The problem
Websites are treated as projects rather than assets. It launches, everyone moves on, and nothing is touched for two years. Plugins go out of date, the contact form quietly stops sending, an SSL certificate lapses, and nobody notices until a customer mentions it.
The recovery from neglect always costs more than the maintenance would have. A compromised site can take a week to clean and months to recover in search.
How we work
- Audit. We start with a health check covering security, performance, dependencies and backups.
- Stabilise. Anything urgent from the audit is fixed first.
- Maintain. Monthly cycle of updates, checks and changes.
- Report. What changed, what we found, and what needs a decision from you.
Who this is for
Any business whose website produces enquiries. If the site matters, it needs someone responsible for it, whether that is us or somebody in house.
Websites are assets, not projects
The common pattern is a launch, then nothing. Everyone moves on, and the site is untouched for two years.
Plugins go out of date. The contact form quietly stops sending. An SSL certificate lapses on a Sunday. A dependency picks up a published vulnerability. Nobody notices, because nothing looks different from the outside.
Recovery from neglect always costs more than the maintenance would have. A compromised site can take a week to clean and months to recover in search.
The form check matters more than it sounds
The single most common fault we find on inherited sites is a contact form that stopped delivering months earlier.
Nobody noticed, because an absence of enquiries looks like a quiet patch in the market rather than a fault. By the time it is discovered, a quarter of leads are gone and unrecoverable.
We submit a real test through every form on the site every month and confirm it arrived.
What the retainer covers
Core, plugin and dependency updates applied on staging and tested before production. Daily backups held off the server with restores verified. Uptime, performance and security monitoring with alerts to a person. Broken link checking. Analytics sanity checks so you notice a tracking failure in week one rather than at quarter end.
Plus a fixed block of change hours, so routine edits happen without raising a quote for every small thing.
Change requests
Content edits, new pages from existing templates, image swaps, small layout adjustments and form changes all come out of the monthly allowance.
Anything larger is quoted separately and we tell you before doing the work, never after. Unused hours roll over for one month so a quiet period is not wasted, but they do not accumulate indefinitely.
When something breaks
Updates are tested on staging first, which catches most problems before they reach anyone. If something still breaks in production we roll back immediately from that day's backup and then diagnose, rather than debugging on a live site while customers watch.
Sites we did not build
We maintain them, after an audit. Occasionally we find a site in a state where maintenance is not sensible, usually a heavily modified theme with no version control and a long list of known vulnerabilities.
In that case we say so plainly and show the reasoning rather than taking a monthly fee to hold together something that will fail anyway.
Reporting you can act on
Each month you get a short report: what was updated, what the monitoring caught, how the site performed, which forms were tested and what we spent your change hours on.
Anything that needs a decision from you is listed separately with a recommendation, so the report is a page of actions rather than a wall of statistics nobody reads.
