Website
maintenance

Website maintenance without a ticket system

Website maintenance at many agencies means a support portal, a ticket number and a reply three days later from someone who has never seen your business. With me it's a conversation. You message me on WhatsApp, Telegram or email the way you'd text a colleague: "new prices from March 1", a photo of the new menu board, a voice note about the holiday hours. I confirm within one business day and make the change.

That works because I maintain only sites I built myself. I know the code, the structure and your business, so a small change stays small.

Why upkeep is light on my sites

Most of the maintenance burden on small-business websites comes from the platform: plugin updates, theme updates, compatibility conflicts and security patches for code nobody on the project wrote. My sites are hand-coded or run on a custom CMS with no plugin marketplace, so that whole category of work largely disappears. Server software and the few dependencies still get kept current, but there's no weekly update roulette.

The result is that maintenance time goes into things that matter to customers: current prices, fresh photos, a new service page, an FAQ answer that saves you phone calls.

You can do a lot yourself

Every site comes with an edit panel for the content you change most: prices, hours, team members, project photos, blog posts, seasonal banners. After launch I train you on Zoom and leave a short written guide. Many owners handle routine updates themselves within a week and contact me only for structural changes. Either way is fine.

The monthly check

Once a month I look over the site: backups present and restorable, forms still delivering to the right inbox and CRM, no broken links or errors in Google Search Console, no unexpected slowdowns. Forms deserve special attention, because a quietly broken form is the most expensive failure a small-business site can have. If something has drifted, such as heavier pages after new photos, I'll flag it; speed is covered in more depth on website speed optimization.

Seasonal and US specifics

American businesses run on a seasonal calendar: Memorial Day and July 4 promotions, back-to-school, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, December holiday hours, tax season for accountants, hurricane-season notices on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, snow-day closures in the Midwest and Northeast. I build seasonal sections you can switch on and off, and I'll remind you before the big dates if you want.

Legal pages need occasional attention too. When you add a new tracking tool, a newsletter or text messaging, your privacy policy and cookie notice may need an update under the state privacy laws that apply to you, and your attorney should look at the wording.

If someone else built your current site

Here's where I'll disappoint some readers: a site another developer built is one I won't look after. Every hour on unfamiliar code is an hour you pay for me to reverse-engineer decisions, and one careless edit can break a form you rely on. The better deal is a fresh build on the same domain, with your best content carried across and old URLs redirected; after that, upkeep is simple. The steps are on website redesign. If you're weighing the cost of a care plan elsewhere, what a website care plan costs is a useful comparison.

Terms

The weeks right after launch are covered as part of the project. After that, we set a maintenance arrangement sized to how much your content actually moves; a florist with weekly specials needs more than a CPA firm. You can end it with a month's notice, there's no minimum term, and because every account is yours, the site keeps working regardless.