A site you maintain,
not a site you rebuild.

The sentence comes up often: “the site runs, we do not touch it”. It is reassuring and it describes exactly the situation that produces unpleasant surprises.

A site depends on a software foundation that moves, on plugins maintained by third parties, and on a permanently exposed server. It does not break down overnight: it decays a point a month, without any alert going off, and you discover it at the moment when bringing it back up to standard costs more than the upkeep you avoided.

Maintenance is not a recurring line sold to install a dependency. It is what decides whether your site will still be an asset in three years, or a building site.

They advance in parallel, each is unremarkable on its own, and it is their accumulation that produces the overhaul.

Images added along the way

Every publication adds visuals, often uploaded straight from a camera or a stock library. They display correctly, so nothing flags the problem. Page weight rises, speed falls, and the effect shows first on mobile, meaning on most of your visitors.

Accumulated third-party scripts

A measurement tool added for a campaign, a chat widget trialled then forgotten, a pixel installed by a supplier who is no longer around. Each adds a request and execution time. After three years, a site often carries a dozen whose purpose nobody can account for.

Plugins that age

A plugin left un-updated goes on working, which is precisely the trap. It stops being maintained, its known vulnerabilities stay open, and its incompatibility with recent versions of the foundation is discovered on the day an update becomes urgent.

Content that dates

Pages describing an abandoned offering, prices that are no longer right, a team member who left two years ago. It is not technical, it is the most visible thing to a visitor, and the simplest to fix if somebody looks after it.

We set out this mechanism and what it costs in our article what breaks a site left to run on its own.

A maintenance contract that commits to nothing verifiable is worth nothing. Here is what we do, at what rhythm, and what you can check.

Every month

• Updates to the foundation and the plugins, applied on a test environment before production.
• A check of the backups, and a restore actually tested, not merely a backup that exists. A backup never restored is not a backup, it is an assumption.
• A check of the accounts: access for people who have left disappears, and the list of administrators is known. One account too many is the most discreet way in there is.
• A measurement of display speed on mobile, in real conditions, not on a computer on fibre.

Continuously

Monitoring that alerts a human when the site stops responding or when a form stops sending. An anomaly recorded in a log nobody opens amounts to an anomaly not detected.

And critical security patches are applied without waiting for the monthly slot. It is the only exception to the rhythm, and it is written down.

What you receive

A short monthly review: what was applied, what was fixed, and the state of the four indicators that matter. Not a forty-page report nobody reads.

Our support has no hour counter. That is not a sales argument, it is a consequence of how a website actually lives.

The problem with an hourly package

A package of four hours a month pushes towards two equally harmful behaviours. Either you do not dare ask, for fear of eating into the quota, and the site freezes. Or you ask in order to consume, and the supplier does useless things.

In both cases, the discussion is about the counter instead of about the site.

What “unlimited” means to us

You ask for what you want, as often as you want. One task is handled at a time, and you set the order. It is that rule that makes unlimited workable on both sides: it does not limit volume, it limits parallelism.

In practice, that covers a page added, a text rewritten, a form changed, a visual replaced, an integration adjusted. What it does not cover is a new piece of work: a rebuild, an online store, an application. Those are costed separately, and we say so as soon as a request crosses the line.

The response time

An answer within four working hours, from somebody who knows your site. That point makes more difference in practice than the list of services.

We say so rather than keep billing for upkeep that no longer settles anything. Three signals, and you need all three.

The three signals

• An update to the foundation breaks the site, because the theme or the plugins no longer keep up and nobody maintains them.
• The number of installed plugins exceeds what anyone can account for.
• The slightest content change requires technical intervention, which means the site can no longer be administered by the people who must keep it alive.

When all three are present, upkeep becomes an expensive plaster, and a framed rebuild costs less than a year of successive fixes.

As long as they are not

Rebuilding a site that works is a comfort expense. We say that too, including when it would mean one more project for us, because a rebuild sold without necessity is paid for in lost trust the moment the client notices.

The link with visibility

A site slowing a point a month loses ground without any report flagging it. That is why performance and search visibility are not settled once and for all, a subject we cover on the SEO and performance page.

It is the calculation nobody makes, because the cost of upkeep appears on an invoice and the cost of doing nothing appears nowhere.

Two kinds of cost

Upkeep is regular, small and predictable. The overhaul is one-off, large and unpredictable, and it almost always arrives at the wrong moment: during a campaign, before a trade show, or on the day a client reports that the site is not responding.

The difference is not only financial. An update applied calmly is tested and corrected calmly. The same update applied in an emergency, because a vulnerability is being exploited, is done under pressure and breaks more often.

What actually happens when a site is compromised

The common picture is of a targeted attack. The reality is more mundane: most compromises come from automated sweeps testing thousands of sites for a known weakness. Nobody chose you, your site answered.

And what follows does not look like the picture either. A compromised site almost never displays a triumphant message. It goes on working normally, while a discreet administrator account has been created, invisible pages are published, or emails go out in your name.

The consequences, on the other hand, are quite visible: the domain ends up flagged as dangerous, legitimate emails stop arriving, and the site is downgraded while it is cleaned. Putting it right costs several days, and the trust lost takes longer to come back.

The silent cost, the one that never makes a noise

A site that slows down loses visitors before it is even read, and no report flags it. A form that stops sending produces no visible error: it produces an absence of enquiries, blamed on the economy for weeks.

It is the most expensive scenario we come across, and the most common. It is only detected by monitoring that tests the real journey, not merely whether the server is up.

How we cost it with you

Two questions settle it, and they require no expertise. How many enquiries does your site bring you in a normal month? And how many days can you afford for it to be unavailable or downgraded?

When the first answer is significant and the second is short, upkeep is justified without discussion. When the site brings nothing and nobody looks at it, the real question is not maintenance, it is what the site is for.

It is the most common case, and it calls for a stage that maintenance contracts often pass over in silence.

The entry audit, before any commitment

We look at the real state before committing to support: the version of the foundation, the plugins and whether they are maintained, the state of the backups, the existing accounts, measured speed, and what the platform actually allows us to fix.

That stage serves you as much as us. It may conclude that the site is sound and that support starts straight away. It may also conclude that an overhaul is needed first, in which case it is costed separately rather than dissolved into the recurring fee.

What we refuse to do

Take on support for a site we know will break in the first quarter, without saying so. It is convenient at the point of sale and unsustainable afterwards: the recurring fee turns into permanent firefighting, and the relationship suffers on both sides.

The case of the closed platform

Some platforms limit access to markup, redirects or code. We check that before costing, so as not to sell you fixes the tool forbids.