What a website care plan covers

“Care plan” is one of those phrases that sounds like an upsell, and often is. So before describing ours, it is worth being clear about what the phrase should mean, and what goes wrong when nobody has the job at all.

What happens when nobody owns your site

Most small business websites have no owner. Someone built it, launched it, and moved on. The business owner has a login somewhere, possibly. Nobody visits the site except customers, and customers don’t report faults. They leave.

Here is what that looks like over a year or two, from the sites that land in our inbox.

• The contact form stops sending. A plugin updates, a mail provider starts filtering, the notification goes to an inbox nobody reads. The visitor sees “thanks, we’ll be in touch”. You see a quiet month. We wrote the full list in the failures nobody reports to you.
• The SSL certificate expires. Certificates renew automatically until the day they don’t: a lapsed card, a moved host. Then every visitor gets a full-screen browser warning that your site isn’t safe, and almost nobody clicks past it.
• Hosting lapses. The renewal email went to the developer’s address. The site simply disappears, and so, often, does the email on that domain.
• Links go dead. A page is renamed or deleted and every link to it, including the ones Google is still sending people to, lands on a 404.
• It goes out of date. Last year’s prices, a therapist who left in March, a Christmas banner in May. Not broken, but it costs you the same way: anyone who spots it wonders what else is stale.
• The developer disappears. The commonest one. You need a change, you email, nothing comes back. The logins are theirs. Now you are paying someone new to work out what the last person did.

None of these produce a complaint. They produce a slightly quieter phone and no obvious reason why, which is exactly why they run for so long.

What a care plan should cover

Strip the marketing off and a care plan is a short list. If a plan you are offered does not clearly include these, ask what the money is for.

• Hosting, the SSL certificate and backups. The site stays up, stays secure, and can be put back if something goes wrong.
• Security and speed kept healthy. Whatever the site runs on is kept current and checked, without you asking.
• A way to change things. Either an editor you can use yourself, or a person who makes the change when you message. Ideally both.
• Bigger work priced before it starts. So nothing lands as a surprise invoice.
• No lock-in. It is your site. You can take it whenever you like, files and all.

Then there is a second, separate category: work that produces something new each month. Search work, new pages, a read of the numbers. That is legitimately ongoing, and legitimately costs more, because somebody is doing it every month. The test, which we set out in is SEO included in web design?, is whether the monthly fee buys new work or charges rent on work already finished.

Our three plans

Kept alive, kept found, kept growing. That is the whole difference between them.

On Found and Growing there is no per-change fee. Changing your prices, swapping a photo, adding a therapist, taking last year’s workshop down: that is the plan, not an add-on. If it turns into a whole new section, that is Growing, or a job priced up front, and you will know which before anything starts.

When you don’t need one

Honestly: a lot of businesses only need Care, and some barely need that.

Take a joiner with one location, the same six services for years and a phone number at the top. He changed his site once last year, to put a photo of the new van on. He is on Care. He would be paying £39 a month for nothing on Found, and we would rather tell him that than take it.

Found is for the businesses whose prices, people or availability move through the year and who would rather send one message than log into anything. A massage therapist whose prices went up in January, who added hot stones in March and is away a fortnight in July. Four or five messages a year, and she is also the one who googles “massage near me” and wonders why she is on page two.

Growing is for businesses with something new to say every month: a studio with a new timetable each term, a clinic with a team where every person is a reason someone might find you.

Start lower than you think. Every plan moves up or down whenever you want, and we will be the ones to tell you when you have outgrown the one you are on.

Questions to ask about any care plan

1. What specifically is included, as a list? Hosting, SSL, backups, updates, changes, monitoring.
2. Is there a per-change fee, and what counts as a change?
3. Who holds the logins for the domain, the hosting and the site, and are they in my name?
4. If I cancel, what do I keep? The right answer is: everything.
5. How quickly does someone reply when I message?
6. Is anybody actually checking the site, or only reacting when I report a fault?

A plan that answers all six plainly is a plan. One that needs a call to explain itself is usually rent.

Where the plan starts

With us the plan comes after the site, never instead of it. Websites from £175, a year’s hosting included, live in under a week depending on the build, and you don’t pay the balance until you love it. The first year of keeping it alive is already in that price. The plans above are what you choose from year two, and only if you want us running it.