Maintenance and Support

Ongoing care for sites and applications, so problems are found before a customer finds them.

A website is not finished when it launches. Platforms release security updates, certificates expire, forms stop delivering because a mail provider changed a rule, and content goes out of date. None of it is dramatic, and all of it compounds.

The failure mode is familiar: nothing happens for two years, and then several things happen at once, urgently, at the least convenient time.

What you get

  • Updates applied and checked, rather than applied and hoped for
  • Monitoring for uptime, certificate expiry, and error rates
  • Content and layout changes handled on request
  • Backups verified periodically by restoring them
  • A periodic check that forms still deliver — a silently broken contact form is the most expensive small fault a site can have
  • One person who already knows your system, rather than a ticket queue

How the work is done

Check the things that fail quietly

Loud failures get reported by customers within the hour. The expensive ones are silent: a form that stops sending, a backup that stops including the database, a certificate three days from expiry.

Test updates before trusting them

An update applied without checking the site afterwards is a change with no verification. Most are fine. The point of checking is the ones that are not.

Keep a written record

What was changed, when, and why. It is what makes a problem six months later diagnosable instead of a guess.

What this does not cover

Maintenance keeps a system healthy and makes small changes. Substantial new features are project work and get quoted separately — it is clearer for both sides than an arrangement where the boundary is vague.

Questions

Can you maintain a site you did not build?

Yes, and it is common. It starts with reading the existing system and writing down how it works, which is useful in itself.

What counts as a small change?

Text edits, image swaps, adding a page, adjusting a form. If something is larger than that, you get told before any work starts rather than after.

What if nothing goes wrong for months?

Then the updates, backup checks, and monitoring have been quietly doing their job. That is what the arrangement is for — but it should be honest about it rather than manufacturing activity to look busy.

Related

Security and Hardening

Making a site survive the automated traffic every public site receives, and cleaning up properly when something has already got in.

Have a system that needs building or fixing?

Describe the problem and you will get a direct answer about whether it is worth doing, roughly what it involves, and what it would take.

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