Website maintenance that prevents the emergency rather than billing for it

What website maintenance actually means

Website maintenance is the recurring set of checks that keep a site working, secure and online: applying updates, taking backups that have actually been restored at least once, patching known vulnerabilities, watching for the domain renewal nobody diarised, and making the small changes a business needs every month.

It is worth saying what it is not. It is not a subscription for reassurance, and it is not insurance against every possible failure. It is a specific list of things that go wrong predictably, done on a schedule, because almost every website emergency I have been called into was preventable and cheap to prevent.

Who this is for

• Businesses whose site takes payments or generates the enquiries the business runs on
• WordPress sites, where unpatched plugins are the most common route to a compromise
• Companies with nobody internally who owns the website
• Businesses that have been burned once by an expired domain, a lapsed certificate or a lost site
• Anyone who would lose real money if the site were down for two days

Who it is not for

Saying this out loud costs me some enquiries and saves both of us the ones that would have gone wrong. If you are on this list, I will tell you in the first reply rather than after a deposit.

• Static brochure sites with no forms, no payments and no CMS, where there is genuinely little to maintain
• Businesses with a competent internal developer already doing this work
• Anyone wanting a retainer that quietly funds continuous new development. That is development, and it should be priced as development
• Sites I have audited and found to be in a state where maintenance would be papering over a rebuild

The problems it solves

Domain or certificate expires and the site vanishes

Renewal and expiry monitoring with alerts that reach a human before the deadline, not after.

Compromised through an unpatched plugin

Updates applied on staging first, then live, on a monthly cycle rather than when someone remembers.

Backups that have never been restored

Quarterly test restores to a scratch environment. An untested backup is a belief.

Nobody notices the site is down

Uptime monitoring with alerting, so you hear it from me rather than from a customer.

Small changes never get made

A monthly allowance for small content and layout work, so minor updates stop accumulating into a project.

Silent SEO decay

Search Console coverage and traffic checked monthly, so a noindex left in production is caught in weeks rather than quarters.

What you get

• Core, plugin and dependency updates applied on staging first, then live
• Offsite backups taken on a schedule and test-restored quarterly, because an untested backup is a hope
• Security patching, plus header and SSL certificate checks
• Uptime and certificate-expiry monitoring, with alerts that reach a human
• Domain and hosting renewal watch — the single most common cause of a site going dark
• A monthly allowance of small content and layout changes, with anything larger quoted separately
• Search Console and analytics checked monthly for coverage errors and traffic anomalies
• A short written monthly report: what changed, what was found, what needs a decision

What is included in the starting price

Everything below is in the $45 figure. Nothing here is quoted as an extra once the build is underway, which is the point of publishing it.

• Core, plugin, theme and dependency updates, applied on staging then live
• Offsite backups on a schedule, with a quarterly test restore
• Security patching, plus header and SSL certificate checks
• Uptime and certificate-expiry monitoring with human-reachable alerts
• Domain and hosting renewal watch
• A monthly allowance of small content and layout changes
• Monthly Search Console and analytics review for coverage errors and traffic anomalies
• A short written monthly report: what changed, what was found, what needs a decision

What costs extra, and why

A quote that omits these is not cheaper — it is less honest. Each one is real work that someone has to do, and pretending otherwise is how a fixed price becomes a negotiation in week two.

New features or pages

Quoted separately so the retainer does not become an argument about what counts as small.

Emergency out-of-hours response

Available on higher plans with a stated response time rather than the word "fast".

Recovery from an existing compromise

A separate piece of work. Cleaning an infected site is not routine maintenance.

Content production

Writing and publishing ongoing content is a different service with different value.

SEO retainer

Maintenance protects what you have. Growing rankings against real competition is separate work.

How the work runs

1. Onboard. Access, an inventory of what the site runs on, and a first full backup taken before anything is touched.
2. Baseline. Current versions, current vulnerabilities, current speed and current indexation, recorded so drift is visible later.
3. Monthly cycle. Updates on staging, verify, deploy, back up, monitor. The same sequence every month, which is what makes it boring and reliable.
4. Quarterly restore test. A backup is restored to a scratch environment and checked. Any month this is skipped, you do not really have backups.
5. Report. What was done, what was found, and what needs your decision. No decision needed most months, which is the point.

Day by day

ongoing monthly from the day scope is signed off. Published as a schedule rather than a promise of speed — you should be able to tell on day three whether a build is on track.

The technology

Deliberately boring, and that is the feature. A stack another developer can pick up is worth more to you than one that impresses other developers.

Backups

Offsite and versioned, never only on the same server as the site itself

Monitoring

Uptime checks, certificate expiry, and domain renewal dates tracked outside the registrar

Staging

A separate noindexed environment where updates are proven before they touch production

Updates

Applied deliberately on a schedule rather than automatically at three in the morning

Reporting

Search Console, uptime history and a written summary you can keep for your own records

What it integrates with

• Google Search Console, monitored for coverage and manual actions
• Uptime monitoring with alerts by email and message
• Your hosting control panel and registrar, for renewal and certificate visibility
• Offsite backup storage separate from the hosting account
• Analytics, watched for the traffic anomaly that signals a technical fault

What I need from you

Short list, and the first item matters most. Projects do not usually slip because the code was hard — they slip because a decision waited a week.

• Access: hosting, CMS admin, registrar and DNS
• A named person who can approve a change or a decision within a few days
• Notice before you or anyone else makes significant changes, so a fault can be attributed
• Honesty about what other people have access to the site, because that is often the answer when something breaks
• A decision on how quickly you actually need a response, since that is what separates the plans

Content and photography

The most valuable content work in maintenance is unglamorous: keeping the pages that already earn their traffic accurate. Prices that changed, services no longer offered, staff who left, an address that moved. Each one costs trust and, where the details are in structured data, consistency signals too.

A short quarterly review of your top ten pages against what the business currently does takes an hour and is worth more than most content plans. It is included in the monthly review here, and it is the item clients are most often surprised to find useful.

Performance standards

Targets, not aspirations — measured before handover on a throttled mobile connection rather than on a fast laptop.

Accessibility standards

This site is built to the same standard it sells, and the accessibility statement lists what is conformant and what is not — which is the part most statements leave out.

Security practices

The SEO included in every build

Not an upsell. A site that launches unindexed is a shop with the shutters down, and the work below is cheap during a build and expensive afterwards because the fixes are structural.

Ownership and handover

You own everything: the domain registered to you, hosting in your account, code in a repository you control, and the payment provider account in your business name. Credentials are handed over as they are created rather than at the end.

A supplier who resists this is protecting recurring revenue rather than your interests. If you want the reasoning in full, including how to check your current site, there is a guide on it.

Aftercare and what happens after launch

Thirty days of snag fixes are included. A snag is something that does not work as scoped — not a new feature, and the difference is written down before launch rather than argued about after it.

You also get written handover documentation aimed at whoever maintains the site next, which may well not be me. That is deliberate: the test of a good handover is whether another developer could take over without calling me, and on my projects they can.

Ongoing maintenance

Optional, monthly, cancellable. Nothing here is required to keep what you paid for.

Payment terms

How this compares to the alternatives

Including the routes that do not involve me, because a comparison that only flatters the author is not a comparison.

What could go wrong, and how it is handled

An update breaks something

Why updates go to staging first. If it breaks there, it never reaches your customers.

The site is already compromised at onboarding

Found during the initial audit. Cleaning it is quoted separately before the retainer starts.

Someone else changes the site without telling anyone

The most common cause of an unexplained fault. Access is inventoried at onboarding for exactly this reason.

The plan does not cover what you assumed

The allowance and the response time are written down. Ambiguity here is what turns retainers into disputes.