Staged updates
Core, theme and plugin updates applied on staging first, checked against your key pages, then deployed. When an update genuinely breaks something, it breaks on staging where nobody is watching.
Protect · Care
WordPress maintenance that prevents the emergency.
Most WordPress disasters are boring in hindsight: an update nobody applied, a backup nobody tested, a certificate nobody renewed. Maintenance is not glamorous work, but it is the difference between a quiet quarter and a very expensive week. That is what our WordPress maintenance work is built to fix.
- Updates tested on staging before they touch your live site
- Backups verified by actually restoring them, not just running them
- A named human who answers, not a ticket queue
The problem
When businesses come to us for WordPress maintenance.
Updates are nobody’s job
Twenty-eight plugin updates are waiting because the last one broke the layout. Every week the gap grows, and eventually you are choosing between a known vulnerability and a risky update marathon.
You find out from a customer
The site went down on Saturday morning and nobody knew until someone emailed on Monday. No uptime monitoring, no alerts, and no idea how much that weekend cost.
The backups have never been tested
A backup plugin runs nightly and reports success. Nobody has ever restored one. A backup you have never restored is not a backup, it is an assumption you are betting the business on.
Support means waiting three days
Small changes queue behind whatever else your agency is doing. A broken form or a wrong price sits live for days because there is no clear route to someone who can fix it quickly.
How it works
How it actually runs.
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Onboarding audit
What you are running, what is out of date and what is already at risk.
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Baseline
Performance, uptime and security recorded so improvement is measurable.
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Staging setup
A proper staging environment, because untested updates are the whole problem.
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Weekly cycle
Updates staged, checked and deployed on a predictable schedule.
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Monitor
Uptime, performance and vulnerabilities watched continuously between cycles.
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Review
Quarterly written review with recommendations, not just a list of tasks.
Results
What the work produced.
MYT Shutters
The multi-language site we built, five years on
A site we had built and that had since been left to run on its own: intermittent full-site outages nobody could reproduce, brochure forms filling with spam, and no backup since April 2023. Traced the outages to a PHP 8.4 fatal inside a caching plugin's Cloudflare integration and updated it. Repaired 499 dead links left by a removed dev site, put reCAPTCHA on all 29 forms, deleted 21 unused ones, and started…
499
dead links repaired
29 / 29
forms protected
Spero
Built, and then kept running
A design and systems consultancy that needed a site, and then needed it to stay correct without anyone internally owning WordPress. Delivered the build and stayed on it — the same people who wrote the code doing the updates, so a change never starts with someone reading unfamiliar work for the first time.
Capabilities
The WordPress maintenance stack we work in.
Updates & staging
- Staging environments
- Git deployments
- WP-CLI
- Visual regression checks
- Rollback procedure
Monitoring
- Uptime checks
- Core Web Vitals tracking
- Error logging
- File integrity monitoring
- SSL expiry alerts
Backups
- Offsite storage
- Versioned snapshots
- Scheduled test restores
- Database & files
- Documented recovery
Security & reporting
- Vulnerability databases
- Patch management
- Access reviews
- Quarterly reports
- Incident documentation
Engagement
Three ways this usually runs.
Essential
Monthly
For brochure and marketing sites. Monthly staged updates, uptime monitoring, offsite backups with scheduled test restores, and security patching.
- Monthly update cycle
- Uptime monitoring
- Tested backups
- Email support
Growth
Monthly
For sites that carry real traffic or revenue. Everything in Essential on a weekly cycle, plus performance tracking, priority response and included hours for small changes.
- Weekly update cycle
- Core Web Vitals tracking
- Priority response
- Included change hours
- Quarterly review
Enterprise
Monthly
For stores and platforms where downtime has a number attached. Agreed response times, out-of-cycle critical patching, a named engineer and an incident process.
- Agreed response times
- Named engineer
- Out-of-cycle patching
- Incident process
- Monthly reporting
Questions
WordPress maintenance questions, answered plainly.
If your WordPress maintenance question is not covered here, send us the details and we will reply with a straight answer.
What is actually included in a maintenance plan?
Staged core, theme and plugin updates, uptime and performance monitoring, offsite backups with scheduled test restores, security patching and a support channel with an agreed response time. Higher tiers add included hours for small changes and a quarterly written review. What is not included is new feature work, which we quote separately so your plan does not quietly absorb project scope.
Do you test updates before applying them to our live site?
Always. Updates go to staging first and get checked against your key pages and critical flows — for a store that means the checkout, for a lead-gen site the forms. Only then do they reach production. This is the single biggest difference between managed maintenance and clicking "update all" on a Friday afternoon.
What happens if something breaks anyway?
We roll back. Every deployment has a documented rollback path and a recent verified backup behind it, so recovery is measured in minutes rather than hours. If a specific plugin update is what broke it, we hold that update and work out whether to patch around it, replace the plugin or wait for the vendor.
Is this just an insurance policy we hope never to use?
Partly, and that part is worth it. But a good plan also produces improvement: performance is tracked so regressions get caught, the plugin stack gets leaner over time, and the quarterly review gives you decisions rather than a task list. If a plan only ever produces invoices, it is not being run properly.
Can you maintain a site you did not build?
Yes, and much of our maintenance work is exactly that. We start with an onboarding audit covering what you are running, what is out of date and what is already at risk. Occasionally that audit finds something serious enough that we recommend fixing it before a plan starts, and we will say so rather than take on a site we cannot keep stable.
Can we cancel?
Any time, and you keep everything. Backups, documentation, staging setup and access all remain yours. We do not hold sites hostage through hosting we control or licences in our name. Clients stay because the site stays stable, which is the only retention strategy worth having.
What does WordPress maintenance actually cover?
Updates applied on staging and checked before they reach live, tested backups, uptime and performance monitoring, out-of-cycle security patching, and a named person who knows your site. If a plan does not include staging, it is not maintenance.
The platform itself is documented at wordpress.org.
Can we not just do WordPress maintenance ourselves?
You can, if you will genuinely do it monthly. The failure mode is never incompetence, it is postponement — and the cost of one incident is usually more than a year of the plan.
Start here
Start your WordPress maintenance project.
The more you can tell us, the more useful our first reply will be. No sales sequence — one of the people who would actually do the work reads this.
- We read it and look at your site
- You get a written reply with our honest read
- If it fits, we scope it properly
Prefer email? hello@dotance.com