Website maintenance: keeping the site current, and knowing when it goes down
A website stays a piece of software, online and exposed day and night, and it starts ageing the day after it launches. Maintenance means hosting it, keeping it up to date, keeping a recent copy of it somewhere else, and noticing a fault before your clients phone you about it.
Two monthly plans, Essential at €49 and Comfort at €69 a month, with no minimum term and the first 3 months free. You cancel when you like with one month's notice: your backups are handed over and your domain name is transferred to you.
Why a site needs upkeep
Security holes are published continuously, and a site that is not updated ends up carrying several of them. Plugins age too: some are abandoned by their author and stop being compatible, others break a page while updating themselves. The security certificate, for its part, expires on a fixed date.
A visible outage gets sorted quickly, because somebody reports it. What costs you is the contact form that stops sending anything for six weeks without anyone noticing, or the site that is down on a Sunday evening. Maintenance is mostly there to catch that kind of silence.
Essential or Comfort
The Essential plan, at €49 a month, covers everything that keeps the site running: hosting, the domain name (managed and paid for by Bebop Tech, registered in your name), visitor statistics, tested updates and their deployment, daily off-site backups, security (firewall, anti-spam, regular audits and patches), monitoring and restoring the site after an incident, and SEO follow-up adjusted to the results. Support replies within 48 working hours.
The Comfort plan, at €69 a month, adds support within 24 working hours and one hour of work a month, which can be saved up over three months, for changes and small improvements: a piece of text, a link, a tweak to the theme, always announced before they are done. On top of that come suggestions for improvement, support for your busy seasons (Easter, Christmas, a launch) and a quarterly review: SEO, traffic, pages that work.
The first 3 months are free on both plans. From the fourth month, the plan you chose starts, unless you tell me otherwise.
What I do each month
Updates are applied to a copy of the site first, checked page by page on the flows that matter (form, booking, order) and only then deployed. Backups are daily and stored somewhere other than the site's own server, so they stay usable even if that server goes down.
Availability is monitored continuously: I am alerted when the site stops responding, usually before you are. Security patches are applied without waiting for the monthly cycle, and SEO is followed: indexed pages, errors reported by Google, speed. On the Comfort plan, the quarterly review sums it all up, with what to plan for.
Sites I did not build
I am happy to take on a site built by somebody else, after a quick audit of what is there: the version of the platform and its plugins, the state of the backups, the access available, the holes already present. That examination says whether the site can be looked after as it stands, or whether it needs bringing up to standard first, quoted separately and never started without your agreement.
What maintenance includes
How a maintenance contract starts
Taking stock, a few days
Versions, plugins, access, existing backups and known holes. You know what state your site is in before signing anything.
Backups & monitoring
Daily off-site backups, the firewall and uptime monitoring are put in place, along with a working copy of the site.
First round of updates
The backlog is cleared on the copy, tested step by step, then deployed to the live site.
Follow-up & review
What was done, what needs watching, what to plan for. A quarterly review on the Comfort plan: SEO, traffic, pages that work.
Common questions about maintenance
No, but I strongly recommend it, and the first 3 months are free so you can judge for yourself. You can stop it at any time after that, with one month's notice.
You then take over the hosting, the domain name, the updates and the deployments of the site. There are no more backups in case of an incident, no more security or SEO follow-up, and access to your visitor statistics ends. I hand over an export of your traffic history, along with your backups. The domain and site are transferred at no cost.
The site is restored from the last clean backup, then the hole that was used is identified and fixed before it goes back online. That is covered on both plans: restoring after an incident is not billed separately.
Yes, on both plans, along with the domain name: I manage and pay for it, but it stays registered in your name and is transferred to you if you cancel. Without a plan, expect €70 to €150 a year with the host of your choice.
Yes, from one month to the next, in either direction. You move up to Comfort when you have regular changes or a busy season to prepare, and back down to Essential when you no longer do.
On the Comfort plan, one hour of work a month is included, which can be saved up to three hours over three months: a piece of text, a link, a photograph, a tweak to the theme. Whatever fits in your available hours is done at no extra charge, and I always tell you beforehand. Beyond that (a new page, an extra feature, a redesign) it is quoted, like any other development work.
The price applies per site, with a reduction from the second one onwards. The exact figure is on the quote, according to the plan chosen for each.
Let's talk about looking after your site
A free hour to talk it through, then a written fixed quote. Yours to do with as you like.