Website Maintenance

Plans are built around what your site actually needs, but typically include WordPress core updates, plugin and theme updates, regular off-site backups, security monitoring and malware scanning, uptime monitoring, performance checks, and a set number of hours per month for content updates or minor changes. For more complex sites — eCommerce stores, membership sites, sites with custom integrations — plans may also include database optimization, staging environment testing before updates go live, and monitoring for third-party service changes that could break functionality. I'll recommend the right plan based on your site's complexity and how actively it's updated.

You can handle content updates — that's what the CMS is for. But plugin and core updates are where things get risky. An update to one plugin can break compatibility with another plugin, your theme, or your PHP version. Without knowing your site's architecture and dependencies, clicking 'Update All' can take a working site offline in seconds. I test updates in a staging environment before applying them to your live site, so if something conflicts, I catch it before your visitors do. It's the difference between proactive maintenance and emergency repair.

Security patches are applied as soon as they're available — those don't wait. General plugin and core updates are reviewed and applied on a regular schedule, typically weekly or biweekly, after testing in a staging environment to make sure nothing breaks. I don't use auto-update for anything critical. Every update is reviewed individually because not every update is safe to apply immediately — sometimes a new version introduces bugs or conflicts that the developer hasn't resolved yet. Knowing when to update and when to wait is as important as updating itself.

Yes, as long as the site is on a platform I support — primarily WordPress. I'll start with a site audit to understand the current setup: what theme and plugins are in use, how the site is structured, what's out of date, and whether there are any existing issues that need to be addressed before starting a maintenance plan. Sometimes that audit reveals problems that should be fixed first — outdated PHP versions, abandoned plugins with known vulnerabilities, or a theme that hasn't been supported in years. I'll be upfront about what I find and recommend a path forward.

Maintenance plans include uptime monitoring, which means I'm typically aware of downtime before you are. When an issue is detected, I get an alert and begin diagnosing immediately. Response time depends on the plan tier, but critical issues — site offline, security breach, broken checkout — are always treated as priority-one. For less urgent issues — a visual bug, a plugin warning, a form not sending notifications — I'll address them within the plan's normal response window. The goal is that your site is never down long enough for a customer to notice.

Yes. Regular automated backups are part of every maintenance plan — both your files and your database. Backups are stored offsite, completely separate from your hosting environment, so they're available even if your server has a catastrophic failure. I keep multiple restore points so we can roll back to a specific date if needed. Before any major update or change, I also take a manual backup as an extra safety net. If something goes wrong, I can restore your site to its last known good state quickly. Backup frequency depends on how often your site changes — daily for active eCommerce sites, weekly for sites with less frequent updates.