Website maintenance

The most common problem is missed updates. WordPress, the theme and the plugins receive security fixes all the time. If they are not installed, known holes stay open, and automated bots look for exactly those sites. The result rarely resembles a film-style hack: spam links appear on the site, visitors get redirected to someone else's page, or Google adds a warning to the search result. The owner often hears about it from a customer.

The second group is silent failures. The contact form stops sending email because mail server settings changed or messages land in spam, and the company spends weeks thinking inquiries have simply dried up. Automatic renewal of the SSL certificate fails and the browser shows visitors a warning. The domain renewal invoice goes to an old email address. The host upgrades its PHP version and a plugin that has not been updated in years stops working.

The third is backups. Many owners assume the host keeps copies, but nobody has checked how old the latest copy is or whether the site can really be restored from it. The value of a backup only shows at restore time, and that is a bad moment to find out there is none.

An update can break things on its own: two plugins stop working together, or the theme does not support the new version. So the order is always the same. First a fresh backup, then the updates, then a check: do the homepage and key pages open, do forms send email, do the cart and checkout work in a store. If something broke, we restore the previous state and find the cause before trying again.

A custom Next.js site has no plugins, but it needs maintenance too: security updates for dependencies, the server, certificates, working forms and monitoring. Terms for those sites are agreed separately, because the amount of work depends on how complex the build is.

The point of a plan is that routine work happens without you having to ask: updates, backups, security checks and monitoring run every month. A plan also includes a fixed number of hours for small changes: one hour in Basic, three in Pro and six in Pro+ per month. If you need more, the extra work is billed at 50 EUR per hour.

The included hours cover ordinary day-to-day tasks: replacing copy and images, adding a subpage based on an existing template, changing a banner or a form field. New functionality, a new language version or a design change is development rather than maintenance, and we quote it separately.

Hourly work alone suits you if changes are rare and someone else handles updates, for example your own IT person. But if nobody looks at the site regularly, missed updates pile up and one day there is a lot more to fix at once.

Monitoring watches site availability around the clock and alerts us as soon as the site goes down. The time to fix depends on the plan: within one business day on Basic, within 8 hours on Pro and within 4 hours on Pro+. The first step is to establish where the fault is: hosting, domain, certificate or the site itself.

If the fault is in the site, we restore a working state from backup. Backups are taken daily and kept for 30 days, so we can go back to a point before the problem appeared. The Pro plan adds a weekly copy stored away from the hosting. If the fault is on the hosting side, we deal with your hosting provider. We do not run hosting ourselves, so the speed of that kind of fix depends on them as well.

At the end of each month you receive a report: which updates were installed, which changes were made and what is worth doing next. That way you can see what you are paying for even in a month when nothing broke.