Website maintenance, before something breaks

Maintenance is focused solely on keeping your Statamic, Composer packages, NPM modules, Laravel and PHP updated. Plus your hosting environment secure and running smoothly.

If you’d like new functionality, design changes, or other custom web development work, I can provide a separate quote.

All plans include developer time, a set number of hours each month, on top of the monthly updates. During business hours only: Monday-Friday, 9:00am-5:00pm.

Applying, testing and deploying updates is part of your plan and doesn't use your hours. They're for everything else that needs a developer: fixing anything an update breaks, issues flagged by the 24/7 monitoring, a broken integration or a problem in the CMS.

If an update breaks Statamic itself, the packages it runs on or an integration covered by your plan, and fixing it takes longer than your hours, I finish it at no extra cost. That doesn't extend to custom code: if an update means custom code needs changing or refactoring, I'll quote for that separately.

Hours don't roll over. If a non-urgent issue needs more time than your monthly allocation and your site is still functional, I'll pause work and pick it back up the following month using that month's hours.

If an issue is urgent and fixing it would exceed your monthly hours, I'll let you know first and only continue with your approval. Additional time is charged at my standard hourly rate of £150/hour.

If you expect to need support regularly, prepaid hour blocks are available at a lower rate of £125/hour, drawn down as you use them. Purchased in blocks of 10 or 20 hours.

Most businesses fall into one of two camps.

1. Either nobody is managing the website at all. 365 days a year it sits unmonitored until something breaks and causes a scramble.

2. Or updates are handled ad-hoc by someone, with no real monitoring in place, so issues still slip through and the site still goes down from time to time.

In both cases, when something does go wrong, it usually ends up on a ticket with an internal or outsourced IT team who have their own fires to fight. It's rarely a quick fix.

With this service, your website is monitored 24/7. I'm notified of issues before you are, and the window for something to go wrong is much smaller because the site is being actively maintained.

I'll always communicate planned time off in advance. But the honest answer is that a well-maintained, monitored website very rarely has the type of emergencies you're used to, and that's the whole point of the service.

And in the rare event that something did go wrong while I was unavailable, you'd simply do what you do now. Contact your internal or outsourced IT team. The difference is, with this service, that scenario is far less likely to happen in the first place.

Out-of-hours support isn't included in any plan.

The plans are for scheduled maintenance during business hours: updates, monitoring, and security patching all happen within that window.

That said, if something urgent comes up outside of hours and I'm available, I'm happy to help, though it's offered at my discretion and can't be guaranteed. This is chargeable at £200/hour, with a minimum charge of one hour, and invoiced separately.

Regular maintenance significantly reduces the chance of emergencies. Keeping software updated and patched means fewer critical issues arise in the first place.

I offer three maintenance and support plans, Core, Plus, and Max.

These cover the most common maintenance needs for Statamic websites at different business scales.

By standardising plans, I can provide a consistent, reliable service while keeping costs predictable and processes efficient.

If you’re unsure which plan best fits your needs, I can recommend the most suitable option based on your site’s size, complexity, and business priorities.

You can cancel simply by not renewing your plan.

Unless you tell me to not maintain your website and server, I will continue to work on your website until the 12-month contract has expired.

No. Cookie consent tools sit outside the maintenance plans, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight.

Whether your site blocks cookies correctly is a legal obligation that sits with you as the site owner, and it depends on decisions only you can make: which categories you offer, what your privacy policy says, and which regulations apply where your visitors are. I can't take that responsibility on your behalf.

Consent tools are also some of the most time-consuming things to debug, because they interact with everything else on the page. If you want help with yours, I'm glad to do it, and I'll quote for it first so you know what it costs before I start.

Tag managers sit outside the maintenance plans too, for a practical reason.

Your marketing team can add, change or remove tags in a container without touching the website, and I have no visibility of those changes. If a tag starts causing a problem, the cause is in a system I don't control and can't monitor.

If something does go wrong and you want me to look, I will. It's chargeable at the rates in the terms, and as with any chargeable work I'll tell you what it will cost and wait for you to approve it before starting.

An integration is a service your site connects to with a key or login, where a change at their end can stop part of your site working: a CRM, a payment provider, a booking or ticketing system, an email platform.

Smaller additions don't count. Analytics, web fonts, map embeds and embedded video are covered on every plan, and keeping them working comes out of your monthly developer time.

We agree the count together before your plan starts, and again at each renewal. Core covers your email or newsletter service, Plus up to three integrations and Max up to six. Sites with more than six are quoted separately.

All maintenance packages are paid annually with a single invoice.

Payment is due by bank transfer within 7 days, and your first maintenance cycle begins once payment has cleared. There are no ongoing commitments, you're paying for 12 months of service upfront.

Around 60 days before your 12 months are up, I'll get in touch to ask if you'd like to renew. All payments are non-refundable, but services remain active for the full term.

Pricing may be reviewed annually. Any changes are communicated with your renewal notice, so you always know what you're agreeing to before you renew.

You can upgrade your plan at any time.

Upgrading starts a new 12-month contract on the higher plan, and the unused portion of your current plan is applied as credit against the new annual fee.

Since plans are paid annually, downgrades take effect at renewal. When your 12 months are up, you can switch to whichever plan suits your needs.

Any plan change is subject to the Terms and Conditions in effect at the time of the change.

Your site needs to be on the current major version of Statamic. If it is on an older one, a Statamic upgrade comes first. If it runs Statamic Pro, it needs a licence with an active update subscription, along with any paid add-ons it uses. You renew and pay for these each year. They aren't part of the plan, and updates pause while a licence has lapsed.

Your site also needs to be on a server I manage. A Statamic migration moves it to one, in a hosting account you own. Setting that up gives me the access I need, so there's no list of logins to pull together.

If anything else is needed, I can liaise with your in-house team, web developer or hosting provider to get it.

Most updates have zero downtime. Statamic CMS updates and the majority of server patches are deployed seamlessly whilst your site continues to run. All testing happens in a staging environment first, and updates are pushed to production during low-traffic periods.

Occasional brief downtime: Some server updates require a reboot, resulting in approximately 5-7 minutes of downtime. These reboots are infrequent and scheduled outside of peak hours. You'll be notified in advance when one is necessary.

The maintenance process is designed to minimise disruption and keep your site available to visitors.

Although problems are rare thanks to thorough testing, I follow a defined recovery process if an issue arises:

1. Roll back: Before I work on your site, I pull a fresh copy of it from production to my local environment, and every update is made under version control. If something goes wrong on your live site, I roll it back to the last working version.

2. Root cause analysis: I investigate the issue on the local copy and staging environment to identify what went wrong.

3. Fix and retest: A solution is developed and tested on staging before reapplying the update to your live site.

4. Clear communication: You receive regular updates and an estimated timeline until the issue is resolved.

Updates happen locally, so they don't impact the production website.

The amount of time it takes depends on the scope and complexity of the updates.

The actual push to production only takes a few minutes. You’ll always be notified in advance, and updates are pushed live during low-traffic periods to minimise any possible disruption.

Yes. I’ll always notify you in advance of any scheduled maintenance.

When an update is scheduled, you’ll get an email letting you know, and a notice appears in the Statamic control panel for anyone who’s logged in.

While the update is running, anyone logged into Statamic will see a message asking them not to make changes to the site until it’s finished.

Once it’s done, everyone who was notified gets a follow-up email to confirm the work is complete. Statamic also shows a notification letting logged-in users know it’s safe to make edits again.

Every update follows a three-stage process before reaching your live site:

• I pull a copy of the production site to ensure my local environment mirrors the latest version. Updates are then applied and tested locally.

• Updates are pushed to a staging server, which mirrors your production hosting environment.

• Only when both automated and manual tests pass do I apply updates to your production site, timed for low-traffic periods.

This three-stage process ensures issues are caught early, reducing risk and protecting your business operations.