Maintenance & retainers

Launching is the cheap part. A website maintenance retainer covers the updates, the small features, the monitoring, and the one incident a year that decides whether a client trusts you. It means there is always someone responsible for what you have live.

Who needs a retainer

The common situation: a site or app was built by a developer who has since moved on, updates have not been applied for months, and nobody knows what would happen if the server went down. Or the business keeps asking for small changes and has no one to ask. A retainer fixes both by giving you a named person who knows the system and has time set aside for it.

What a website maintenance retainer includes

The routine work comes first. Frameworks, plugins and dependencies are kept up to date, with security patches applied promptly and tested before they reach production. Backups run automatically and are checked, because a backup that has never been restored is only a hope. Uptime monitoring and error tracking alert me when something breaks, often before your users notice.

Each month includes a budget of hours for small changes: a new page, a form field, a report, a copy update or a minor feature. Anything larger is estimated separately so the retainer stays predictable. We agree a response time for real problems, so you know when to expect an answer if the site goes down.

I maintain my own products this way, including Direct Dine and Albania Magic, so the process is the one I use every day, not a sales package.

How it starts

If I did not build the system, the first step is an onboarding review. I get access, read the code, check hosting, backups and monitoring, and give you a short list of risks and what I would fix first. After that, the retainer runs month to month: updates and checks happen in the background, requests come in by email or WhatsApp, and you get a short summary of what was done.

Cost and timeline

The retainer is monthly. The amount depends on the size of the system and how many hours of changes you expect to need each month. After the onboarding review I send a written proposal.

FAQ

Can you maintain a site someone else built?

Yes. Most retainers start that way. The onboarding review tells us whether the code is in good enough shape to maintain as it is.

What happens to unused hours?

That is agreed in the proposal, so there are no surprises at the end of the month.

Which systems do you maintain?

WordPress, Laravel, Symfony and React applications, along with the servers and services they run on.