Website maintenance for owners without an in-house dev.
Most small service businesses don't need a full-time developer — they need someone they can shout at when a contact form stops working, a Google penalty lands, or a plugin breaks the homepage at the worst possible moment. So that's what the maintenance retainer is. Small monthly fee, no contract, properly responsive, by someone who actually understands SEO as well as code.
I sell SEO consulting, website work and content. So you should know up front that's the bias. I'd rather you knew than have me pretend I'm neutral.
What's actually in the retainer.
- Speed checks — monthly PageSpeed audit, slowdowns investigated and fixed before they hurt rankings.
- Indexability checks — Google Search Console review, broken-link cleanup, sitemap maintenance.
- Schema + on-page SEO tuning — schema markup kept fresh as Google's rules shift, on-page titles + descriptions tuned for the queries you actually want.
- Security + updates — if you're on WordPress, plugin/core/theme updates run monthly with backups. Astro sites don't need this.
- Content edits — small copy changes, new opening hours, fresh testimonials, new staff photos. Up to two hours a month is included.
- Backup + uptime monitoring — automatic, alerted to me first so you don't get the 3am email.
Who this is for.
- Owner-operators of UK service businesses
- 5-50 page websites — service businesses, professional firms, local trades
- People who'd rather pay a small monthly fee than worry about uptime
- People who want their dev to also understand SEO
Not for: enterprise sites, ecommerce stores with 1,000+ SKUs, or anyone needing 24/7 SLAs. Don't worry, I'll tell you if you'd be better off with an agency that staffs round-the- clock.
What you actually buy.
Monthly health report
PageSpeed, indexability, broken links, schema, security — all checked, all reported, all fixed where needed. One short email a month.
On-demand fixes
Something breaks, something needs changing — same-day response in business hours. Most fixes shipped within 24 hours.
Two hours of edits
Two hours a month of content changes, design tweaks, or small SEO improvements. Roll-over if you don't use them.
Cancellation, contracts, lock-in.
None. The retainer is month-to-month, no contract, no notice period beyond the current month, no exit fee. By the way, I don't hold your site hostage — if you leave, you get the codebase, the credentials, and a friendly handover document. That's it.
What it costs.
Honest answer: I don't publish pricing on this site, on purpose. Maintenance scope varies a lot — Astro builds I made vs older WordPress sites, single-page sites vs multi-location operations — and a generic price would either over-quote you or under- quote me.
Drop your URL into the free audit; you'll get an instant score and a personally-written report within a working day. Then we have a quick call to talk through scope, and I come back with a fixed monthly figure tailored to your business. Don't worry, no obligation either way.
Common questions.
What counts as "maintenance"?
Anything the site needs each month to stay fast, ranked, secure and converting. So: speed checks, broken-link fixes, schema updates, plugin/patch management if you're on WordPress, content edits, contact-form testing, new pages or blog posts if we've agreed those. To be honest, it's everything an in-house dev would do, just delivered as a small monthly retainer.
Is this for any website, or only Astro builds?
Any website. WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, custom builds — I've worked on all of them. Don't worry, you don't need to be on my Astro stack to take a maintenance retainer. By the way, if you are on Astro, the retainer is usually cheaper, because there's less to break.
Is there a contract?
No long-term contract. The retainer renews monthly, and you can cancel any month with no fee, no exit penalty. So if I'm not earning the retainer in a given month, you can stop paying without a fight.
What if something breaks at 2am?
If your site is on the stack I build on (Astro + Cloudflare), it almost never does — that's part of the point. If you're on WordPress and something does break, I respond same-day during business hours; outside hours, I do best-effort but I won't promise a 24/7 SLA. Most maintenance clients have not had a 2am emergency in the last two years.
※If you want me to look at your current site and tell you what a maintenance retainer would actually need to cover — that takes me a working day, and it's free. Send the URL over — let me know what's going on.