Website Maintenance & Care Plans

A website is not finished when it launches. Software needs updating, security patches are released, hosting environments change, forms stop sending, and the business itself changes, with new services, staff, prices, and offers that need to appear online. Website maintenance, or a care plan, is the ongoing work that keeps a site secure, working, and current, so problems are caught before visitors or customers notice them.

Every site we build includes 30 days of post-launch support. A care plan continues that relationship afterwards. It suits businesses that do not have a developer on staff, companies whose marketing team can edit content but should not be updating plugins or server software, and anyone whose website brings in enough enquiries or sales that downtime has a real cost. We also take on maintenance for sites built by other developers, after an initial review.

The review comes first. Before we agree to maintain a site, we check what it runs on, how up to date the software is, whether backups exist and actually restore, who has access, and whether there are known security issues. Sites that have gone unmaintained for a long time sometimes need a round of clean-up before regular maintenance makes sense, and we tell you if that is the case before you commit.

What a care plan covers depends on the platform. For WordPress and WooCommerce sites, it typically includes core, theme, and plugin updates, applied on a staging copy first where the risk justifies it; malware scanning; and regular off-site backups. For Laravel and Filament applications, it covers framework and package updates, security patches, server monitoring, and backups of both the application files and the database. In every case, we monitor uptime and SSL certificate expiry, and we check key forms and checkout paths so a broken contact form does not go unnoticed for weeks.

Small changes are part of the plan too. Updating a price list, adding a team member, changing opening hours for Ramadan, swapping a banner for a campaign, or fixing a layout issue on one page. These are the requests that do not justify a project but pile up if nobody owns them. Your delivery lead handles them within the plan's agreed allowance, and anything larger is scoped separately so you always know before extra work is billed.

When something goes wrong between scheduled checks, uptime monitoring alerts us and we treat it as a priority. We investigate, restore service, and explain what happened and what we changed to stop it recurring.

Reporting is plain. Each month you receive a summary of what was updated, what was fixed, backup status, uptime, and any issues we recommend addressing, such as a plugin that has been abandoned by its developer or a PHP version approaching end of life. Your strategist can review that report with you on a call if you want to plan larger improvements.

We do not publish a flat monthly price for care plans. The right level of cover depends on the platform, the size and complexity of the site, how much traffic and revenue it handles, and how often you expect changes. We quote after reviewing the site, and the plan can be adjusted if your needs change.

The pitfalls of unmaintained sites are predictable. Plugins go out of date and become security risks. Backups exist but have never been tested. Hosting is upgraded and an old theme stops working. Admin logins belong to people who have left the company. Contact forms silently fail, and nobody notices until a customer mentions it. Most of these are cheap to prevent and expensive to fix once they happen.

Onboarding a site onto a care plan usually takes a week or two, covering the review, access set-up, backup configuration, and monitoring. After that, maintenance runs on a regular schedule, with urgent issues handled as they arise.

If you are unsure whether your current site is being maintained properly, ask whoever manages it three questions: when were backups last restored as a test, when were plugins or packages last updated, and who has admin access today. If nobody can answer all three with confidence, the site is probably overdue for a proper check, and we are happy to talk it through on a short call before you decide anything.