Website maintenance in Birmingham: scheduled updates, and someone who knows your code
Websites don't stay finished. Core updates, security patches, expiring certificates, and a new page that breaks the layout all come up. A care plan means those things get handled on a schedule, not after something breaks. We look after Drupal and WordPress sites for organizations in and around Birmingham, including sites someone else built.
What goes wrong without website maintenance
There's rarely one dramatic failure. Usually it's a slow drift. Updates get skipped because nobody wants to be the one who breaks the site. A plugin with a known vulnerability sits there for months. The developer who built it has moved on, and the login is on a sticky note. Then something does break, and the fix starts with a week of figuring out how the site even works.
A care plan swaps that for a routine.
Built around your site: a starting point, plus what you need
Every care plan is built around your site, your team, and how much help you want. You start with Starter or Growth, add the extras that make sense for your site, and add a bucket of hours if you want flexible help.
Starter: $320/month
- Managed CMS updates, every quarter
That's the foundation. Everything else can be added on, so you only pay for what your site needs.
Growth: quoted for your site
A broader plan for sites that need more hands-on care. Everything in Starter, plus:
- A monthly analytics report
- A monthly SEO report
- Multidev environments (depends on your host)
- Access control for your environments
- Documentation of ongoing development work
- Server uptime monitoring
- Server hardening
Available in plans or as add-ons
None of these come with Starter at $320/month. We can build them into your plan or add them on:
- Critical-issue response: we respond to critical issues within 24 hours (one business day).
- Rollbacks if an update causes trouble.
- Daily backups with tested recovery. What's possible depends on your host. On Pantheon, our preferred host, backups are built into the platform. See Pantheon hosting and DevOps.
- Backup plan setup, which also depends on your host.
- Integration monitoring: we watch the connections to your CRM or other systems. Changes to an integration itself are quoted separately. See API integrations.
- Accessibility re-checks with professional third-party tools, so new content and widgets don't bring new WCAG problems. See WCAG accessibility.
- Server uptime monitoring, if you're on Starter.
- Content workflow: we create and document how content gets made, reviewed, and published on your site.
- Content updates: we make the changes for you.
- Git repositories for your site's code.
- A monthly top-level analytics report.
A bucket of hours
For everything else, like text tweaks, a new form field, or a broken link, you can add a bucket of hours to use however you like each month, or send us specific requests. Unused hours don't roll over to the next month.
Pricing
Care plans start at $320/month. That's Starter: managed quarterly CMS updates.
What changes the price:
- Starter or Growth
- The add-ons you choose
- How many hours of work you want each month
- The size of your site
- Your hosting setup
Growth plans and add-ons are quoted for your site.
Non-profits get 20% off care plans, and on new builds too. See non-profit web development.
Support is available by email, through our intake form, or by phone, Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Central, from our studio in Chelsea, south of Birmingham. We also support sites for organizations in Montgomery and beyond.
Getting started: discovery
Every new plan starts with a paid discovery phase. Before we can look after a site, we need to understand all of it and have access to all of it, including:
- Hosting
- The CMS and its modules or plugins
- Your domain registrar and DNS
- Third-party vendors and services
- Custom code and code repositories
The cost of discovery depends on the size of the site. If it turns up catch-up work, we'll quote that separately so your monthly plan stays predictable.
Sites someone else built
We're happy to take these on, with one honest caveat: we can't be responsible for code or security problems we inherit from someone else's work. Discovery is how we find them, and we'll tell you plainly what we found and what we'd fix first.
Case study: from takeover to steady care. A national franchise brand's Drupal site came to us undocumented, with broken staging and no way to test changes safely. We spent two months documenting and stabilizing it, rebuilt its environments with automated deployments, and upgraded it to Drupal 10 with zero data loss. When its inherited deploy pipelines failed silently, we had deployments working again in under 24 hours. Two years on, the site is still running cleanly.
FAQ
What if we need more work than the plan covers?
Additional work, like a new section, an integration change, or a redesign, is scoped and quoted separately, so you know the cost before we start.
Do you need to host the site to look after it?
No. Pantheon is our preferred host, and we're a Pantheon partner, but plans aren't tied to it. We support sites on Pantheon, Acquia, and AWS and Azure through DevPanel.
What happens if an update breaks something?
We're careful with updates, but no process is perfect. Rollbacks are available in plans or as an add-on, so if an update does cause trouble, we roll it back. Pair that with daily backups and a 24-hour critical-issue response if you want a fuller safety net.
Do you look after both Drupal and WordPress?
Yes. They're the two platforms we build on. See Drupal development and WordPress development.
How do we reach you?
By email, through our support intake form, or by phone, during the support hours listed under Pricing. Either way, you'll be talking to a developer who knows your site. To get started, contact us.
Hand off the worrying
If your site's been running without a safety net, let's talk about what it needs. Not sure what shape it's in? A free WCAG audit is a quick, no-cost look at one important part of it.