Website Maintenance, Explained Plainly
Not every visitor is ready to hire someone. Some just want to understand the problem first. These explanations do that — including the parts that are not in our favour.
Start with the problem you have, or read the guides below. Every explanation links to the service behind it, only when it is genuinely useful.
Start With Your Problem
Most people arrive with a symptom, not a service name. Find yours here.
My site feels slow
What actually slows a site down, and what usually moves the numbers.
Read →My site may be hacked
How to tell, what to do first, and why early containment matters.
Read →Something on my site broke
Broken forms, page errors and the difference between fixing and rebuilding.
Read →A browser is warning visitors away
What a “deceptive site” warning means, and the order to fix it in.
Read →Is maintenance worth the money?
The real cost of maintenance against the cost of the failure it prevents.
Read →Which plan do I need?
How the plans differ, and how to work out the right starting point.
Read →I run an agency
White-label and reselling options for teams that serve client sites.
Read →My developer disappeared
How to take over a site someone else built, and what to gather first.
Read →Do I own my website?
Who should hold the domain, the hosting and the files — and what to check.
Read →Browse by Topic
The main areas of website care, with the page that covers each one.
Maintenance
What ongoing care includes, and what falls outside it.
Security
Hardening, monitoring and what happens during an incident.
Backups
Why a backup you cannot restore is not really a backup.
Monitoring
The quiet failures worth watching, beyond uptime.
Migration
Moving hosts or platforms without losing search visibility.
Core Web Vitals
What the metrics mean and what actually improves them.
Ecommerce care
Keeping a store's checkout and orders working through busy periods.
Custom & legacy sites
Maintaining builds whose original developer is no longer around.
White-label
Delivering maintenance under your own brand for client sites.
Guides & Checklists
Longer explanations for the questions people ask most. Each one is written to be useful even if you never contact us.
What to put in a website maintenance contract
A maintenance agreement is the answer to one question: what happens when something breaks? The clauses worth having in writing, and the red flags to check before you sign.
Read the guide →A maintenance checklist you can run yourself
Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly checks any site owner can do in minutes — plus the three findings worth acting on the same day.
Read the checklist →DIY, a freelancer, a team, or AI tools?
Four realistic ways to keep a website maintained, compared honestly — including when paying for a plan is the wrong answer.
Read the comparison →llms.txt and AI crawlers, explained
What the file does, what it cannot do, which crawlers to allow, and why answer-first structure matters more than any single file.
Read the explanation →Recovering from a search or browser warning
What a warning means, the order that works, why review requests fail when sent too early, and how it differs from email blacklisting.
Read the guide →What website maintenance actually costs
Plan ranges by site type, what drives the price up or down, and why two quotes for the same site can differ so much.
Understand the cost →Quick Checks You Can Run Yourself
Five things any site owner can check in a few minutes. If one looks wrong, you can act on it yourself or send it to us.
- Submit your own contact form and confirm the message actually arrives. A form that stops sending is the classic quiet failure.
- Search your site on Google with a phrase from a key page. If the page has vanished, something may be blocking indexing.
- Check your backup exists and, if possible, that it can be restored — not just that a job ran.
- Look at your home page on a phone over a normal connection. A slow or broken mobile page costs visitors first.
- Review your admin users and remove anyone who should no longer have access.
Found something? Describe the issue and we will review it, or if the site is down or compromised, use emergency support. The full list is in the maintenance checklist.
Resources FAQ
What will I find in Resources?
Plain explanations of how website maintenance works: what things cost, what belongs in a contract, how access and security are handled, what speed work actually involves, and how to tell when a site is quietly failing. Each explanation links to the service behind it.
Are these articles or sales pages?
They explain the subject honestly, including the parts that are not in our favour — like what we do not promise, and when doing it yourself is the better answer. Where a topic leads to a service, the link is there, but you are never required to follow it.
Do I need to read anything before contacting you?
No. The explanations are here for people who want to understand the topic first, but you can describe your situation directly and we will work out the starting point.
Can I run these checks myself?
Yes, and you should. The checklist is written so any site owner can run it, and the on-page checks take a few minutes. If something looks wrong, you can fix it yourself or send it to us — either is fine.
How do I know the information here is current?
Each guide carries a last-reviewed date. We write about how we actually work and what we actually do rather than general theory, and when a detail changes we update the page it belongs to, so the explanation and the service stay in step.
Still Unsure Where to Start?
Send the site URL and what you are seeing. We will help you work out whether you need ongoing care, a one-time project, or urgent help.
Something down right now? Request Emergency Support.