Web development monthly support
Website maintenance is monthly work that keeps your site opening, taking inquiries and not reminding you of itself with failures. We update WordPress and plugins, make backups, watch uptime and make edits for up to five hours a month. At the end of the month you get a report on what was done.
01 Definition
Website maintenance is regular work that keeps a site in working order: updates to the content management system and plugins, backups, checks on uptime and speed, small edits to content and layout. It is also called site support or website care. There is no difference between the words. The difference is in what each contractor puts into them, so read the list of work more closely than the name.
A site ages even if nobody touches it. WordPress, plugins, the PHP version on the hosting and browsers all keep updating, and a site left alone for a year slowly drifts away from everything it runs on. At first you don't notice. Then the form stops sending, or after a hosting update a white screen opens instead of your site.
02 Scope
You won't notice most of this work, and that is how it should be: it is done so that nothing happens. Each item has a line in the monthly report.
03 Plan limits
The line runs where what exists ends and what is new begins. Changing what is already on the site can be done in the support hours. Adding what wasn't there is separate work with its own price.
We record time to the nearest 15 minutes and show it next to each task in the report. If a task doesn't fit in the remaining hours, we tell you before we start. Then you decide: move it to next month or pay for extra hours at a rate we named in advance.
Unused hours carry over to the next month, but no further. If something breaks because of our update, we fix it outside your hours.
04 Sample
At the end of every month we send a one-page report. The example below is for illustration: the coffee store is made up and the figures are hypothetical.
Updates. WordPress, WooCommerce and four more plugins. Tested on a copy: the cart, payment and the contact form work.
Backups. 31 database copies, 4 file copies. A restore from a copy was tested on October 12.
Uptime. One failure: on October 9 the site was down for 14 minutes because of work at the hosting provider.
Edits: 3 h 45 min of 5 h. New prices on 26 product cards: 1 h 15 min. A promotion page: 1 h 30 min. A "Buy" button that shifted on narrow screens: 1 h.
Recommended. The author of the slider plugin hasn't updated it in over a year. We suggest replacing it before the next major WordPress update; estimate: 2 hours.
the store is made up, the figures are hypotheticalMaintenance is hard to judge: when it works, nothing happens. The report shows what was updated, how many minutes the site was down and where the hours went.
The last line, "Recommended," is there so that big jobs don't come as a surprise. You find out about an outdated plugin or a hosting plan that's too small in advance, not on the day the site goes down.
05 First month
The first month is different from the later ones: we first have to learn the state of the site and make a copy it can be restored from. We take on other people's WordPress and WooCommerce sites the same way as the ones we develop ourselves.
You create a separate user for us in the admin area and on the hosting. You don't hand your own passwords to anyone, and you can switch our access off with one click.
→ 1 day
We check the WordPress, PHP and plugin versions, look for extensions abandoned by their authors, and see whether backups exist and where they are stored. If we find signs of a hack, we tell you at once and quote the cleanup separately.
→ 2–3 days: a list of risks
We make the first full backup and set up the daily ones. We restore the site from the backup on a private address, where we then check every update.
→ a backup you can restore from
We update what is out of date, starting with the riskiest. If the site hasn't been updated for several years, the first month may need more hours than the plan includes. We warn you about that after the review.
→ current versions
From then on we work to a schedule: updates, backups, monitoring and your requests. Small edits we do the same or the next business day, larger ones we put into the plan and give a date.
→ a report at the end of the month
06 No lock-in
We don't move sites to "our" hosting and we don't register domains in our name. You pay the hosting, domain and paid plugin bills to the providers directly. If you decide to stop maintenance, the site stays with you along with the latest backup.
07 Who needs it
Not everyone should pay for it every month. Here is what we say when people ask us directly.
08 Pricing
The basic plan starts at $400 a month for one site: updates, backups, monitoring and up to five hours of edits. Over a year that is from $4,800. If in the same month you need a new service page with 600 words of copy, the layout comes out of the plan's hours and the copy starts at $108.
| Service | What's included | Turnaround | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website maintenance | Updates, backups, monitoring, up to 5 hours of edits | monthly | from $400 / month |
| Website redesign | Audit, new structure, design, content migration, redirects | 3–6 weeks | from $3,500 / website |
| SEO audit | Technical audit, content and link review, fix plan | 5–7 days | from $750 / audit |
| SEO copywriting | Keyword research, outline, copy, title and meta description | from 3 days | from $0.18 / word |
| SEO services | Audit, keyword research, technical tasks, content, monthly report | 6 months or more | from $1,500 / month |
09 Questions
Yes, if the site runs on WordPress or WooCommerce. Before we start we review it and tell you what we found: outdated plugins, holes, missing backups. Sites on other systems we take on request: first we look at the code and tell you whether we can handle it.
Monitoring runs around the clock, so we learn about a failure at once. We pick it up during business hours, and a site that doesn't open goes first in the queue. The basic plan has no round-the-clock on-call cover. If you need it, for example for a store with night orders, we'll discuss separate terms.
We restore the site from the last clean backup, find out how it was hacked and close that hole. If the cause is on our side, for example a skipped update, we do this outside the plan's hours. If the cause is external, such as a weak admin password or a hack at the hosting level, the restore comes out of the plan's hours or is estimated separately.
Ask five questions. Where are the backups stored, and when was a site last restored from one? Do they test updates on a copy before putting them on the live site? What exactly counts toward the hours, and to what precision?
Two more: in whose name are the hosting and the domain registered, and how fast and during what hours do they reply to requests? If any of the questions gets no clear answer, keep looking. Our answers to all five are on this page.
No. You pay for them to the providers directly, and they are registered in your name. We watch the dates and remind you about payments. If the hosting can't carry the site, we'll explain which plan you need and why.
It can, which is why we never update a live site blindly. Each update goes onto a copy first, and we check the essentials: forms, the cart, payment, language versions. Before updating the live site we make a fresh backup, so the previous state can be restored in minutes, not days.
Yes. We price one-time work as a separate estimate after reviewing the site. We don't sell updates, backups and monitoring as one-offs: they only make sense as regular work.
Maintenance keeps the site in working order, and SEO brings people to it. Keyword research, new pages for search and link work aren't part of maintenance: that is SEO services. But SEO starts from a working, fast site, so one often follows the other.
We fix the list of work and the price for the month in writing before we start. At the start of the month you pay 50%, and the rest after the report. Payment is by bank transfer against an invoice. Hosting, domain and paid plugins are not part of this amount.
10 Related
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