Website maintenance and care.

Why websites require maintenance

A website is software running on infrastructure connected to the public internet at all times. Without maintenance it deteriorates: security updates to the platform and its components go unapplied; the SSL certificate expires and browsers warn visitors away; a form stops delivering after a change at the mail provider; backups that were never tested prove impossible to restore. Website Care is the managed service that prevents these failures, with a named party responsible for the website and a monthly report that documents the work carried out.

Included in every plan

Care always includes managed hosting for standard use, SSL and domain monitoring, uptime monitoring, backups, security monitoring, scheduled updates, a monthly check of forms and key flows, a monthly report and a defined first-response time. What changes from one website to the next is frequency and depth: a presentation site is checked daily and backed up weekly, while a site that takes enquiries or payments is monitored continuously, backed up several times a day, given a staging environment where updates are tested before release, and has its critical flows verified every day.

What a site actually needs

What a website needs follows from the job it does, not from a budget line. A presentation site that exists to be found and to give contact details needs reliable basics. A site that generates enquiries every week needs closer monitoring and a faster response, because a broken form has a direct cost. A site the business runs on needs a staging environment, so that updates are tested before they reach visitors. A shop or booking platform needs daily verification of the flows that take money. The scope is agreed at the start and revised as the business changes.

Included hours

Where the site warrants it, an allocation of hours each month is agreed for routine changes: updates to text and images on existing pages, minor interface fixes, troubleshooting, restoration of forms, links and standard integrations, and minor adjustments to analytics and tracking. New pages, new features, redesigns, content production and campaigns are outside this allocation and are quoted separately. Unused hours expire at the end of each month. Additional work is billed at the hourly rate stated in the agreement, with a surcharge for urgent work outside business hours.

Terms

Website Care plans for newly built websites have a minimum term of twelve months and are billed monthly, or annually in advance where preferred. Websites not built by the studio are onboarded following a technical audit. The first-response time on each plan is the time within which investigation of an issue begins, not a guaranteed time to resolution. Website Care provides prevention, monitoring, backups and a structured response; it does not constitute a guarantee that a website will never be attacked. Clients are free to leave the plan at the end of the term, and the website, the code and the accounts remain theirs.

Reporting

Each month, clients receive a written report covering uptime, backups completed and verified, updates applied, security events, performance measurements and the work carried out against the included hours. The report is written for the person responsible for the business, not for a technical specialist, and identifies any matter requiring a decision.

Platforms

Website Care covers websites built by the studio and, following an audit, websites built elsewhere on the common platforms: WordPress and WooCommerce, Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace, and static or custom-coded websites. The audit establishes whether the website can be maintained responsibly on its current platform and, where it cannot, what would need to change first.

Starting

Enquiries can be submitted through the contact form, selecting the plan of interest, or by email to hello@walkupdigital.com with the website address. We respond within one working day and, for existing websites, propose an onboarding audit as the first step.

What care costs you in attention

The point of a maintenance agreement is that it removes a category of work from the client’s desk entirely. There is no monthly decision to make about whether an update is urgent, no scramble when a certificate expires, and no need to discover that the contact form stopped sending three weeks ago because nobody tested it.

What arrives instead is one short report a month, in plain language: what was checked, what was updated, what was fixed, and anything that will need a decision soon. If a month passes with nothing to report, the report says that too.