Website support and maintenance
Sites do not stay working on their own. Plugins update, certificates expire, PHP versions are retired and forms quietly stop sending. This is the agreement that makes all of that somebody’s job.
What goes wrong when nobody is looking after a site
Not dramatically, and that is the problem. In order of how often we see it:
- The contact form stopped sending three months ago and nobody noticed, because nobody is expecting the emails that are not arriving.
- The SSL certificate expired on a Saturday.
- An unattended plugin with a known vulnerability was used to inject links into every page. The site still looks fine to you; it does not look fine to Google.
- The host retired the PHP version the site runs on, and the site went with it.
- There is a backup. Nobody has ever tested restoring it.
Every one of these is cheap to prevent and expensive to fix afterwards.
What is covered
Updates
WordPress core, plugins, themes and PHP versions, applied on a schedule with a check afterwards that the site still works. Updates are staged and verified rather than applied blind, because the update that breaks a site is always the one nobody looked at.
Backups
Scheduled backups of files and database, held off the server, and — the part that is usually missing — restores tested rather than assumed.
Monitoring
Uptime and the things that fail silently: forms, certificates, checkout where there is one. You should hear about a problem from us rather than from a customer.
Security
Hardening, access review, and removing what is not used. Most site compromises come through something that was installed once for a reason that no longer applies.
Small changes
The content edits, new pages and tweaks that are too small to quote for individually. An agreed monthly allowance so they do not each become a purchase decision.
What is not covered
Stated plainly, because a support agreement that is vague about its edges is the one that ends badly:
- New features and new page types. Those are quoted as work.
- Redesigns.
- Third-party services that are not ours to control — your payment provider, your email platform, your domain registrar. We will help you deal with them; we cannot commit to their timescales.
- Content writing.
Where the boundary sits is written into your agreement rather than decided when something arrives.
Rescue work
Sites arrive here in a bad state, and that is a normal way to start rather than something to apologise for. Hacked and defaced sites, sites that are down, sites whose developer is uncontactable, sites nobody can deploy.
Rescue starts with a written assessment: what is wrong, what is recoverable, what it will take. That is a smaller commitment than a rebuild, and it frequently establishes that a rebuild is not needed.
Rescue is quoted as work rather than covered by a monthly agreement. Once the site is stable it can move onto one.
Performance work
A site that has become slow, or that has never been fast. Core Web Vitals, images, caching, database queries, and the extensions that are costing more than they contribute.
This is also quoted separately, and it starts with a measurement rather than a recommendation. We will tell you if the honest answer is that the platform or the hosting is the constraint, in which case tuning it is money spent on the wrong thing.
How support works day to day
One place to send things.You report issues one way, and everything is tracked in the same place, so nothing depends on which person happened to see the email.
Priorities are agreed in advance.A down site and a typo are not the same, and which is which is defined in the agreement rather than argued about at the time.
You get a report.What was updated, what was fixed, what was noticed. In plain language.
Response commitments are published.They are in our SLA, which is a public page rather than a paragraph in a contract you have to ask for. Here they are.
- Time-sensitive
- The site is materially impaired — checkout failing, a form not submitting, a page erroring. Picked up immediately during coverage hours, and always within 2 hours.
- General
- Something is wrong or unclear but the site is working. Content questions, small fixes, advice. Answered within 2 business days.
- New work
- A change or addition that is not a fault. Scoped and quoted within 4 business days, and built once you have agreed it.
- Coverage
- Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 20:00 UK time. Anything that arrives outside those hours is picked up at the start of the next working day.
There are no support tiers. One agreement covers everything on this page, and the only thing that changes between sites is the monthly allowance for small changes, which is sized against how much the site is used. Backups and monitoring are never the upgrade.
Questions we get asked
How quickly do you respond?
Immediately if the site is materially impaired — and always within 2 hours during coverage — within 2 business days for anything else, and within 4 business days for a quote on new work. Coverage is Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 20:00 UK time. The commitments are published in full in our SLA rather than buried in a contract.
Are there different support tiers?
No. There is one agreement and it includes everything on this page — there is no level at which backups or monitoring are an optional extra. What changes between one site and the next is the size of the monthly allowance for small changes, which is set against how much the site actually gets used.
Will you support a site you did not build?
Yes, and it is most of this work. It starts with an assessment — what it is built on, what state it is in, and anything that needs fixing before an ongoing agreement makes sense. You get that in writing, with a price, before anything is committed.
Do we have to host with you?
No. See hosting if you would rather we did, but support works on your hosting.
What if we only need occasional help?
Then a monthly agreement is probably the wrong product and we will say so. Occasional work is quoted as work. The agreement exists for sites where someone needs to be watching between the requests.
Can we cancel?
Yes, on notice set out in the agreement. Nothing is locked to us — you hold the code, the hosting access and the backups.
Do you cover e-commerce?
Yes, and stores are treated differently from brochure sites: checkout is monitored, updates are staged more carefully, and a broken checkout is the highest priority there is. See WooCommerce development.
Start a project
Tell us the site’s address and what has gone wrong recently. If nothing has, that is the best time to start.
Or email us at hello@felixwebsolutions.com.
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