Website Maintenance & Support

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.

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.

What this costs

My rate is $10 per hour. Maintenance runs as a monthly block of hours you can scale up or down. Unused emergency capacity is not something I bill for.

Questions people ask

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.

Start a project

Send me your URL and I will tell you what state it is in before you commit to anything.