Services · 04 · The long haul
Maintenance after launch.
Care for websites and platforms after they go live: updates, fixes, small changes, and one address where the person who knows the code answers.
We maintain what we built, and inherited projects worth saving. Updates to WordPress and the plugins, and to PHP when it is due, are planned in advance, usually every six months. Fixes and changes go to one address, and when production stops you write to a person who knows the code instead of a ticket queue.
Pick this when
- You have a site or an application that earns money and nobody who can safely change it.
- Your last developer finished and disappeared, and updates now make you nervous.
- You want the changes made by someone who knows the code from the inside.
A website is not finished on the day it launches. WordPress, plugins and PHP keep moving, browsers change their minds, and meanwhile the company wants a new page or a new integration. Maintenance is the work that keeps all of that from colliding at the worst possible moment.
How it runs
Updates are planned in advance, usually every six months: a backup, the new versions of WordPress and the plugins, then a check by hand of the pages, the forms and the checkout before the cycle is closed. Fixes and small changes come in by email, and we bill the hours actually worked. Larger migrations, to a new PHP version or to another server, are quoted separately and prepared on a copy of the site. The La Danse shop moved to a current PHP version that way: first a copy of the shop, the checkout and the accounting integration tested on it, and only then production.
The quiet failures
Server monitoring catches the easy case, a site that does not answer. The expensive failures are quiet: a form that stops sending mail after an update, a checkout that fails at payment, an expired certificate. That is what we are building GoFirmo for, our own monitoring tool. For now it runs in test on the sites we look after.
Sites we did not build
We take over other people’s projects too, when they are worth saving, but always after a paid audit: we read the code first, then say whether it can be maintained as it is. Without that, a promise to keep it running would be worth nothing, and you would find that out at the worst possible moment.
- Updates
- Every six months
- WordPress, plugins, PHP when it is due.
- Fixes and changes
- On request
- Billed by the hour.
- Who
- Same hands
- The people who built it.
- Long haul
- Year one to year five
- Nothing handed on.
Opsahl Gruppen
One WordPress install for two brands of a Norwegian property group, the corporate site and the Skullerud Park office park. We built it in 2022 and have run its scheduled updates since, checking every site in the network each time.
Read the caseWhat we won't do
- Disappear after launch and sell support back as a separate contract.
- Pass your project to whoever happens to be free that week.
- Agree to maintain code nobody here has read.
Common questions
Can you take over and fix an existing WordPress site?
Yes, after a paid takeover audit. We read the code first and tell you in writing whether it can be maintained as it is. If it can, we go through the plugins one by one and keep only the ones the site needs.
Can you migrate my existing site to better hosting?
Yes, and it is often the cheapest reliability upgrade a site can get. We move it onto a proper server with staging and version control, usually as part of taking the site over for maintenance.
Do you host the sites you build?
We run sites on provisioned VPS servers, set up the way a developer would: version-controlled deploys, a staging environment, server-level caching and off-server backups. Not shared cPanel hosting behind an FTP password.
Bring us the plan.
We'll price it.
If this is not what you need, we say so in the first reply.