maintenance

Something always breaks eventually.
We handle it before you notice.

Most of what keeps a website healthy is invisible — until it isn't. A plugin update silently breaks your contact form. An SSL certificate expires and Chrome starts warning visitors away. A spam bot finds your inquiry page and starts stuffing it with garbage. None of it makes noise. You just start losing leads and don't know why. That's what website maintenance actually is: the ongoing, unglamorous work of making sure your site keeps doing its job. We do that work so you don't have to think about it — and so your customers never see the mess.

{ Cleaning Services } { HVAC } { Plumbers } { } { E-commerce }

the honest truth

The moment you realize your site has been quietly broken for weeks.

Here's the myth: you launch a website, and then you have a website. Done. It just sits there, working, until you need to change something.

That's not how it works. WordPress sites run on a stack of moving parts — core software, plugins, themes, a server underneath all of it, a certificate proving to browsers you're legitimate. Every one of those parts updates on its own schedule, sometimes conflicts with something else when it does, and occasionally breaks something you rely on. Nobody sends you an email when that happens. You find out when a customer mentions it, or when a competitor asks if you knew your site was down.

The specific things that bite people: a plugin update that fights with another plugin and kills the contact form — not with an error message, just silently stops delivering emails. An SSL certificate that expired because nobody was watching it, and now every visitor gets a "Not Secure" warning before they even see your homepage. Spam bots that find an unprotected form and flood it until you can't find the real inquiries. A WordPress core update that went wrong because nobody checked for compatibility first. None of these are exotic problems. They happen to real local businesses every week.

And the cost of finding out too late is real. Every day your contact form doesn't work is a day a potential customer filled it out and heard nothing back — and hired someone else. Every week your site throws a security warning is a week Google is watching and quietly updating its opinion of you. A 404 page where your services page used to be doesn't just disappoint visitors — it tells search engines your site is unreliable. These aren't technical problems. They're business problems.

what you actually get

Maintenance that actually prevents problems — not just fixes them after.

A lot of "maintenance plans" are just automated scripts. A server cron job runs the updates, a plugin fires off a security scan, and you get an email report that nobody reads. If something breaks, you find out when you find out. Ours is different because humans are watching. Here's what that looks like in practice.

{ human-run updates }

Monthly updates done by people, not a cron job

We don't just click "update all" and walk away. Before we update anything — plugins, themes, WordPress core — we check the changelogs for known conflicts, look at your specific plugin stack, and make sure what we're about to do won't cause a problem. Then we update, then we test. Contact form still sending? Pages still loading? Checkout still working?

Automated updates are fast. Human-reviewed updates are safe. For a website that's actively bringing in business, safe matters more than fast.

{ unlimited small edits }

Need to change something? Just text us.

New team member needs to be added to your About page. Your hours changed for the holidays. You moved to a new service area and the old one is wrong. You got a better headshot and the current one is embarrassing you.

Don't put these things off because you don't want to deal with your website. Just text us. Small content edits — copy changes, photo swaps, adding or updating a page section — are included. No per-task billing, no minimums, no "that'll be two hours at our hourly rate." You send the request, we handle it, you get a confirmation. That's it.

{ proactive monitoring }

We find problems before your customers do

Every week we're checking uptime, SSL certificate validity, broken internal links, and site speed. Every month we run a full security scan and test your contact forms end-to-end — not just "is the form there," but "did the email actually land in your inbox?" We pull your Google Search Console data and look for crawl errors, manual actions, or indexing drops that might mean something went sideways.

Most of our clients never hear about the small things we catch and fix. That's the point. You shouldn't have to know every time a plugin threw an error or a link rotted. You should just know your site is being looked after.

{ rapid response }

When something does go wrong - and eventually something does - we're fast

If your site goes down or something breaks, you'll hear from us within two business hours. Not an auto-reply. A real person who has looked at the issue and can tell you what happened and what we're doing about it. Critical issues — site completely down, security breach, checkout broken — get escalated immediately and resolved same day in almost every case.

We also keep backups verified and ready. If an update goes badly wrong, we can roll back to yesterday's clean version while we sort out what happened. You don't lose days of work. You lose minutes.

always watching

We catch the small things before they become expensive things.

Every month, we run through the unglamorous stuff that keeps your site out of trouble: plugin vulnerabilities get patched before anyone can exploit them, core WordPress updates get reviewed for compatibility before they're applied, and speed checks catch anything that's started to drag on load time. We also keep an eye on your Google Search Console for crawl errors and indexing issues — the quiet problems that chip away at your search visibility without any obvious warning - and we verify your backups are actually clean and restorable, not just sitting there giving you false confidence. None of it is exciting. All of it matters.

what's in the box

One monthly plan. No itemized invoices for things that should just be covered.

Some maintenance plans charge you a base fee and then bill hourly when something actually happens — which is exactly when you least want to receive an invoice. Others bundle in so many automated tools that you're essentially paying for the illusion of oversight. Here's what's actually included with every Red Cedar maintenance plan, every month, without asking:

Monthly WordPress core + plugin updates — reviewed by humans, tested after every run
Uptime monitoring (24/7) — around-the-clock checks with real alerts when something drops
Monthly security scan — malware detection, file integrity check, unauthorized change alerts
Broken link check — internal links scanned and cleaned every month
Contact form testing — live end-to-end test to confirm email delivery is working
Monthly speed check & report — Core Web Vitals snapshot with notes on anything slipping
Google Search Console monitoring — crawl errors, indexing drops, and manual actions flagged
Backup verification — we confirm your backups are current, clean, and restorable
Priority support response — two-hour response window for issues, same-day for critical problems
Monthly status email — a plain-English summary of what we did, what we found, and how your site is doing

Something always breaks eventually. We handle it before you notice.