Website Care & Maintenance | Vancouver

Most small-business websites are quietly rotting. The plugins are eighteen months out of date, nobody has tested whether the backup restores, the SSL certificate renews by luck, and the person who built it stopped answering emails two years ago.

It usually stays invisible until it isn't. A site goes down on the morning of a product launch, or a contact form has been silently failing for six weeks, or an outdated plugin becomes the way someone gets in. None of that is a design problem. It is a maintenance problem, and maintenance is what we already do for everything else you run.

What's included every month

Platform, theme, and plugin updates, applied on staging before production
Daily off-site backup, with restores actually tested each quarter
Uptime monitoring, so we know before your customers tell you
SSL certificate and DNS management
Malware scanning and sensible hardening
Broken-link and contact-form checks
A one-page monthly report, so you know what happened
An allowance of content edits, described in full below

What counts as an edit

Every provider offering website maintenance includes "some edits" and almost none of them say what that means. That vagueness exists so the boundary can be decided later, usually in whichever direction suits the provider. So here is our list, in public, before you sign anything.

Included in your monthly allowance

Changing text on an existing page
Swapping or replacing images you supply
Publishing a blog post or news item from copy you supply
Updating staff, hours, contact details, prices, and service descriptions
Adding, removing, or reordering a menu item
Fixing broken links
Adding a testimonial to a section that already exists
Small styling adjustments to components already on the site

Quoted separately as project work

New page templates or new kinds of page. A new page using an existing template is an edit; a new type of page is a build
Design changes, restyling, and redesigns of any size
New functionality: booking systems, online stores, memberships, payments
Integrations with other systems, including CRMs and payment providers
Writing the words. We will happily publish and format copy you supply, but copywriting is a different job and we price it as one
Photography, graphic design, illustration, and logo work
SEO campaigns. Technical hygiene is included; link building, content strategy, and ongoing keyword work are not
Bulk content migration, or restructuring how the site is organised
Anything that needs a new paid plugin, theme, or licence

The allowance, and what happens past it

Website Care includes 60 minutes of content edits a month, and Website Care Plus includes three hours. Unused time does not roll over, which we would rather tell you now than have you discover in month four.

Past the allowance, work is billed at $150 an hour in fifteen-minute increments. That is the same out-of-scope rate as the rest of our pricing, because inventing a second rate for website work would just be a way of hiding one of them. Anything that will exceed your allowance gets quoted and approved in writing before it starts, so there is no such thing as a surprise invoice here.

Two practical requests. Send edits through one channel rather than scattered across texts and calls, and batch them where you can. Ten separate two-minute jobs cost considerably more than one twenty-minute job, and the allowance goes further when they arrive together.

How fast we respond

Website work does not share the response times on our IT plans, and we would rather be straight about that than promise something we would resent at 9pm. An outage is an emergency. Changing a phone number on a page is not.

Site down, or a security incident: two business hours, same as your IT plan
Something broken: a form not sending, a checkout error, an expired certificate. Same business day
Content edits: two business days, or next business day on Care Plus
Quoted project work: to the schedule we agree up front

What it costs

Flat per site, per month, in CAD. Not per user, because a website does not get bigger when you hire someone.

Website Care

$149 a month alongside any IT plan, or $199 on its own
Everything in the list above, with 60 minutes of edits

Website Care Plus

$299 a month alongside any IT plan, or $349 on its own
Three hours of edits, next-business-day turnaround
A quarterly content and technical-SEO review
Performance and Core Web Vitals tuning
Reporting on what the site is actually converting

It is cheaper alongside an IT plan for a straightforward reason: we already hold your documentation, your credentials, and the context. There is less to set up and less to remember, so it costs us less to do.

New sites and rebuilds

We build sites too, though it is not the main event here and we take on a small number of them. Fixed scope, quoted before anything starts, the same way we handle every other project.

Starter site, up to five pages: $2,500. Responsive, accessible, SEO basics, analytics, and a working contact form
Business site, up to twelve pages: $5,500. The above, plus a guides section, per-service pages, and structured data

Both include two rounds of revisions, where a round means one consolidated set of feedback. Further rounds are billed hourly. Copy and images are yours to supply, and if they have not arrived within thirty days of starting we pause and re-quote, because a project priced in March cannot be delivered at March rates in September.

The first month of Website Care comes with any build, and then it continues. A site nobody maintains starts decaying the week it launches, and we would rather not build you one of those.

If you want to see how we build, this site is the example. Around seventy pages, statically generated, no framework running in your browser, self-hosted fonts, tested against WCAG AA, and structured so each page targets one real search. Ask us why any particular decision was made and there is an answer.

Where we stop

The same rule as everywhere else on this site: better to say it now than in month three.

Online stores. Payment handling, PCI exposure, and constant plugin churn make e-commerce maintenance a different and riskier job. We refer it out
Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify. Those platforms patch and back themselves up, so most of what Care covers is already handled and charging you for it would be dishonest. We will do content edits on an hourly or small-retainer basis instead
Sites we have not audited. Taking over an unknown install means inheriting whatever is already wrong with it. We audit first, tell you what we found, then quote
Custom applications. A bespoke web application is software support, not website care
Ranking promises. Nobody can honestly guarantee a position in search results, and anyone who does is telling you something useful about their other claims

Platforms we support: WordPress, and static sites built with Eleventy, Astro, or Hugo.

Why your IT provider should do this

Look at what website maintenance actually consists of: patching, backups with tested restores, uptime monitoring, certificates, DNS, and security hardening. That is the same work we do on your servers and laptops, pointed at a different box. It sits naturally with the people who already hold your DNS and your credentials.

The alternative is the arrangement most small businesses end up with, where the site belongs to a web designer who has moved on, the domain is registered to someone nobody can reach, and the login is in a former employee's personal password manager. We have untangled that more than once. It is much cheaper to avoid.

Website care