Website care
It launched, everyone moved on, and it has been slowly rotting ever since.
Nothing dramatic happens. Plugins fall out of date, a form stops sending, the certificate lapses on a Saturday, new pages get published without alt text. Six months later the site is slower, less accessible and less trusted than the day it went live.
From $249/mo · ongoing retainer
The work
From $249/mo
What is actually covered
- Updates applied and tested — platform, dependencies and security patches, checked afterwards rather than applied and hoped for.
- Backups that have been restored at least once. An untested backup is a belief, not a backup.
- Uptime and certificate monitoring, so you hear it from me rather than from a customer.
- Accessibility checks on new content. Accessibility slips back — every new page is a fresh chance to break it. Why this matters.
- Performance watched over time, because sites get slower one well-meaning addition at a time.
- A block of hours for small changes — the edits that are too small to quote and too annoying to wait for.
- A quarterly note in plain language: what changed, what is coming, what I would do next.
From $249/mo, by site size and how much change you expect. No lock-in.
The point
You are paying for someone who already knows your site
The value is not the checklist. It is that when something breaks at an inconvenient moment, the person fixing it already knows how your site is built, where its odd bits are and what it connects to — instead of spending the first two billable hours finding out.
That said: a care plan is not a substitute for someone inside your organization caring about the site. If you have that person, this exists to support them, not to replace them.
How it runs
Most of this is watched, not remembered
None of the failures on a neglected site announce themselves, which is why noticing cannot depend on somebody thinking to check.
- Accessibility checks run on every build, so a new page cannot quietly undo the last audit.
- End-to-end journeys run in a real browser — the forms and the paths people actually take, not just the pages.
- Link and document sweeps on a schedule, so a dead link surfaces before a visitor finds it.
- Results to a dashboard, with an alert when something breaks, so the first you hear of it is not a phone call.
This is running against Confederation College's estate today.
Limits
When a care plan is not worth it
- Sites I did not build and have not audited. I need to see it first — inheriting an unknown site on a fixed monthly fee is bad for both of us.
- Anyone wanting 24/7 guaranteed response. If you need an on-call rota, you need a managed host, and I will help you choose one.
- Sites that need rebuilding. Maintaining something structurally broken is money spent to postpone a decision. I will tell you if that is where you are.
- Anyone treating it as unlimited development. Care is upkeep plus small changes; new features get quoted.
Response
Response times, stated plainly
| Situation | You hear from me |
|---|---|
| Site down, or a security issue | Same business day, and evenings and weekends when I can — but see the honest limit below |
| Something broken but the site is up — a form not sending, a page erroring | Within one business day |
| Small changes | Within three business days, usually sooner |
| Anything else | Acknowledged within one business day, even if the answer is "next week" |
The honest limit: I am one person, not a rota. I do not offer a 24/7 guarantee because I could not keep it, and a promise I cannot keep is worse than a smaller one I can. If your site cannot be down overnight, you need managed hosting with an on-call team, and I will happily help you choose one.
Evidence
Looked after like this
Including the tool I built because checking large sites by hand never happens otherwise.
The estate moved onto modern rails without losing URLs or search visibility, and accessibility became something checked on every build.
Several thousand public pages, content owners across dozens of departments, a statutory accessibility obligation, a small team, and no option to take the site down while you fix something.
Broken links get caught by a scan instead of by a visitor.
Broken links accumulate silently on any large site, and checking them by hand is the kind of job that never gets done.
Questions
The usual questions
Does hosting include this?
Hosts keep the server running. They do not update your CMS, test that your forms still send, or notice that last week's news post has an image with no alt text. Different job.
Can we just call you when something breaks?
Yes, at the ad-hoc rate. It is more expensive per incident and the things that would have been prevented still happen. Some organizations prefer it, and that is a reasonable choice to make on purpose.
What if we want to leave?
You give notice and go. Everything is already in your accounts and your repository — that is a standing rule, not a courtesy. Nothing needs to be extracted from me.
Do you maintain sites other people built?
Often, after a look at what I would be taking on. If it is well built, gladly. If it is held together with abandoned plugins, I will tell you what it would cost to make it maintainable first.
What counts as a small change?
Text edits, swapping an image, a new page from an existing template, adjusting a form. Roughly anything under an hour. New features and new templates get quoted, and I will tell you which side of the line something falls on before doing it, not after.
Is there a minimum term?
No. Thirty days' notice, no auto-renewal trap, no exit fee. A care plan you would not choose to renew is one I would rather fix than keep billing.
Tell me about the site
What it runs on, who touches it, and what has gone wrong lately. You will hear whether a care plan is worth it or whether you need something else first.
Or start here
A couple of lines is enough to get a straight answer about whether a care plan fits.
Goes straight to me. No list, no automated sequence — see the privacy policy.