and over, and they are the ones that should be cheap and fast. If a content edit requires a meeting, the arrangement is wrong.
Structural changes. A new page, a new navigation item, a new form, a new section on the home page. These are real work — half an hour to a couple of hours — and it is fair for them to be quoted. What is not fair is discovering that price only after you have asked.
Platform changes. Adding online booking tied to real availability, a storefront with inventory, member logins, a second language. These are engineering projects and they price like engineering projects. Nobody should promise you those are free.
When you compare two quotes, force each of them to price all three categories. The spread between quotes usually widens once you do, and sometimes the more expensive build turns out to be the cheaper year. We work through that comparison in what should a small business website cost in Canada?.
The updates that carry legal weight
Some edits are housekeeping. A few are obligations, and they are easy to miss because nothing on your site turns red when they go stale.
Prices you no longer honour. A price sitting on your site is a live representation to the public. Section 74.01 of the Competition Act reaches representations that are false or misleading in a material respect, and subsection 74.01(1.3) specifically treats a price as false or misleading where it is not attainable because of fixed obligatory charges or fees, excepting only charges imposed under an Act of Parliament or a provincial legislature [2]. Raising your rates is fine. Leaving last year's rate up while quoting this year's is the problem.
Tax wording. If you show prices, say plainly whether tax is included. The Canada Revenue Agency is explicit that the rate of tax to charge depends on the place of supply, illustrating the point with a Vancouver store that charges 13% HST when delivering to Toronto [3]. If you start serving customers in another province, that line on your pricing page may need to change too. More detail in how should I display prices with GST/HST?.
Claims about performance. "Fastest response in the region", "lasts twenty years", "the lowest rate in town". Under paragraph 74.01(1)(b) a performance or efficacy claim must be based on an adequate and proper test, and the proof of that test lies on the person making the representation [2]. If the thing that justified the claim has changed, the claim has to change with it. See what can I legally claim on my website?.
Your privacy page. If your contact form now emails three people instead of one, or you started keeping enquiries in a customer database, your privacy page is now describing a business you no longer run. PIPEDA's Schedule 1 requires purposes to be identified before or at the time of collection, requires knowledge and consent, requires that information no longer needed be destroyed, erased or made anonymous, and requires your policies to be readily available to the people you collect from [4]. Ten minutes of editing keeps that honest. See does my small business website need a privacy policy?.
Accessibility, when you add things. The usual way a site becomes unusable is not the original build — it is the additions. A price list posted as a photograph of a printed sheet, a PDF menu with no text version, a new button with no label. The Accessible Canada Act names information and communication technologies among the areas in which barriers are to be identified and removed, working toward a Canada without barriers on or before January 1, 2040 [5]. The same habits that keep a page usable — real text rather than text baked into an image, labelled form fields, headings in order — are what let an answer engine read and quote the page at all. See what are the website accessibility requirements in Canada?.
The five questions to ask before you sign
Put these to every provider, in writing, and keep the replies:
1. What does a text change cost, and how long does it take?
2. What does a new page cost?
3. Who holds the domain registration, and in whose account?
4. If I leave, do I get a copy of the site, and in what form?
5. If you are unavailable for two weeks, who can change my hours?
Question three is the one people skip and later regret. Your domain is the asset; the site is a file. Under the ICANN Transfer Policy, Registered Name Holders must be able to transfer their domain name registrations between registrars, a registrar of record may refuse a transfer only in a short list of enumerated circumstances, and where a transfer lock has been applied it must be removed — or an accessible removal method provided — within five calendar days [6]. That protection only helps you if the registration is in your name in the first place, which is why we wrote who owns my website and my domain?.
What good maintenance actually looks like
It is not a redesign every two years. It is four small habits: check your phone number and hours every quarter; take down services you no longer offer; keep your price page matching what you actually quote; and add the questions customers keep asking you as plain answers on the page. That last one does more for how you show up in search and in AI answers than any visual refresh, because it is the only part of most sites written in the language a buyer uses.
Where we sit
A maple.website build starts at $50, covering 20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images and 2 hours of work. Beyond that, extra copy is $0.20 per 1,000 characters, extra custom images are $2 each, and extra hours are $40 per hour — always quoted before the work happens, never after. Hosting is $10 CAD per month including SSL, a CDN and daily backups, on a domain you own and control. All prices CAD; HST extra where applicable.
Turnaround is 48 hours from brief to live, and media can be added at any time afterwards, so a photo you have not taken yet is never the reason your site is offline. Because the domain is yours, nothing here depends on you staying: you can move, and the mechanism for moving is a published international policy rather than our goodwill.
The honest version of the answer is this. You can always update your site. Whether you will is decided by how much friction sits between noticing a wrong phone number and fixing it. Price that friction before you buy, and the maintenance question mostly takes care of itself.