Website maintenance & troubleshooting

A website is not a leaflet. Once it is live, WordPress itself, your theme and every plugin (the add-ons that give a site extra features, like forms or galleries) keep releasing updates. Many of those updates fix security holes. If nobody applies them, the site slowly becomes easier to break into, and sooner or later something stops working: a contact form, a checkout, or the whole page.

Website maintenance is simply someone responsible for that upkeep, month after month. On a care plan I apply the updates, check the site still works afterwards, keep backups you can genuinely restore from, and watch for problems. Plans start from £45 a month. It is one person, with 15+ years of WordPress experience, who knows your site, so when you message me there is nobody to explain it all to from scratch. If your site was built by someone else, that is fine: I start with an audit and tell you plainly what state it is in.

Most of the work is invisible when it goes well, which is the point. Here is what a typical month looks like:

• Updates: WordPress, theme and plugin updates are applied and the key pages, forms and (on a shop) the checkout are checked afterwards.
• Backups: a copy of the site is stored away from your hosting, and I test that it can be restored, because a backup that has never been tried is only a hope.
• Security: the site is scanned for malware and unusual changes.
• Uptime: if the site goes offline, I get an alert rather than waiting for a customer to tell you.
• Small changes: a set allowance of content edits, such as a new price, opening hours or a swapped photo.

If you would rather have the hosting looked after too, see WordPress hosting. Plans start from £45 a month, and the exact price depends on how big and busy the site is.

Sites go wrong in ordinary ways: a white screen after an update, a form that stopped sending emails, pages that suddenly load slowly, a strange redirect to another website, or a warning from your host. Often the cause is not obvious, and the host, the theme author and the plugin author can each point at someone else.

When you send me a message, I work out where the fault really is and fix it, rather than passing you between suppliers. Urgent problems can come straight to me on WhatsApp, every day, 09:00 to 21:00, and most messages get a reply the same working day.

If the site has been hacked, the job is cleaning it, restoring anything damaged, and then closing whatever way the attacker got in. Clean-up alone is not enough, because the same weakness would let them straight back in.

Not on a plan? You can still get in touch when something breaks. One-off jobs are quoted per job before I start.

You do not need to have bought your website from me for me to look after it. Plenty of sites arrive after a developer has moved on, a freelancer has gone quiet, or an agency contract has ended.

Before I agree to a plan, I audit the site. That means checking:

• how out of date WordPress, the theme and the plugins are
• whether there are backups, and whether they work
• whether any plugins are abandoned or no longer supported
• signs of malware or old, unused admin accounts
• how quickly the pages load

You get a plain-English list of what I found, what matters and what does not, and a fixed price for anything that needs sorting out first. Then you decide. You keep ownership of your domain, your hosting account and your licences throughout, so there is no lock-in and you can walk away whenever you like. Care plans run month to month with 30 days’ notice. If the site needs bigger changes later, that is a job for WordPress development, and you can send me the address to start with an audit.