Website Maintenance & Support

Website maintenance and support

A new site is not “finished” at launch. Platforms, plugins, dependencies and content needs keep moving. Maintenance is how you avoid surprise outages, insecure software and a homepage that quietly rots.

We offer practical care plans: updates, backups, monitoring and a monthly allowance for small fixes — with larger work quoted separately so the plan stays predictable.

What is typically included

CMS/core and critical dependency updates on a controlled schedule; backups and a known restore path; uptime monitoring on plans that include it; a small content or bug-fix allowance each month; security hygiene; and clear notes on what happened when we touch production. Critical outages are prioritised ahead of routine content changes. We typically reply within one business day.

“Controlled” means we patch in a window you can live with, check the pages that take enquiries or orders, and roll back if an update breaks checkout, forms or login. It is not a dump of every plugin update at 2am with no owner.

What is not included

New sections, redesigns, major integrations and campaign landing pages are project work. That separation keeps care plans affordable and stops “unlimited changes” from becoming neither unlimited nor careful. Rollover rules for unused hours, when offered, are written simply so there are no month-end surprises.

If you need a new service cluster, a redesign, or a campaign landing page, we quote that as a project. Mixing those into a retainer is how both sides end up frustrated: you wait, we rush, and production gets risky changes with no staging discipline.

Who a care plan fits — and who it does not

Maintenance suits Perth businesses that already have a site worth protecting: tradies who cannot afford a dead quote form on Monday morning, clinics that need plugin and privacy hygiene, and retailers whose cart cannot silently fail after a theme update.

It is a poor fit if the site is on abandoned hosting, has no backups, or is so customised that every change is a research project. In those cases we recommend a short audit first — sometimes a migration or rebuild is cheaper than babysitting a stack that will fail anyway. We also will not sell a retainer as a substitute for SEO; updates do not create search demand on their own.

Practical decisions, risks and integrations

You will decide who holds hosting, DNS and CMS access; whether we update on staging first (preferred) or production with a restore point; which third-party tools are in-scope (forms, bookings, payments, chat); and what counts as an emergency versus a content tweak. Write those down. Informal “just quickly” requests are how sites drift.

Risks we see often: auto-updates that break a page builder; a backup that exists but has never been restored; PHP or Node versions the host is about to retire; and a staff member who left with the only login. For WordPress and WooCommerce, plugin conflict after a core bump is the classic incident. We would rather delay a non-critical plugin than take the store down.

Integrations stay in the care plan only when they are already live and understood. New CRM wiring, payment gateways or membership layers are scoped separately because failure modes (failed webhooks, duplicate contacts, tax misconfiguration) need testing, not a leftover hour at month end.

How we measure health, and what you get at handover

Reporting is meant to be useful: what we updated, what we checked, incidents closed, and a short backlog of improvements we noticed but did not have allowance for. Uptime charts without a restore test are theatre. If a plan includes monitoring, alerts come to us first so customers are not your monitoring tool.

When we take on a site we did not build, handover the other way — from you to us — needs a credential list, hosting panel, DNS, analytics, and any app stores (Shopify, Webflow, payment dashboards). When we built the site, you still own those accounts; the care plan is access plus a working agreement, not a lock-in.

Get a quote with your platform, hosting and whether you need monitoring — we will recommend a plan that matches risk, not a one-size package. Questions about delivery rhythm sit on our process page.

What you get

• Controlled updates for CMS, themes and critical dependencies
• Backups with a known restore path
• Uptime monitoring on plans that include it
• Monthly allowance for small content and bug fixes
• Clear boundary between care plan work and scoped projects

How we deliver

1. Stack audit
2. Care plan setup
3. Monthly reporting
4. Prioritised improvement backlog

Get a quote for website maintenance & support in Perth — tell us your goals and current setup.