Our Custom Website and Creative Ecommerce packages include a month of free maintenance after launch. Here is what that month means in practice, so you know what to ask for.

Website maintenance is easy to overlook while a site is being built, and hard to ignore once it is live. Software needs updates, backups need to run, and small changes keep coming. This note covers what our free month includes, what counts as a new project, and what happens after.

What is included

Fixes for anything that doesn’t work as agreed in the project.
Updates to WordPress, the theme and the plugins, tested before they go live.
Regular backups and security checks.
Small content changes, such as a new text, a picture or a price.
Help and advice while your team gets used to running the site.

Why website maintenance matters

A website is software, and software ages. WordPress, themes and plugins release updates to fix security holes and bugs, and a site that misses them becomes an easy target. Most hacked sites are not targeted personally: automated tools scan the web for known weaknesses in outdated plugins.

Maintenance also protects what you have built. A recent backup turns a broken update or a mistake into a short restore instead of a rebuild. Regular checks catch a broken form or an expired certificate before customers notice.

For the technical side, the official WordPress hardening guide lists what a secure setup includes.

What is a new project

New pages, new features or a change of direction go beyond maintenance. We are happy to scope them, and many clients plan a small second phase once the site has been live for a few weeks.

The first month is when you learn what the site really needs.

A website maintenance checklist

Whoever looks after your site, these are the tasks that keep it healthy:

Update WordPress, the theme and plugins, after testing them on a copy of the site.
Keep daily or weekly backups, stored away from the website’s own server, and test a restore now and then.
Check that forms, checkout and emails still arrive.
Watch uptime, and renew the domain and the SSL certificate before they expire.
Remove plugins and user accounts nobody uses.
Review speed and Search Console once a month for new errors.

After the free month

Ongoing support is optional and monthly. It covers the same care, updates, backups, fixes and small improvements, with a short report of what we did.

Questions people ask

Can we skip maintenance after the first month?

Yes, it is optional. If you do, make sure someone on your team takes over the checklist above, especially updates and backups. A site left alone for a year usually needs more work to bring back up to date than regular care would have cost.

Does website maintenance include new content?

Small changes, yes, such as a new text, a picture or a price. New pages and features are scoped as a project, so they get proper design and testing.

What if something breaks at night or on a weekend?

Monitoring alerts us when the site goes down, and backups mean we can restore a working version quickly. Tell us how critical your site is when we plan support, so the response time matches it.

Ongoing website maintenance is what our ongoing support service covers, month by month. It is also part of keeping a site fast: see why a website feels slow on a phone. The free month comes with our Custom Website and Creative Ecommerce packages.