Website maintenance for the sites I build

What every plan includes

• Managed hosting and an SSL certificate, so your site loads securely
• Automatic backups, so nothing is ever truly lost
• Security updates applied as they are needed
• Uptime monitoring, so I usually know about a problem before you do
• The changes agreed for your plan each month: edits, new photos, price updates, and small additions
• Domain renewals and DNS management, so nothing lapses by accident
• A monthly report in plain language: what happened, what changed, what is next

The person doing all of that is the same person who designed and built the site. There is no ticket queue, no account manager and no handoff, so a request never has to be explained to somebody who has never seen the code.

Form delivery is part of what gets watched, and it deserves its own line. A contact form that quietly stops reaching your inbox is the most expensive failure a small site can have, because nothing looks broken while it is happening. The forms on the sites I maintain are wired to a real inbox, tested at launch, and checked as part of monitoring afterward. And if your site was built with a custom admin panel or an internal tool, that piece is maintained as part of the site under the same plan rather than turning into a second subscription somewhere else. Changing how it works is quoted like any other request beyond what your plan covers.

What the plan costs

Plans start at $99 a month, and the exact fee is quoted with your site, because a heavier site costs more to keep healthy. A five page site for a local contractor takes less looking after than a bilingual site that books appointments, takes payments, and syncs with software you already run. The fee reflects that instead of pretending both are the same job.

Whatever the fee turns out to be, the plan covers the same list. The changes agreed for your plan, and they hold for as long as the plan is active. Updates and security. Uptime monitoring. Hosting and SSL. Domain management. Ongoing SEO monitoring and optimization. And the monthly report that tells you in plain language what happened.

What sits outside your plan is quoted before the work happens, so nothing is ever billed without your approval. That is the whole arrangement, written down at the start, which is the point: you should never have to argue after the fact about what was supposed to be included.

Every site I build continues with its own plan, sized to that site, and a site I built is the only kind of site a plan covers. If what you have today was built by somebody else, the plan starts once the site has been rebuilt, reusing the content, the photos and the branding that are worth keeping. The pricing page shows both payments side by side, the one time build and the monthly plan.

There is a reason for that boundary, and it is not tidiness. Everything promised on this site, pages that load in about a second, accessibility that holds up under a real test, a structure Google can read without guessing, comes from decisions made while the site is being built. Inheriting somebody else's build means inheriting their plugins, their page builder and their shortcuts, and then quietly missing those same promises month after month while you pay me to watch it happen. Building the site myself is exactly what makes the rest of these commitments something I can stand behind.

Service level agreement

These are written commitments, not intentions:

• First response to any request within 24 business hours
• Critical incident resolution within 48 hours
• Minor change requests completed within the billing month
• Monthly report delivered within the first 5 days of the month

A critical incident means one of four things: the site is inaccessible, forms are not sending, there is an SSL certificate error, or data has been lost. Everything else is a standard request. Business hours are Monday to Friday. Requests are worked in the order they arrive, and severity is the only thing that moves one forward, so if something you sent in as a routine request turns out to be one of those four, it goes to the front on its own.

What a month actually looks like

Most months are quiet on your side and busy on mine. Backups run and get verified. Security updates go on. Uptime monitoring watches the site and the contact form. The changes covered by your plan go to whatever you send: a new price, a staff change, three photos from last week's job, a seasonal banner. Part of every month goes into SEO monitoring and on page optimization, and into content that is meant to still be earning traffic a year from now. Here is a full month of that work, written out.

Unused change time does not roll over, and if one month needs more than your plan covers, the extra work is quoted before it happens. Nothing gets billed without your approval, and if the busier months stop being the exception, we resize the plan rather than letting a surprise invoice do it.

Why this matters

The fourteen client sites I have built since 2021, plus two of my own, are all under active maintenance today. When a form quietly stops sending, most owners find out weeks later, after the missed leads. Monitoring plus a real person who responds within a business day turns a bad month into a bad hour.

The failures that hurt small businesses are almost never dramatic. An SSL certificate expires and browsers start warning visitors away. A domain lapses over a holiday weekend. A form silently stops delivering after a mail setting changes. None of those announce themselves, and all of them are cheap to prevent and expensive to discover late.

Who this is for, and who it is not

Any business that loses money when the site goes down or the form goes silent. The plan covers the sites I build, and that is the honest boundary, better written here than discovered later: I do not take over a WordPress, Wix or Squarespace site somebody else set up and run it from inside their platform. If that is what you have, the path is a rebuild first, keeping your content, your photos and your branding, and the plan starts the day the new site is live. All of this work happens remotely, so it makes no difference whether your business is in Tampa Bay, elsewhere in Florida, or in another state.

It is not for you if you need someone on call overnight and on weekends. I am one person, my hours are Monday to Friday, and I would rather write that down than let you find out during an emergency. It is also not the right fit if you want unlimited changes. What your plan covers is agreed in writing on purpose, and it holds while the plan is active, so the price stays honest and neither of us has to reconstruct months later what was supposed to be included.

Not sure what your site needs yet

If you are unsure whether your current site is worth keeping, start with the fixed price website audit at $197. It tells you what is wrong and what to fix first, in a report written plainly enough to hand to anyone, and the fee is credited if you decide to have me rebuild the site. A rebuild is what the fix looks like here, and the redesign page explains how that works without losing the Google standing you already have. From the day the new site launches, the plan on this page applies to it.

Common questions

How much is a website maintenance plan?+

Starting at $99 a month. The exact fee is quoted with your project, because a heavier site costs more to keep healthy: a five page site for a local contractor takes less looking after than a bilingual site that books appointments and takes payments. Whatever the fee, every plan covers the same list: the changes agreed for your plan, updates, security, uptime monitoring, hosting and SSL, domain management, ongoing SEO monitoring and optimization, and a monthly report. Anything beyond what your plan covers is quoted before the work happens.

Is the monthly plan required?+

No. It is not a condition of any project, there is no cancellation fee, and the domain is always registered to you, so the site stays yours regardless. What the plan does is keep the site working, which is the part that quietly stops happening when nobody is responsible for it. Every project I deliver continues with its own plan, sized to that site, and the plan exists to keep that site working rather than to tie you to me.

How fast do you respond when I need a change?+

First response to any request within 24 business hours, critical incidents resolved within 48 hours, and minor change requests completed within the billing month. Business hours are Monday to Friday. Critical means one of four things: the site is inaccessible, forms are not sending, there is an SSL certificate error, or data has been lost.

Can you maintain a site that someone else built?+

No, and it is worth being direct about why. The plan covers sites I built, because maintaining a site properly means knowing every decision inside it. If what you have now was built by somebody else, on a page builder or on a platform I did not set up, the honest path is a rebuild: I reuse the content, photos and branding worth keeping, build the site from scratch, and the plan starts the day it goes live. Taking over somebody else's install and still promising you speed, accessibility and search visibility is a promise I could not keep, so I do not sell it.