Website Maintenance

Nothing Breaks Quietly

A WordPress site is not a finished object. Plugins update, PHP versions move on, SSL certificates expire, and contact forms stop delivering mail without announcing it. Most owners find out weeks later, and usually because an enquiry never arrived rather than because anything looked obviously wrong.

A care plan exists so that doesn't happen to you.

What Actually Goes Wrong

In practice it's rarely dramatic. The common failures are quiet ones:

• A plugin update conflicts with another and a section of a page stops rendering.
• The form plugin's email delivery breaks, so enquiries vanish silently.
• An SSL certificate lapses and browsers start warning visitors away.
• The host moves to a newer PHP version and something old stops working.
• An unpatched plugin gets exploited and the site starts serving spam links.

None of these announce themselves. All of them cost you enquiries for as long as they go unnoticed.

What's Covered

Updates, Applied Carefully

Core, theme and plugin updates applied and then checked, with a full backup taken first so anything can be rolled back. Updating is easy; noticing that an update broke a form three pages deep is the part that takes attention.

Backups That Have Been Tested

Scheduled off-site backups, restored periodically to confirm they work. A backup nobody has ever restored is not a backup, it's a hope. Off-site matters too: a backup stored only on the same server disappears with the server.

Uptime Monitoring

Automated checks so I find out the site is down before your customers do. Downtime during business hours is lost work, and the worst version is the one nobody notices until Monday.

Security

Hardening, login protection and malware scanning, plus cleanup if something does get through. Most compromises are opportunistic and automated rather than targeted, which is precisely why keeping patches current does most of the work.

Form Delivery Checks

Contact forms are tested periodically to confirm submissions are still arriving. This is the failure that costs the most and gets spotted the latest, so it's worth checking on purpose rather than assuming.

What's Not Covered

Being clear about this up front avoids awkward conversations later. A care plan covers keeping the existing site healthy. It does not cover building new pages, redesigns, or new functionality — that's project work and gets quoted separately, at which point you can decide whether you want it.

Do You Need One?

Honestly, not everybody does. If you're comfortable logging in monthly, running updates against a backup, and checking your own forms, you can run the site yourself — and I'll show you how at handover either way. A care plan is for owners who would rather that time went into their actual business, and who want somebody to call when something looks wrong.

Pricing

$75 a month, covering everything above. No minimum term — it's a monthly arrangement you can stop whenever it stops being worth it.

On response times: I reply within 24 hours, and usually a good deal sooner. I've deliberately not promised same-day. I'm several hours ahead of the UK and most of a working day ahead of the US, so "same day" is a promise that would break regularly depending on when your message lands. Twenty-four hours is one I can actually keep.