WordPress Hosting, Support and Website Care Plans
The work doesn't stop at launch.
Keep the team that built it within reach, and keep the investment holding its value — uptime, patching, performance and a roadmap that keeps moving well past launch week.
Four steps, in the same order every time — for a reason.
The sequence matters. Every expensive mistake we’ve seen in support and protection started with skipping step one.
Onboard
Audit, backups, monitoring, access and a runbook — whether we built it or somebody else did.
Protect
A patching cadence, security monitoring and an incident process with a named responder.
Improve
Performance budgets, plus a monthly batch of improvements pulled from the shared board.
Review
A quarterly roadmap with the team that knows your systems: what to build next, and what to leave alone.
Doctor Flue
Chimney and fireplace services with hard seasonal peaks — kept fast, secure and current year after year.
What this looks like in your sector.
Compliance and accessibility monitored continuously, not audited once.
Disclosure versions archived and approval flows kept working.
ERP and catalog sync watched around the clock.
Hosting sized and tested for the Monday morning a cohort starts.
How much support a site actually needs.
Support is usually sold as one package. In practice there are three different problems — keeping the site alive, keeping it current, and keeping it improving — and most businesses need a different amount of each.
Keeping it alive: hosting and security
The environment the site runs in, the updates applied to it, backups taken off the server, and somebody watching. This is the floor, and going without it is a decision most businesses make by accident rather than on purpose. Covered in detail on the managed hosting page.
Keeping it current: the care plan
The work done to the site rather than around it — edits, fixes, new pages, content changes, the small requests that quietly stop happening when every one of them needs a quote. This is where most of the month-to-month value sits.
Keeping it improving: the roadmap
A scheduled conversation about what the site should do next, informed by what the data shows and what the business has changed. Without it, sites freeze at their launch-day assumptions and drift further from the company every quarter.
Knowing who to call, and them knowing you
The practical value of a retainer is not the hours. It is that the person who answers already knows why your site was built the way it was, which integrations are fragile, and what you asked for last spring. That knowledge is the thing you are actually retaining.
Evidence for the people who ask for it
Procurement questionnaires, client security reviews, insurers, and increasingly ordinary customers. Being able to state where backups live, how quickly you can recover and who has access is much easier when maintenance is somebody's contracted responsibility.
Taking on a site somebody else built
Most of what we look after, we did not build. That starts with an audit — what is installed, what is out of date, what has been edited directly on the server, what is at risk — and a plain assessment before anything is agreed. Occasionally that assessment is that the site is not worth maintaining.
Leaving, if it comes to that
Your hosting, your domain, your licences, your content, full administrator access throughout, and a monthly arrangement you can end. A support relationship that depends on you being unable to leave is not a support relationship.
What an audit finds when we take a site on
Plugin and theme inventory, versions, licences, direct edits made on the server, integrations nobody documented, and the things quietly broken that nobody has reported. You get that assessment in plain language before committing to anything.
Planning a year rather than a month
A short annual view of what the site needs — the platform upgrade coming, the section that is now out of date, the integration whose vendor is changing. Budgeting for that beats discovering it in a quarter when there is no budget left.
What is explicitly not covered
Worth stating plainly, because vagueness here is how support relationships sour. New functionality, a redesign, a new integration or a migration to a different platform are projects with their own estimates rather than retainer work. So is rebuilding something a third-party plugin broke beyond repair. You will always get the estimate before anything starts, and we would rather have that conversation at the outset than in the middle of a month you thought was covered.
Questions about support and protection.
What is the difference between hosting and a care plan?
Hosting covers the environment the site runs in — the server, the stack, the backups, the security layer. The care plan covers the work done to the site: updates, edits, fixes and improvements. Most clients take both so one party is responsible for the whole stack, but they are genuinely separate services and either works alone.
How quickly do you respond?
Four business hours for a first reply, from somebody senior enough to assess the problem rather than log it. Genuine emergencies are handled as emergencies. Routine requests are usually done within a couple of business days, and same-day when something is time-sensitive.
Can we cancel?
Yes, monthly. Everything stays in your name throughout and you keep full access, so leaving is a matter of telling us.
Do you support WooCommerce and other stores?
Yes, scoped separately. A store carries payment, tax, shipping and customer data, cannot be cached the way a brochure site can, and a broken checkout is a different order of problem from a broken contact form. Pretending it is the same service would be a disservice.
Can you maintain a site hosted somewhere else?
Yes. The care plan works on your existing host, and we would rather do good work on somebody else's server than move a site that has no reason to move. Some problems resolve faster when we control the environment too, but that is a convenience rather than a condition.
We did not build our site with you. Is that a problem?
No — it describes most of the sites we look after. We audit it first and tell you honestly what condition it is in, including the parts that are going to cost money to put right. You get that assessment before you commit to anything.
What happens if the site is compromised?
We clean it up, and on a plan that is covered rather than separately quoted. In practice it means taking the site off the line if needed, restoring from a known-good backup, finding how they got in and closing it, then checking whether anything was exfiltrated. Almost every case we have been called to was an out-of-date plugin or a weak administrator password.
Can you help in an emergency if we are not on a plan?
Usually, yes — a hacked site or an outage is not the moment to discuss retainers. We will quote the recovery work and get on with it. What we will say afterwards is that the emergency rate is considerably more than the monthly cost of not having the emergency, and that almost every incident we are called to was preventable with updates somebody deferred.