WordPress maintenance

Almost nobody buys website maintenance because they feel like it. They buy it afterwards: when the site went down on a Friday, when the contact form had been silently failing for two months, or when a red browser warning started scaring customers away.

The arithmetic usually looks like this: a month of maintenance costs less than one afternoon of somebody fixing a broken site, and considerably less than the sales that never came in while it was down.

What this actually is

Two different things get sold under the same name, and they have nothing in common.

The first is a plugin that updates on its own at three in the morning and a dashboard that says “all good”. It’s cheap because there’s nobody behind it: when an update breaks the site — and some do — the dashboard keeps saying everything is fine while your customers see an error.

The second is what we do: somebody looks. We update with a backup taken first, and we check the site still works afterwards. When something fails, we see it and fix it, usually before you notice.

Why sites break

Most of the sites that reach us haven’t been attacked by anyone in particular. They had simply gone months without updates, and over time that stops being a pending task and becomes a statistical risk: the vast majority of compromised WordPress sites are compromised through an out-of-date plugin, theme or core with an already published flaw.

Real attacks aren’t someone picking you out. They’re bots crawling the internet blindly, trying old versions with known flaws. They don’t choose you: they find you. And what usually follows isn’t visible damage but injected spam, mobile redirects, or a back door sitting there waiting.

Updating in time closes that door before anyone tries it. It isn’t glamorous. It’s what works.

What we do every month

We update while watching. Core, theme and plugins. A backup before each round, and a check afterwards that the site still does what it’s supposed to: that it loads, that the form sends, that the shop charges.

Backups that work. Automatic, kept off the server itself and — this is the part almost nobody does — restored now and then to confirm they work. A backup that has never been restored isn’t a backup: it’s a folder with hope in it.

Monitoring. If the site goes down, we get an alert. We don’t rely on a client emailing us on a Sunday to say their site won’t open.

Security reviews. Periodically we look at what’s been left exposed — a plugin abandoned by its author, a PHP version that no longer gets patches, access that’s no longer needed — and close it.

The small changes. Changing a price, uploading a photo, correcting some text, publishing a post. Included. Charging separately for ten minutes of work strikes us as absurd, and it’s worse if you don’t write to us because you’d rather not spend it.

What it costs and what it doesn’t cover

€39/month, hosting included, no minimum term. That’s the low end of the Spanish market, which runs from €19 to €400/month, and we say so plainly because it’s an argument in our favour, not a weakness.

What falls outside that fee, said up front rather than afterwards:

• Online shops. A WooCommerce store with orders and payments has considerably more surface to watch. We can do it, at its own number, which isn’t this one.
• Fixing what arrived broken. If your site turns up infected, on a dead PHP version, or with a theme its author abandoned years ago, that’s a job with its own price. After that, it moves onto the normal fee.
• Development. A new section, a feature, a redesign. Quoted separately, fixed before we start.

And what is covered even when it’s expensive: if you get hacked while you’re with us, we clean it at no cost. If the site is under our watch and they still get in, that’s our problem, not yours.

No small print, no hostages

Two things that ought to be obvious and often aren’t.

First: the access is yours. Your domain in your name, your backups downloadable, your site in a standard format. If one day you leave, you take it all with you without having to ask twice.

Second: you know who you’re talking to. There are no support tiers and no ticket system where the reply arrives in three days. You write, and the person who’s going to fix it answers.

How we start

You send us the site, we review it from the inside and tell you what state it’s in: what’s up to date, what isn’t, and whether anything needs fixing before it comes on. That diagnosis costs nothing and commits you to nothing — if your site is fine, we’ll tell you that too.

If you’d rather start yourself, run it through our checker first: in two minutes you’ll see what’s visible from outside, free and with no sign-up.