Website maintenance in Des Moines
Updates, backups, monitoring and edits, so a known hole does not sit open for months. On sites we built and sites we did not — and you can stop any month.
Since 2011 · No lock-in · You keep everything · Veteran-owned
What happens to a website nobody is maintaining
None of this announces itself. That is the whole difficulty with it.
A plugin updated, a mail setting changed, or the address it forwards to stopped existing. The form still says thank you. The inquiries have been going nowhere for four months and the only signal was that things went quiet.
Almost no small site is targeted by a person. It is found by an automated scan looking for a plugin version with a published vulnerability. The fix existed and was released weeks earlier — nobody applied it.
A backup nobody has tested is a belief, not a backup. Plenty are running to the same server that would be lost, or silently stopped months ago after a permissions change.
Prices from two years ago, a member of staff who has left, an event that has happened. Each one is small. Together they tell a visitor the business is not paying attention.
What WordPress website maintenance actually covers
Specific work on a schedule, not hours drawn down against a retainer.
- WordPress core, theme and plugin updates, applied and then checked on the live site
- Off-server backups on a schedule, with a restore actually tested rather than assumed
- Uptime monitoring, so we find out the site is down before your customers tell you
- SSL certificate renewal watched, so it never lapses into a browser warning
- Vulnerability monitoring against published advisories for what you actually run
- Form testing on a schedule — a live submission, end to end, to a real inbox
- Content edits: text, prices, hours, photographs, staff and posts
- A plain-language report of what was done, so you are not paying for an invisible service
- Someone to email who already knows how your site is put together
What happens to your website if you stop paying us
The question a retainer page is supposed to avoid. Here is the answer.
Your website keeps running. It does not stop, degrade, phone home or lock you out, because none of it depends on us. The domain is registered in your name, the hosting is under your billing at a host you could have chosen yourself, and the licenses are on your account. There is nothing for us to switch off.
What stops is the work. Nobody applies the updates, nobody watches the backups, nobody notices the SSL certificate expiring. The site does not break on the day you cancel — it starts ageing again, which is a slower and much less dramatic thing.
This is the obvious tension in selling maintenance alongside a promise that you own everything, so we would rather resolve it out loud: we think maintenance is worth buying and we would rather you bought it from us, but you should be able to leave in any month without a conversation, and you should be able to take it in-house or elsewhere without asking us for anything. Both of those are true. A plan that only holds because leaving is painful is not a plan anybody should sell.
Maintenance for a business with nobody in-house to do it
Which is most businesses under about thirty people.
The usual arrangement is that maintenance is somebody’s fifth priority. An office manager, a marketing coordinator, or the owner. They are conscientious and they are busy, so updates get applied in a batch when something has already gone wrong, and nobody checks the site afterwards to see whether the update broke a page.
We take on sites we did not build, and it is a large share of what we do. The first thing that happens is an audit of what is actually there: what is out of date, what is exposed, what is installed and unused, and whether the forms deliver. You get that in writing whether or not you go on to buy anything — inherited sites are where most of the genuinely broken things we find are.
What maintenance does not cover, and what that costs instead
The boundary between an edit and a project, drawn before we start.
- New pages beyond the small edits included — those are quoted at the build rate
- A redesign or a change of layout — that is a redesign, and it is priced as one
- New functionality: a store, a booking system, a member login, an integration
- Cleaning a site that is already compromised — that is incident work, quoted separately
- Ongoing SEO campaigns, paid advertising or social media management
- Hosting and domain fees themselves, which you pay directly at cost
- Recovering a premium license bought on somebody else's account
Every site is built by Elisabeth Samuels and the Salterra team — a company building websites since 2011. Not a reseller, not an offshore queue. The same person who scopes your project writes the pages and hands over the logins.
Send us the address. We will tell you what is out of date, what is exposed and what is quietly broken — before you decide whether you want us to fix any of it.
What a Des Moines website maintenance plan costs each month
Monthly, cancel in any month, and quoted before it starts.
Maintenance is quoted per site rather than sold as one flat number, because the work genuinely differs: a five-page site we built last month and a sixty-page site we have just inherited with forty plugins on it are not the same job, and pricing them the same would mean one of you subsidizing the other.
What we will commit to is the shape of it. You get the figure in writing before anything starts, it is monthly rather than annual, you can stop in any month without a conversation, and the things that move it are listed right here. If we look at your site and think you do not need a plan, we will say so — a five-page site that rarely changes is often better served by an audit once a year.
What moves the number
- How many pages there are, and how often they change — a site edited weekly is a different commitment from one edited twice a year
- How many plugins are installed and how many are premium — each one is a thing to update, a license to renew and a potential conflict to test
- Whether we built it — a site we know is faster to maintain than one we are meeting for the first time
- How much content editing you want included, versus doing that yourself in the admin
Frequently asked questions about website maintenance in Des Moines
What does website maintenance cost per month in Des Moines?
It is quoted per site and you get the figure in writing before anything starts. We do not publish one flat number because the work genuinely differs — a small site we built and a large inherited one with forty plugins are not the same job. It is monthly, and you can stop in any month.
What is included in a WordPress maintenance plan?
Core, theme and plugin updates applied and then checked on the live site. Off-server backups with a tested restore. Uptime and SSL monitoring. Vulnerability watching against what you actually run. Scheduled form testing with a real submission. Content edits. And a plain report of what was done, so you can see you are paying for something.
What happens to my website if I cancel?
It keeps running. Nothing depends on us — the domain is in your name, the hosting is under your billing and the licenses are on your account, so there is nothing for us to switch off. What stops is the work: nobody applies the updates or watches the backups. The site does not break, it starts ageing again.
Do I need maintenance if my site is new?
Less than an old one, and sometimes not enough to be worth buying. A new site has current software and few plugins, so the risk is low for a while. What does not change with age is backups and form testing. If your site is small and rarely changes we will tell you that an annual audit is a better use of your money than a monthly plan.
What is not covered by a maintenance plan?
New pages beyond small edits, redesigns, new functionality like a store or a booking system, and cleaning a site that is already compromised. Those are quoted as projects. Hosting and domain fees are yours and paid directly at cost.
Do you maintain websites you did not build?
Yes, and it is a large share of what we do. It starts with an audit of what is actually there — what is out of date, what is exposed, what is installed and unused, and whether the forms still deliver. You get that in writing whether or not you buy a plan afterwards.
Tell us what you sell. Get your number.
Send us what your business does and roughly how many pages you think you need. You will get the number and a timeline in writing.
Takes about a minute. No call, no obligation.
We reply to everything within one business day.