Web & technologies
Website care & maintenance
Your site stays patched, fast and online without you being the one who discovers it wasn't — monitored every minute, updated on a staging copy first, and fixed to an agreed response time.
The short version
Websites decay quietly. A plugin update breaks the contact form and nobody notices for six weeks, a certificate lapses on a Sunday, an image-heavy new page drags the load time past 3 seconds, and the backup nobody has ever restored turns out to be empty. None of it is dramatic on the day it happens, and all of it costs enquiries. Care is the unexciting work of catching each one before a customer has to tell you.
What is included
- Core, plugin, theme and dependency updates applied to a staging copy, checked there, then released to production — never straight onto the live site on a Friday.
- Off-site backups taken daily and kept for 30 days, with a restore tested every quarter, because a backup nobody has restored is only a hope.
- Uptime monitoring at 1-minute intervals, plus certificate and domain expiry alerts, so the first person to know is us and not one of your customers.
- A monthly check of the things that fail silently: every form submitted by hand, key pages measured against their load budget, broken links and 404s reviewed.
- An agreed monthly allowance of content and small change requests — text edits, a new page, image swaps — with anything larger quoted before it starts.
- A short monthly report in plain language: what was updated, what broke, what we fixed, and what now needs a decision from you.
How we work
Our approach
The stages this work runs through, in order. Every one of them ends in something you can see or sign off.
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Step 01
Take stock before taking over
Inheriting a site without inspecting it is how you end up owning somebody else's problem. We start with an audit: versions and known vulnerabilities, whether backups exist and whether they restore, where DNS actually points, which plugins are abandoned, and what the current load times are. Anything already broken is listed and quoted separately, so your monthly fee isn't quietly paying off a debt someone else built. The audit is yours whether or not you go ahead.
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Step 02
Update in a safe order
Updates go to staging first, then through a short written checklist: homepage, every form, the checkout if there is one, and the two templates most likely to be affected by what changed. Only then does it reach production, with a restore point taken immediately beforehand. Security patches are handled differently. A critical vulnerability is applied within 24 hours of us learning about it, because on that one the risk of waiting beats the risk of updating.
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Step 03
Watch the quiet failures
Downtime is easy to notice. The expensive faults are silent — a contact form that submits and sends nothing, a payment webhook failing after a plugin change, Core Web Vitals drifting as pages get added month by month. So we submit the forms ourselves every month, measure the pages that matter against the budget the site launched with, and read Search Console for indexing errors. When a page drifts past its budget, you get told what caused it.
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Step 04
Stay easy to leave
Care is monthly, with 30 days' notice, no minimum term and no hostage-taking. The hosting account, the repository and the backups are all registered to you throughout, and if you leave we hand over the documentation and the access list rather than turning a departure into a project. We intend to keep the work by being worth paying for. Nothing here ties the site to us, including the monitoring and backup tooling, which we set up in your own accounts wherever the platform allows it.
Before you ask
Questions we get asked first
How fast do you respond when something breaks?
If the site is down, or a checkout has stopped taking payments, we respond within 4 working hours and keep you updated until it is resolved. Non-urgent requests, like a text change or a new page, are picked up within 2 working days. Scheduled updates run on a fixed monthly cadence rather than whenever we remember. Out-of-hours cover for a shop or a live campaign is available and priced separately, because pretending it is free is how it quietly stops happening.
How is it priced?
A monthly fee in pounds, set by the size of the site, the platform it runs on, and how many hours of change requests you want included. We quote after the audit, so the figure reflects the site you actually have rather than an average. Unused hours roll forward once and then reset, and we say that up front instead of banking a credit you would never spend. Work beyond the allowance is quoted first. No annual lock-in, no renewal you have to remember to cancel.
What do you need from us?
Admin access to the site, the hosting account, DNS and the domain registrar. Those last two are what people usually cannot find, and hunting for them during an outage is expensive. One person we can email for decisions. If a previous developer still holds something, tell us early and we will help move it into your name. We would also like the site's original performance budget if it had one, because it gives us a figure to hold the site to.
How do we know we're getting value for it?
From the monthly report, and from things not happening. The report lists every update applied, every incident with the response time against what we promised, uptime for the month, and the load times of your key pages against their budget. It also names anything we decided not to do, and why. If a month is quiet the report is short, because a short honest report beats inventing work to justify an invoice.
Want this scoped for your situation?
Tell us the goal and the deadline. You get an honest read on whether this is the right service, a fixed price if it is, and a straight no if it isn't.
Or email [email protected] directly. We reply within one working day.