Professional website maintenance services

Most support work does not begin with a site we made. It begins with one built by an agency that stopped answering, or by a developer who left, and the first task is not a fix. It is working out what we have become responsible for.

That starts with access, and access is always incomplete. The hosting account is in a former employee's name. The domain sits with whoever registered it in 2014. The analytics property belongs to a contractor's personal address. The code exists in exactly one place. The server. Before anything is changed, all of it is listed, moved into accounts the client owns, and written down in one document. Companies tend to discover they do not own their own domain at the worst possible moment.

Then an inventory, because nothing can be supported that cannot be seen: platform and version, components and their update status, how code reaches the server if it reaches it at all, where backups go and — the part nobody has tested — whether they can be restored. A backup nobody has restored is a belief, not a backup. We restore one into a scratch environment before calling the site covered.

What comes back is a list in two halves. Things that threaten the site: an unpatched version, a component abandoned by its author, no way to undo a bad change. And things that are merely inherited awkwardness: an odd theme structure, copied code, a plugin doing what fifteen lines would do. The first half gets dates. The second waits. The second gets repaired when we are already in that file for another reason, because rewriting somebody else's working code on principle is how a support budget disappears in a quarter.

Only then does the routine begin — updates on a schedule with a staging step, monitoring for uptime and certificates, and a monthly note saying what was done and what comes next.