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
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.
The problem
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.
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.
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.
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
What you are running, what is out of date and what is already at risk.
Performance, uptime and security recorded so improvement is measurable.
A proper staging environment, because untested updates are the whole problem.
Updates staged, checked and deployed on a predictable schedule.
Uptime, performance and vulnerabilities watched continuously between cycles.
Quarterly written review with recommendations, not just a list of tasks.
Results
Membership platform
A site with a history of monthly incidents, all traceable to unstaged updates. We set up staging, moved updates to a weekly cycle and added monitoring. The incidents stopped.
Professional services
Thirty-one pending updates and a team afraid to touch any of them. We cleared the backlog over three staged cycles, then kept it at zero with a weekly rhythm.
Capabilities
Engagement
Monthly · TODO: add price
For brochure and marketing sites. Monthly staged updates, uptime monitoring, offsite backups with scheduled test restores, and security patching.
Monthly · TODO: add price
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.
Monthly · TODO: add price
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.
Questions
If your situation isn't covered here, send us the details and we'll reply with a straight answer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Start here
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.
Prefer email? hello@dotance.com