Website Maintenance and Support
Someone whose job it is to notice. Updates done with judgement, backups that have been restored, monitoring, and a person to ring who knows your site.
Website Maintenance and Support
A website or an app needs looking after, the same as anything else that earns you money. Most of our clients stay with us for years after launch for exactly that reason, and a fair few of the sites we look after were built somewhere else.
Maintenance is sold in a very wide range. At one end somebody logs in monthly and presses update. At the other, nobody looks until the site goes down. Both get called maintenance and both get invoiced. This page is the list we'd want if we were the ones buying.
We're in Sturminster Newton, in north Dorset, and look after sites for businesses across southern England and further afield. Where the site lives has never mattered much; who is watching it does.
What looking after a site should cover
Updates, with some judgement
Core, plugins and themes all need updating, and both instincts people have about it are wrong. Update everything the moment it appears and sites break. Never update and you carry every flaw disclosed since the day you stopped. Updates go to a private copy of your site first, someone clicks round the pages that matter, then the same updates go live. Security releases move faster than that, because the gap between a flaw going public and being exploited is measured in hours.
Backups that have been restored
Taking backups is the easy half. The half that matters is proving one restores. Ours run to somewhere that isn't the same server, they go back far enough to be useful, and we restore one on purpose so nobody finds out the hard way.
An inventory
What is installed, what each thing is for, who maintains it, and when it was last updated. Dull, and the single most useful document about your website. It turns "are we affected by this?" from an afternoon of poking about into a two-minute answer.
The quiet essentials
Uptime monitoring, so you hear your site is down from us and not from a customer. The certificate that puts the padlock in the address bar, renewed before it lapses. The PHP version kept in support. Database and image housekeeping, which affects speed more than safety.
Someone to ring
The reason people buy this in is not the tasks. It is having someone whose job it is to notice, on a week when yours is busy, and who already knows how your site is put together.
What we won't sell you
Monthly reports full of numbers nobody acts on. If a maintenance report has never once caused a decision, it is a receipt, not a service.
Security plugins stacked three deep. More is not better here, and each one is itself code running with high privilege on your site.
Speed optimisation as a recurring line item. Performance work is mostly a project. Once it is done it stays done, unless somebody adds something heavy.
If your site was built somewhere else
That's fine, and it's common. WordPress, WooCommerce, or something bespoke: we know what we usually find when we take a site over, and the first month is spent putting the basics in place. An inventory, a backup we have actually restored, updates through a staging copy, and a look at who has access and why.
If you suspect something has already gone wrong, here is how to tell, and it is worth a call before you touch anything.
You don't have to stay on WordPress to be looked after by us, and you don't have to leave it either. We work across the common platforms, and we build on our own CMS when it's the right answer. What platform agnostic means in practice.
Hosting, if you want it in one place
Most clients on maintenance are on our green hosting too, on 100% renewable energy in data centres running at a PUE of 1.12. One invoice, one person to ring, and no argument between the host and the developer about whose fault it is.
I have dealt with Jamie and Motley several times over the years, they did my first website and have now just completed my upgrade. Jamie is really easy to deal with and always manages to sort out any problems I might have.
Questions people ask
What does it cost?
It depends on the site and how much is running on it, so it is priced per site as a monthly retainer, with the figure agreed before it starts and covering everything on the list above. If your site needs work before it can be looked after properly, that is quoted separately and first, so you know both numbers.
What happens when something breaks?
Monitoring tells us, usually before you notice. We look, we fix what is ours to fix, and we tell you what happened in plain English. If it needs a decision from you, you get the options and our recommendation, not a bill for a surprise.
Can you take over a site you didn't build?
Yes. A good share of the sites we look after were built by someone else. The first month puts the basics in place; after that it is the same service as any other site.
Can we do it ourselves instead?
Perfectly reasonable for a small site. If you can keep an inventory, apply updates on a staging copy, test a restore twice a year, and act on a security advisory the day it appears rather than the following month, you don't need us for this. The list above is the list, whoever does it.
Not sure what your current plan covers?
Forward it over. We'll tell you what's missing, even if the answer is nothing.
Get in touchOne email a month...
Most months we publish a handful of articles about running a website: what things cost, where the money goes, what's changing in search and which bits of AI are worth a small business's time. Once a month we gather them into a single email. It waits in your inbox until you have ten minutes spare, whether that's the same day or the end of the month.