Most website problems do not announce themselves. A certificate lapses and browsers start warning your visitors away. A plugin update quietly breaks the one form that feeds your pipeline. A backup runs every night for two years, and the first time anyone tries to restore it is the day it turns out to be empty. Website maintenance services exist because each of these failures is invisible until it is expensive.
We maintain the sites we build and the sites we didn’t — WordPress, POPCMS, and custom applications alike. The relationship is simple: we watch, we update, we test, and when something breaks, the person who fixes it already knows your stack.
What Maintenance Actually Covers
A maintenance relationship is a set of disciplines performed on a schedule, and it is worth knowing exactly what you are paying for:
Updates, applied and re-tested
Core, plugin, and dependency updates are applied on a schedule — and the site is checked afterward, because an update that breaks something quietly is worse than no update at all.
Backups, verified by restore
A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup. Every site we host is backed up automatically, and we restore on a schedule to prove the backups actually work. If you host elsewhere, that is fine too — we simply scope a backup solution early in the relationship, so the question is settled long before the day it matters.
Uptime and certificate monitoring
We are notified when your site goes down or a certificate approaches expiry — usually before anyone else notices anything at all. Certificates deserve the attention: one that is expired or improperly installed throws browser warnings at your visitors, and that costs you trust, traffic, and search ranking. We make sure it never gets that far.
Security: scan, diagnose, repair
Malware scans, file-integrity checks, and firewall review are the routine. When something does get in, we diagnose how it entered, contain it the same day, and repair the site — restoring from clean, verified sources before the blacklist warning ever appears.
QA review
Regression checks after every update, cross-browser passes, and form-delivery verification — we send a real test message through your forms and confirm it arrives.
Small fixes, included
The broken link, the outdated phone number, the image that needs swapping. Small requests are handled inside the retainer instead of becoming tiny invoices.
The QA Review, Specifically
Quality assurance is the part of maintenance most providers skip, because it is the part that takes actual time. Ours is simple and unskippable: after updates, we click through the pages that matter, on the browsers your visitors actually use. We submit each form and confirm the message arrives where it should. We check that the pages which earn your traffic still render the way they did before the update. A maintained site is not one whose software is current — it is one that has been looked at by someone who knows what it is supposed to do.
Already Broken? Start There.
Plenty of maintenance relationships begin with the words “can you fix my website?” Yes — and the rescue usually teaches both of us exactly what the maintenance plan needs to cover. We have rebuilt a film director’s site after malware that three quiet months let in, and repaired a community organization’s theme that an automatic update had broken. In both cases the fix came first and the watching came after, so it does not happen again.
IT Support, Not a Landlord
Some agencies use maintenance as a lease: they hold the keys, and leaving them means starting over. Our stance is the opposite. Your site, your hosting account, your data — documented and yours to take. We are your IT department for the web, not your landlord. Clients stay because the service is good, and that is the only reason we want.
How the Retainer Works
Not a fan of contracts? Neither are we, honestly. A recurring commitment has to earn its keep every month, and it does not always make sense — so here is exactly how ours works, and when we would steer you away from it.
Maintenance is a flat monthly retainer, sized to the site and agreed in advance — no hourly meter, no surprise line items. What moves the number is the size of the site, the number of moving parts (forms, integrations, e-commerce), and how often it changes. A fixed estimate takes one short conversation.
If your site is small and static, a monthly plan may be more than you need. For sites like that, it often makes more sense to quote work hourly as it comes up — and we are happy to work that way, too. The retainer is for sites where downtime, a dead form, or a hack has a real cost.
Questions We Actually Get
- What do website maintenance services include?
- Scheduled updates with post-update testing, backups verified by restore, uptime and certificate monitoring, security scanning with diagnosis and repair, QA review of pages and forms, and small content fixes — all inside a flat monthly retainer.
- Can you maintain a website you didn’t build?
- Yes. Most of the sites we maintain were built by someone else. We start with an audit, take a verified backup, and document the stack before we change anything.
- My website is broken right now. Can you fix it?
- Usually, yes — start the conversation and include what changed most recently. Rescues are how many of our maintenance relationships begin.
- Do WordPress sites really need maintenance?
- More than most. The plugin ecosystem that makes WordPress flexible is also its attack surface, and unattended plugins are the single most common way small-business sites get compromised.
Three Rescues, Anonymized
A film-industry site went three months without updates while its owner was on location. Malware moved in through a stale plugin, invisibly — the front end looked perfect. We found it, contained it the same day, rebuilt the infected layers from clean sources, and put the site under daily watch. The lesson wasn’t the cleanup; it was that three unwatched months is all it takes.
A community organization’s site auto-updated its platform overnight, and the theme — customized years earlier by a developer nobody could reach — stopped rendering. We repaired the theme, documented what the customizations actually did, and added post-update checks so the next update gets tested before visitors see it.
Not every rescue is an emergency — some are just aggravations that have gone on too long. A state professional association came to us mid-project: the site was half-built, the relationship with their developer was not working out, and the annual conference that drives their whole year was approaching. We audited what existed, kept what was sound, completed the build, and had the site ready ahead of the event. Taking over someone else’s work is a skill of its own — the first step is never code, it is an honest inventory of what is actually there.
Client names withheld — rescue stories are told with permission or not at all.
The Cheapest Fix Is the One That Never Happens
A fixed-estimate maintenance retainer costs less than one emergency rescue. Tell us about your site, and we will tell you honestly whether it needs watching.
Start the conversation