Monthly Maintenance
Updates, backups, security and support, so the site keeps working long after launch day.
A Website Is Not A Finished Object
People tend to think of a website the way they think of a shop sign: you pay once, it goes up, and it is there until you take it down. Software does not work like that. A WordPress site is a live application made of a dozen moving parts, and every one of those parts gets updated by somebody else on their own schedule.
WordPress itself releases security patches. The Divi theme releases updates. Every plugin has its own developer pushing changes. PHP, the language the whole thing runs on, gets new versions, and old ones stop receiving security support. Your host changes their server configuration. None of this asks your permission.
Left alone, a site does not stay still. It drifts. Usually it drifts quietly for a year or two and then breaks all at once, at the least convenient moment, and the repair costs more than the maintenance would have.
What Actually Goes Wrong
Three things, in roughly this order of frequency.
Security
The overwhelming majority of WordPress sites that get compromised are running an out-of-date plugin with a known, published vulnerability. Nobody targeted the business. Automated software scans the whole internet looking for that specific old version, finds it, and gets in. The result is usually spam pages injected into your site, which Google then flags, which costs you the rankings you paid to build.
Breakage After Updates
The opposite problem. Updates arrive, something in the combination does not agree, and a form stops sending or a layout collapses on mobile. The site looks fine on the home page, so nobody notices for six weeks, during which every enquiry has been going nowhere.
Quiet Decay
Nothing breaks, but the site gets slower as the database fills with revisions and logs, images pile up uncompressed, and the content ages until the prices and hours on it are simply wrong.
What We Do Every Month
Maintenance is unglamorous by nature. It is a checklist, done consistently, by someone who will notice when a number looks wrong.
Updates, Applied Safely
We update WordPress core, the Divi theme and every plugin. The important part is how. Updates go onto a staging copy of your site first, not straight onto the live one. We check that the pages render, the forms submit and the checkout works, and only then push the update live. If something conflicts, it is a staging problem rather than your customers seeing a broken site.
Backups That Have Been Tested
Daily backups of both files and database, stored off the server, with a month of history. Off the server matters: a backup sitting in the same hosting account is no use if the account is what fails. We also periodically restore one to confirm the backups actually work, which is the step most providers skip.
Security Monitoring
A firewall and malware scanning, login attempt limiting, and monitoring for file changes. If something does get through, cleanup is included rather than billed as an emergency.
Uptime And Speed Checks
Your site is checked every few minutes from outside. If it goes down we know before you do, and usually before a customer does. We also watch page speed over time, because sites get heavier gradually and it is easier to correct a small slide than a large one.
Content Changes
Every plan includes a monthly allowance of small changes. New opening hours, a price update, swapping photos, adding a paragraph, publishing a new job. You email us, we do it. You can also do these yourself in Divi, and plenty of clients do both.
Every Plan Covers
- WordPress, Divi and plugin updates
- Staging tested before going live
- Daily off-site backups, month of history
- Firewall and malware scanning
- Uptime monitoring every few minutes
- Page speed tracked over time
- Monthly allowance of content changes
- No minimum term
What It Costs Against What It Saves
The honest case for a care plan is not that something will definitely go wrong this year. It is that the cost of the plan is small and predictable, and the cost of the alternative is neither.
A hacked site that has been injected with spam pages is not a one-hour fix. It means cleaning every infected file, working out how they got in, closing that hole, restoring from a backup that predates the infection, and then asking Google to review and unflag the site. That last part is the expensive bit, because while you are flagged you are invisible, and recovering rankings takes longer than losing them did.
A contact form that has silently stopped delivering is worse in a quieter way. There is no alarm. You just have a slow month, and then another one, and the enquiries you paid to generate went into nothing.
What Is Not Included
We would rather be clear about the edges than surprise you later.
Maintenance covers keeping the site you have working properly. It does not cover building new sections, redesigning pages, or adding features like a shop or a booking system. Those are projects, and they get quoted separately so you can decide whether they are worth it. It also does not cover hosting itself, though we are happy to recommend hosts and to move you if yours is the reason the site is slow.
There is no minimum term. Plans run month to month and you can stop whenever you like. If you leave, you keep everything: the site, the backups, the logins. We think a care plan should be worth renewing rather than difficult to escape.
Whose Site We Will Take On
We maintain sites we built, and we take on sites built by other people. For the second group we start with an audit, because we need to know what we are inheriting: what version of WordPress and PHP it is on, what plugins are installed and whether any are abandoned by their developers, whether backups exist, and whether it has already been compromised.
Occasionally the audit finds a site so far behind that patching it is not sensible, and we will tell you that rather than take a monthly fee to keep something upright that needs replacing. More often it is fine and just needs bringing up to date once, after which the monthly routine keeps it there.
Three months of maintenance is included with our Framework build, and an ongoing plan comes with Full Build. For any other site, tell us the address and we will look at what state it is in before quoting.
Why Staging Matters More Than It Sounds
Of everything on this page, the staging step is the one that separates a real care plan from a monthly invoice for pressing an update button.
WordPress will happily update everything with one click. The risk is not the update itself, it is the combination. Your site runs a specific theme, a specific set of plugins and a specific PHP version, and a plugin author cannot test against every combination that exists. Most of the time it is fine. Occasionally two things disagree, and the result is a fatal error and a white screen where your website used to be.
A staging site is a private copy of your live site on the same server setup. Updates go there first. If something breaks, it breaks somewhere no customer can see, we work out which component caused it, and either wait for a fix or find an alternative. Your live site carries on unaffected the whole time.
It costs a little more time each month. It is the reason we can update confidently rather than nervously, and it is why we do not simply enable automatic updates and hope.
Want Someone Watching Your Site?
Send us the address and we’ll tell you what state it is in, what needs doing first, and what a plan would cost.