Website maintenance

A website is not finished when it launches. Certificates expire, plugins get vulnerabilities, disks fill up, an API changes its response format and the contact form quietly stops sending. Maintenance is the work that keeps all of that from becoming an emergency.

What is included every month:
— updates of the framework, packages, plugins and PHP, tested on a staging copy first;
— backups of files and database, with a restore actually performed and verified;
— monitoring of uptime, certificates, disk space and error logs;
— a look at the error tracker: what is failing for real users and how often;
— small changes — texts, images, blocks, prices — without a separate negotiation each time.

You also get someone to write to when something goes wrong, with an agreed response time and a person who already knows how your project is deployed. That is the part that is impossible to buy after the fact, in the middle of an incident.

Maintenance works for sites we built and for sites we inherited. In the second case it starts with a short audit and a handover: access, deployment, backups and a written map of the project — the things that turn out to be missing exactly when they are needed.