Website support for small businesses that manage their own site
Many small business websites begin with somebody inside the company handling updates when they have time. That can work until the website becomes important for enquiries, bookings, sales or customer information and a missed update or unexplained error suddenly matters.
Good support does not need to turn a straightforward website into a large IT project. It should deal with the routine technical work, make problems visible early and provide a sensible recovery route when something fails.
For businesses that mainly need an early warning system, Uptime & Security Monitoring costs £29 a month. Essential Care costs £59 a month and adds the regular maintenance work, including weekly WordPress updates, daily off-server backups and security scanning.
What small business website maintenance should prevent
The most troublesome website problems are often ordinary ones left unattended. A plugin falls several versions behind. A certificate approaches expiry. A site stops responding after a hosting problem. A backup exists but nobody knows whether it contains what is needed for recovery.
The National Cyber Security Centre advises small organisations to keep backups of important business data and to know how those backups can be restored. It also specifically identifies company websites and domain hosting accounts among the online services businesses should protect.
For a WordPress site, routine maintenance means applying updates in a controlled way and checking that the site still works afterwards. A successful update message does not prove that a form submits correctly, that the navigation still behaves on mobile or that a plugin has not introduced a visible error.
You can read more about the maintenance work itself on our WordPress maintenance page.
Monitoring from £29 a month
Uptime & Security Monitoring costs £29 a month or £290 annually. It is intended for businesses that are comfortable looking after their own website but do not want an outage or obvious security problem to remain unnoticed.
- One-minute uptime checks operate 24/7.
- Email and SMS alerts are issued when monitoring identifies an incident.
- Malware, blacklist and SSL expiry monitoring are included.
- A monthly uptime report records availability information.
Monitoring is not the same as maintenance. It can tell you that something is wrong, but it does not replace software updates, backups and ongoing technical management. Businesses that want those tasks included should consider a care plan rather than monitoring alone.
Full small business website support from £59
Essential Care costs £59 a month or £590 annually. It is designed for brochure and lead-generation websites that need to remain updated, backed up and available without a business owner having to manage routine WordPress maintenance personally.
The plan includes weekly core, plugin and theme updates, daily off-server backups, 24/7 uptime monitoring, security scanning and hardening, a monthly health report and email support with a next-business-day response.
Businesses that depend more heavily on the website can move to Professional Care at £119 a month. It adds 60 minutes of development time each month, fixes within 24 to 48 hours, speed and Core Web Vitals monitoring, a monthly accessibility scan and phone and email support seven days a week.
For ecommerce and higher-traffic sites, Premium Care at £249 a month includes three hours of monthly development time plus WooCommerce and payment testing. The full comparison is available on our pricing page.
Backups, updates and security need to work together
No single website control removes every risk. Updates can address known software problems, but an update can also expose a compatibility issue. Backups provide a recovery point, but only if they are stored safely and can be accessed when the live website is unavailable. Monitoring can identify an outage, but it cannot replace the repair work.
That is why small business support is more useful when these controls work together. If an update causes a problem, there is a recent off-server backup. If the website stops responding later, monitoring makes the outage visible. If a security incident is suspected, the site has a maintenance history and a recovery point rather than relying on guesswork.
If you already have hosting that you want to keep, Hosting Support costs £39 a month and covers areas such as SSL, DNS, email configuration and server-level troubleshooting. Managed WordPress Hosting is also available from £69 a month for businesses that want hosting and technical management together.
When a support plan is worth considering
A monthly plan makes most sense when the website is important enough that losing access to it, discovering an expired certificate or trying to repair an update problem yourself would interrupt normal business. A very small informational site that changes rarely may only need monitoring. A lead-generation or ecommerce website normally has more moving parts and a greater need for active maintenance.
If something has already broken, monthly maintenance is not a substitute for repairing the current fault. Our Emergency Fix costs £249 per incident and covers diagnosis and repair of one problem on a no fix, no fee basis.
For ongoing cover, compare monitoring, care and hosting options on our website support pricing page.