Website Maintenance & Support
Website maintenance service for WordPress, Laravel and Shopify. Updates tested on staging, daily backups, uptime monitoring and security patching.
Monthly care for a site you depend on. Updates, backups, uptime monitoring, security patching and the small changes you keep meaning to ask for.
Websites are not finished, they are maintained. The ones that break are the ones nobody looked at for eight months, and the repair always costs more than the upkeep would have.
My rate is $10 per hour. Maintenance runs as a monthly block of hours you can scale up or down, and unused emergency capacity is not something I bill for. Larger jobs that fall outside the block, such as a rebuild or a migration, get quoted as a fixed price up front.
What maintenance covers
Updates, tested first
Core, plugin, theme and dependency updates applied on staging before production. WordPress, Laravel and Shopify. An update that takes the site down at 2pm on a Tuesday is worse than one applied a day later.
Backups you have actually restored
Automated daily backups stored off the server, with a restore tested periodically. An untested backup is a hope, not a plan.
Uptime and error monitoring
Alerts when the site goes down, when SSL is close to expiry, when the disk fills, or when error rates spike. You hear it from monitoring, not from a customer.
Security
Patching known vulnerabilities, hardening logins, rate limiting, file permission checks and malware scanning. Most compromised sites I see were running a plugin with a public advisory published months earlier.
Small changes
Copy edits, a new page, a price update, a form field, a broken link. The jobs too small to raise a project for, which is exactly why they pile up.
Performance checks
Core Web Vitals, image weight, caching and database bloat, reviewed rather than assumed. Sites get slower gradually, so nobody notices until it is bad.
The platforms, and what upkeep means on each
The work is not the same everywhere, and neither is the risk.
The highest exposure, because plugins are the attack surface. Everything goes through staging, and abandoned plugins get replaced.
Composer dependencies, framework upgrades, and queue workers that stop quietly. Less frequent, larger jobs.
The theme rather than the platform. App conflicts after an update, and Liquid that breaks when a section is renamed.
No update mechanism at all, so it is patching by hand and reading the error log.
Month to month
- 01Baseline auditBefore the first invoice I record what is installed, what is out of date, what is exposed and what is already broken, so we both know the starting state.
- 02Updates on stagingApplied and checked away from production, then shipped.
- 03Backups and restoresDaily off-server backups, with a restore tested periodically rather than assumed.
- 04Monitoring in the backgroundUptime, SSL expiry, disk usage and error rates watched continuously, so you hear about a problem from me and not from a customer.
- 05Your small changesThese go into the same monthly block, so they stop waiting for a job big enough to justify raising.
You will know what changed
Every month you get a short note: what was updated, what was patched, what broke, and what is worth doing next.
Written in plain language, so you can hand it to someone who does not work in this.
Recent work
Before hiring
Do you maintain sites you did not build?
Yes. I audit first and give you an honest picture of what state it is in before we agree on anything.
What if the site goes down outside your hours?
I am on Philippine Standard Time, UTC plus 8, which covers Australian and Asian business hours and US early mornings. Monitoring alerts me regardless of the clock.
Does this include hosting?
Separate but related. See hosting and infrastructure. Many clients take both so one person owns the whole stack.
What platforms?
WordPress, Laravel, custom PHP and Shopify.
Can I cancel?
Yes, monthly. And you keep everything, because all accounts are in your name from the start.
Built with this service
Other ways I can help
I build software, and I measure whether it works.
The same questions I research are the ones I ask on client builds: is it reliable, is it fast, is it easy to use, and is it secure. Those four drove satisfaction in my ICT portal study, and they shape how I scope and test every project.