Platform

Website Maintenance and Support

Security updates, dependency hygiene, backups, monitoring and the small changes that keep accumulating. A site is a system that is running, not a project that finished.

The short answer

What is website maintenance?

Website maintenance is the ongoing work of keeping a live site secure, current and working: applying security patches, updating dependencies before they become unsupportable, verifying backups actually restore, monitoring uptime and performance, fixing what breaks, and making the steady stream of small content and functionality changes every business generates.

Sites are rarely abandoned deliberately. They are left alone because nothing appears to be wrong — until a plugin vulnerability is exploited, a payment integration stops working after an API change, or three years of skipped updates make any change expensive.

Scope

What we build

Security and updates

Core, plugin, framework and dependency updates applied and tested.

Monitoring

Uptime, error and performance monitoring with alerting that reaches a person.

Backups and recovery

Automated backups with restores actually tested, not merely configured.

Content and small changes

The steady stream of edits, new pages and small features.

Performance upkeep

Core Web Vitals monitored over time, because sites slow down as content accumulates.

Technical SEO health

Watching for crawl errors, broken links and indexation problems before traffic drops.

Why teams call us

Business problems this solves

If more than two of these describe your situation, the problem is usually structural rather than cosmetic.

  • A site running plugins with known vulnerabilities
  • Nobody certain whether backups would actually restore
  • Downtime discovered by a customer
  • Small changes waiting weeks because no one owns them
  • A framework so far out of date that any change is a project
  • Traffic declining from technical problems nobody is watching for

How it works

Our process

  1. 01

    Onboarding audit

    Current state — dependency versions, security posture, backups, monitoring and performance.

  2. 02

    Stabilise

    Fixing what is urgent: security exposure, missing backups, absent monitoring.

  3. 03

    Routine cycle

    Scheduled updates applied on staging, tested, then released to production.

  4. 04

    Request handling

    Content and change requests through an agreed channel with a defined response time.

  5. 05

    Reporting

    What was done, what was found, and what needs a decision.

  6. 06

    Planning

    Flagging what is heading toward end of life early enough to budget for it.

What you get

Deliverables and features

Deliverables

  • Onboarding audit and remediation plan
  • Scheduled security and dependency updates
  • Automated backups with verified restores
  • Uptime, error and performance monitoring
  • Agreed response times for issues and requests
  • Monthly report of work done and issues found
  • A named contact who knows your site

Features

  • Updates applied on staging and tested before production
  • Security monitoring and patching
  • Backups stored separately from the live environment
  • Uptime checks with alerting
  • Error tracking and resolution
  • Core Web Vitals monitored over time
  • Broken link and crawl error checks
  • Content updates and small feature work

Stack

Technologies we use

We choose tools for the next three years, not the next three months — and we document why, so your next developer is not guessing.

  • WordPress
  • WooCommerce
  • Next.js
  • Node.js
  • Shopify
  • Uptime monitoring
  • Sentry
  • Automated backups

How we think about it

Our approach

Performance and security

Sites get slower on their own. Content accumulates, images are uploaded at full resolution, plugins are added, marketing tags pile up and nobody removes the ones for tools you stopped using. We track Core Web Vitals continuously and treat a downward trend as a maintenance item rather than waiting for a redesign to fix it.

Search considerations

A lot of search decline is maintenance failure, not competition: broken redirects after a content change, crawl errors, expired structured data, pages accidentally noindexed. Watching for these is far cheaper than diagnosing a traffic drop months later.

Budget

What drives the cost

We do not publish price ranges, because a number given before we understand the work is not a real one. These are the factors that actually move it.

  • Platform and how many dependencies need tracking
  • Volume of content and change requests each month
  • Response times required, and whether that includes out of hours
  • Whether hosting and infrastructure are included
  • Condition of the site at onboarding — neglected sites need remediation first

After a discovery conversation we give a fixed scope and a fixed number before any work begins.

Questions

Website Maintenance — frequently asked

What does website maintenance actually include?

Security and dependency updates, backups with verified restores, uptime and error monitoring, performance tracking, technical SEO health checks, and an agreed allowance for content and small changes. The exact scope is written into the arrangement rather than left vague.

Our site works fine. Do we need this?

Working today is not the same as maintained. The risks are a known vulnerability in an unpatched dependency, a backup that has never been tested, and update debt that makes future changes expensive. Those are invisible right up until they are not.

Can you maintain a site you did not build?

Yes. We start with an onboarding audit covering dependency versions, security, backups and monitoring, then give you a remediation plan before routine maintenance begins.

What response times do you offer?

They are agreed as part of the arrangement and differ for a site being down, a broken feature and a content change. We would rather commit to times we can actually meet than quote an impressive number.

Is hosting included?

It can be, or we can work with your existing hosting. If your hosting is the cause of recurring problems, we will tell you and explain the alternatives rather than working around it indefinitely.

What if we need a larger change?

Anything beyond the monthly allowance is scoped and quoted separately, so a maintenance arrangement does not quietly become an open-ended development budget.

Start here

Ready to talk about website maintenance?

Tell us what you are trying to achieve and what you are working with. We will come back with an honest view of scope, approach and whether we are the right fit.