Website care
Website care plans, so the site does not quietly rot
A website care plan covers the work that keeps a site working after launch: hosting, software updates, security patching, backups that have been proven to restore, uptime monitoring and the small content changes that otherwise pile up for a year. One monthly fee, and the same team that built the site.
- Backups tested, not assumed
- Small changes included
- Same team that built it
What actually goes wrong with an unmaintained website
Websites do not fail suddenly. They decay. The platform and its plugins fall a year behind, then two. A security patch is missed. A form quietly stops delivering to an address that no longer exists. An SSL certificate lapses on a Sunday and the browser starts telling visitors the site is unsafe. None of it announces itself, and all of it costs enquiries.
The pattern we see most often is a site built well three or four years ago by somebody who has since moved on, running software with known vulnerabilities, with a backup nobody has ever tested. That site is one bad week away from being a genuine problem, and the owner usually has no idea.
A care plan is the answer to that, and it is deliberately unexciting. Someone is responsible, the updates happen on a schedule, the backups are restored to prove they work, and when something breaks there is a number to ring where the person answering already knows how your site is built.
Care plans are the ongoing half of web design in Nottinghamshire.
What a care plan covers
- Fast UK hosting with SSL, renewed automatically rather than remembered
- Core, plugin and theme updates applied on a schedule and checked afterwards rather than fired and forgotten
- Security patching, with anything urgent applied out of cycle instead of waiting for the next window
- Daily backups held off the server, with restores tested on a schedule so we know they work
- Uptime monitoring that alerts an engineer rather than filling a log nobody reads
- Form delivery checked, because a contact form silently failing is the most expensive fault a site can have
- An allowance of small content changes each month: text, images, prices, opening hours, a new team member
- A quarterly note on anything worth knowing, including performance and anything ageing badly
The small changes allowance is the part people use
Most businesses can edit their own site and most of them do not, because the change is small, the week is busy, and it never quite reaches the top of the list. Six months later the prices are wrong and there is a member of staff on the team page who left in the spring.
Having somewhere to send those changes is what stops that happening. Send the sentence, it goes on the site, nobody has to open an editor or remember a password.
- Text, prices, images and opening hours changed on request
- New pages and posts added within the allowance
- Anything larger quoted first, so there is never a surprise invoice
Care plans and IT support are different things
A website care plan looks after the site: the platform, the hosting, the backups of what we host, the content. An IT support plan looks after your business: the computers your staff use, the email, the servers, the network and the security around them.
Plenty of clients take one and never the other, and there is no obligation to bundle. Where a business does take both, the advantage is not a discount. It is that when a form stops arriving, nobody spends a week deciding whether it is a website problem or a mail problem, because it is the same team on both sides of that line.
If it is the computers and email rather than the website, that is business IT support.
We did not build your site. Can you still look after it?
Usually yes, and it is a large part of this work. We start with an audit: what it is built on, how far behind it is, what state the backups are in and whether there is anything urgent.
You get that audit in writing whether or not you go on to take a plan. Occasionally it says the honest answer is a rebuild rather than maintenance, and we would rather tell you that at the start.
Get in touch
Talk to us about website care plans
A few lines is enough. We will tell you straight whether we can help, what it would cost and how quickly we can be there. No hard sell, and no follow-up sequence if you decide against it.
- We reply within one working day
- A straight answer, including when it is no
- Free process review available, before any money changes hands
Would rather just ring? 01623 354250, Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm.
Frequently asked questions
If the answer is not here, ask us. You will get a straight one, from someone who does the work.
Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm
How much does website maintenance cost?
It depends on the size of the site and how much change you expect month to month, and we quote a fixed monthly figure before you commit. A brochure site with occasional edits is at the low end; a shop with a moving catalogue and integrations sits higher because there is genuinely more to keep working.
Do I have to be on a care plan?
No. Every site we build is yours outright and you are free to host and maintain it wherever you like. The plan exists because most small businesses find that the maintenance never quite gets done otherwise, not because the site is locked to us.
Are backups actually tested?
Yes, on a schedule, and we can tell you the date of the last restore test. An untested backup is a belief rather than a safeguard, and the moment you find out it never worked is always the worst possible moment.
What counts as a small change?
Text edits, price and hours updates, swapping images, adding a page or a post, adding a team member. Anything that is really a new feature or a design change gets quoted separately so you can decide, rather than being absorbed until the allowance quietly means nothing.
Can you take over a site somebody else built?
Usually. We audit it first so both sides know what state it is in, and you get the findings in writing regardless of what you decide afterwards.
What happens if the site goes down at the weekend?
Monitoring alerts an engineer rather than logging it quietly, and hosting faults are ours to fix at any hour. For anything needing a decision from you, we will have already started the work by the time we ring.
