Updates
Core, plugin, theme and dependency updates applied on staging first, with security advisories treated as urgent rather than batched into the monthly cycle.
Performance, Security & Care
Website maintenance & support
Websites do not stay still. Plugins get security advisories, PHP versions reach end of life, certificates expire, disks fill, and payment gateways deprecate the API you integrated against two years ago. None of it is dramatic individually, and all of it compounds when ignored.
Maintenance is the arrangement where somebody is paying attention to that on an ongoing basis, so problems get handled while they are still small.
How I work on it
Process
Adjusted to the job, but this is the shape it usually takes.
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Onboarding audit
Full inventory, backup verification and a security baseline before the retainer starts, so we both know the actual starting condition.
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Scheduled cycle
A regular update and check window, at a time that suits your traffic pattern.
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Escalation for the urgent
Security issues and outages break the schedule. That is the point of the arrangement.
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Quarterly review
A step back to look at hosting cost, performance trend and anything that should be planned rather than patched.
Questions
Things people ask
Monitoring alerts me regardless of the hour. Response expectations for out-of-hours incidents are agreed in writing at the start. I would rather set a realistic commitment than an impressive one I cannot honour.
The small-changes allowance is a monthly amount and does not accumulate indefinitely, because the value is availability rather than a bank of hours. If there is a bigger piece of work coming, we plan and quote it separately.
Yes, and much of this work is exactly that. It starts with the onboarding audit, occasionally that surfaces something that needs fixing before ongoing maintenance is meaningful, and I would tell you that up front rather than after signing.