Managed Websites

Why "managed" matters more than it sounds

A website is not a purchase; it is a small piece of infrastructure. Certificates expire. Dependencies get security advisories. Domains come up for renewal. Forms silently stop delivering because a mailbox filled up or an API key rotated. Search engines change what they reward. Browsers change what they support.

None of that is dramatic in isolation. Together, over three or four years of nobody being responsible, it is how a perfectly good website turns into an embarrassment — or a liability. The pattern we see most often is a site built competently in 2019, handed over with good intentions, and never touched again until the day it broke or was defaced.

A managed website removes that risk by making one person accountable for keeping it working. In practice that means a predictable monthly fee, a named contact, and a site that quietly stays fast, secure and current while you get on with running your business.

What we take care of

Hosting that is genuinely appropriate

Managed sites are hosted on a global edge network, with your pages pre-rendered as static HTML and served from a location near the visitor. HTTPS is enforced, certificates renew automatically, and there is no origin server sitting on the public internet waiting to be scanned.

This is not the cheap end of a compromise; it is a better architecture. There is no virtual machine to patch, no PHP version to upgrade, no database to tune or back up, and no shared hosting neighbour to be compromised. It is also why hosting can be included in a modest monthly fee rather than billed as a line item.

Domains, DNS and certificates

Renewal dates are tracked and diarised. DNS is documented. Certificates are monitored as well as automated, because "it renews automatically" is a statement of intent rather than a guarantee.

Everything is held in accounts registered in your name. We hold delegated access. This matters enormously if you ever change supplier — and it is astonishing how many businesses discover, at the worst possible moment, that their domain is registered to an agency that has stopped answering the telephone.

Backups you could actually restore from

Content, code and configuration are backed up daily to storage separate from the live site. More importantly, restores are tested rather than assumed. An untested backup is a hope, not a plan.

Because content lives in a Git repository, there is also a complete, attributable history of every editorial change. Restoring a page to how it read three months ago takes moments.

Updates and patching

Dependencies are reviewed monthly and on any security advisory that affects the stack. Updates are applied to a preview deployment first, checked, and then promoted. You get told what changed in the quarterly review; you do not have to think about it in between.

Because the sites we build have a small, deliberate dependency list and no plugin ecosystem, this is a contained job rather than an endless one. That is precisely why we build them that way. Our website maintenance service covers the same ground for sites we do not host.

Monitoring

Uptime, certificate validity and Core Web Vitals are monitored continuously. If a page starts failing, or a form stops delivering, or the largest contentful paint drifts upwards after a content change, we find out and act.

The practical benefit is that most problems are fixed before anyone tells us about them. It is a much better position than waiting for a customer to mention that your contact form has not worked for a fortnight.

Changes, included

Every managed plan includes a monthly allowance of content and design changes. New service page, updated prices, seasonal opening hours, a clearer call to action, a page that needs restructuring because the business has moved on — that is what the allowance is for.

This is deliberately generous, because we would rather your site kept improving than sat frozen while you weighed up whether a small change was worth an invoice. Hesitating over a fifteen-minute job is how sites go stale.

What it costs and how it is priced

Managed plans are quoted as a fixed monthly fee based on the size of the site and the change allowance you want. There is no minimum term and no exit fee; a month's notice on either side is all that is needed.

We deliberately do not run a tiered pricing table, because the questions that determine the fee — how many pages, how often things change, whether there are integrations to look after — vary too much between a five-page site for a local trade and a forty-page site for a professional practice. Tell us what you have and we will give you a figure, in writing, that will not move.

Larger pieces of work are always quoted separately: a new section of the site, a redesign, an integration, a migration. You will never receive a surprise invoice, and we will never start something you have not agreed.

Taking over an existing website

We regularly adopt sites built by somebody else. The process starts with an audit covering hosting, security, backups, performance, accessibility and search visibility, at the end of which you get a plain-English written summary of what is fine, what needs attention now, and what can wait.

Sometimes the honest answer is that the existing site cannot be kept secure or fast at a reasonable cost — an abandoned page builder, an unsupported PHP version, a theme that has not been updated in five years. In that case we will say so and explain why, rather than taking a monthly fee for maintaining something we know to be fragile.

Where a site is fundamentally sound, we keep it, improve it, and save you the cost of a rebuild you do not need.

Is a managed plan right for you?

It suits businesses that:

• Rely on the website for enquiries and cannot afford it to be down or slow
• Do not have anybody in-house whose job is to look after it
• Want one supplier and one bill rather than a hosting company, a developer and a domain registrar
• Would like the site to keep improving rather than being rebuilt every four years

It is probably not right if you have an internal development team, or if you want the absolute lowest possible running cost and are comfortable taking on the risk yourself. We will tell you which camp we think you are in.

To discuss a managed plan, tell us about your site or call 01420 446331. If you have an existing website, mention the address and we will look at it before we reply. Our frequently asked questions cover ownership, notice periods and what happens if you want to leave.