Website Maintenance

Websites need looking after

Nobody expects a van to keep running without a service. Websites are treated differently: built, launched, celebrated, then ignored until something visible goes wrong. By that point the small, cheap jobs have accumulated into one large, expensive one.

The decay is gradual and almost always invisible from the front end. Software versions fall behind and pick up published vulnerabilities. A form stops delivering because an API key rotated or a mailbox filled up. Pages get slower as images are added at full resolution. Links rot as suppliers reorganise their sites. Certificates expire on a bank holiday. Content drifts out of date until it actively misrepresents the business — the wrong opening hours, a service you no longer offer, a member of staff who left two years ago.

Maintenance is the unglamorous work that stops all of that. It is also, pound for pound, the best value work we do.

What we actually check

Software and dependencies

Every month we review the site's dependencies against published advisories, apply the updates that matter, and verify the result on a preview deployment before anything reaches the live site. Updating is the easy part; checking that nothing broke is the part that gets skipped.

Where a site depends on something that is no longer maintained, we flag it early and plan a route off it, rather than waiting for the version that stops working altogether.

Backups, and restores

Backups are taken off-site and retained on a rolling schedule. More importantly, we periodically restore one to a preview environment to prove it works.

This matters more than it sounds. A large proportion of the businesses we take on believe they have backups and do not: the plugin stopped running eight months ago, or the files are on the same server as the site, or nobody has ever tried to restore one. A backup you have not tested is not a backup.

Forms and enquiry delivery

The contact form is tested end to end — submitted, delivered, and confirmed to have arrived where it should. Silent form failure is the most costly and most common fault we find, precisely because nothing appears to be wrong. The site looks fine. The enquiries simply stop.

We also review validation and error handling, so a customer who mistypes an email address is told clearly rather than losing what they wrote.

Links, errors and search health

Internal links are crawled monthly and broken ones fixed. Outbound links are checked, because a link to a supplier who has restructured their site reflects on you. We review the browser console for JavaScript errors, and the error logs for requests that are failing quietly.

We also watch search coverage: pages dropping out of the index, canonical conflicts, structured data warnings and any manual action notices. Finding those in the month they appear is much easier than finding them a year later.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Performance decays with use, and images are usually the culprit. A page that scored well at launch can be measurably slower a year later purely because content has been added without a thought for file sizes.

We measure Core Web Vitals monthly and act on drift: compress and resize new images, remove anything unused, check that layout has not started shifting as it loads. Where a site needs more than routine attention, we quote for performance optimisation separately rather than absorbing days of work into a maintenance fee.

Accessibility

Accessibility regresses too, usually through content. An image added without alt text, a heading level skipped for visual effect, a link labelled "click here", a table used for layout, a PDF that no screen reader can read. Each month we check recent changes against WCAG 2.2 AA and put right what has slipped.

Content accuracy

The least technical check and often the most valuable. Are the opening hours right? Is the telephone number right on every page? Are the services listed the services you actually want to sell? Has a price changed? Is there a member of staff on the team page who left?

We flag what we notice. You would be surprised how often a business has been quietly advertising something it stopped doing in 2022.

The change allowance

Every maintenance plan includes an allowance of hours each month for content edits and small design changes. It is deliberately generous because we want your site to keep improving.

The alternative — billing for every fifteen-minute job — creates exactly the wrong incentive. Owners hesitate, batch things up, and then never get round to it. Six months later the site says something that is no longer true, and the person who noticed has stopped mentioning it.

Typical uses of the allowance: a new page, updated photography, revised service descriptions, a clearer call to action, seasonal opening hours, a new member of staff, a testimonial added, a form field changed.

Taking on a site we did not build

Most maintenance clients come to us with an existing site, often one whose original developer has moved on. We start with an audit covering hosting, software versions, security headers, backups, forms, performance, accessibility and search health, and give you the findings in plain English with the risks ranked.

From there, one of three things is true:

1. The site is fundamentally sound. We fix the urgent items and maintain it. This is the commonest outcome and saves you the cost of a rebuild.
2. The site needs work but is worth keeping. We plan the work in order of value and spread it over a few months.
3. The site cannot be kept secure or fast at sensible cost. Usually an abandoned page builder, an unsupported platform, or a theme that has not been updated in years. We will tell you plainly, explain why, and set out what a replacement would involve — without pretending maintenance would solve it.

We would rather lose the monthly fee than take money for maintaining something we know is fragile.

How it is priced

Maintenance is a fixed monthly fee based on the size and complexity of the site and the change allowance you want. No minimum term, a month's notice either way.

If you already host with us on a managed plan, maintenance is included — there is no need for both.

To get a figure, send us the address of your site or call 01420 446331. We will look at it properly before we reply, and tell you what we would deal with first.