What is website maintenance?
A website is not a brochure that gets printed once. It runs on code, libraries and services that keep changing underneath it. Browsers update. A form provider changes its rules. A library your site depends on gets a security fix. Maintenance is the unglamorous, essential work of keeping all of that working, month after month, so your customers never see the seams.
Hosting and SSL, in normal language
The practical result: when someone visits your website it loads securely over HTTPS, and you never think about servers, certificates or renewals.
What maintenance may include
- Routine technical upkeep of the site we manage.
- Fixing broken elements: buttons, layouts, images, links.
- Dependency-related maintenance where applicable, so the site keeps working as underlying tools update.
- Deployment issues, so changes reach the live site cleanly.
- Content-related problems, such as a page that stopped rendering after an edit.
- Small technical corrections before they become customer-facing problems.
Website monitoring
Monitoring means we watch for problems rather than waiting for a customer to tell you the site is down. Depending on the checks in place for your site, that may cover uptime, broken pages, form problems where monitoring supports it, performance issues, technical errors, and search or indexing issues through Search Console.
We are careful with this word. Monitoring covers the checks actually set up for your site, and we will tell you which ones those are. We do not claim to watch things we are not watching.
Website issue fixes
If something within the website we manage stops working correctly, we investigate and fix reasonable issues covered by the plan: a broken button, a layout problem, a missing image, a broken internal link, a form or display problem, a rendering issue. You report it or monitoring catches it; we handle it.
Three things usually fall outside normal Growth Starter scope, and we say so up front: outages at third-party services we do not control, entirely new functionality, and major external integration work. We will still tell you what is going on and what your options are.
What Secret Systems does
Example. After a browser update, a booking form on a client's site began displaying its fields in the wrong order on iPhones. Monitoring did not need to catch it; the client mentioned it. We reproduced it, corrected the layout code, redeployed, and confirmed it on a real phone the same day. That is maintenance.
Example. The website becomes unavailable at 2am because of a hosting problem. Uptime monitoring alerts us instead of a customer discovering it at 8am. Where uptime checks are in place, that is exactly what they are for.
How it fits into Growth Starter
What we do not promise
- We do not guarantee 100% uptime; hosting and network providers have outages outside any provider's control, and we respond to them rather than pretend they cannot happen.
- We do not claim monitoring for capabilities that are not actually implemented for your site; your report and onboarding state which checks are in place.
- New functionality, major integrations and third-party platform outages are outside normal scope and are discussed honestly when they come up.
Frequently asked questions
Updates are changes you ask for: new hours, a new photo, a price change. Maintenance is the technical work that keeps the site healthy whether or not anything visible changes. Both are included in Growth Starter.
No. Hosting and SSL are managed within our platform as part of the plan. There is nothing for you to renew, and nothing that quietly expires.
Where uptime monitoring is in place it alerts us, and we investigate immediately. If the cause is at a third-party provider we keep you informed while it is resolved. Either way you are not the one who has to notice.
If something that used to work stops working, or displays wrong, that is a fix and it is covered. If you want the site to do something it never did, that is new work, and we will quote it honestly, often small.
Yes. The domain and content are yours. Hosting on our platform ends with the plan, and we will help you move the site if you ever need to.
Maintenance, hosting, SSL, monitoring and issue fixes are included in Growth Starter.
One monthly plan covers ongoing SEO, technical SEO, content, local SEO, hosting, maintenance, monitoring, issue fixes and a monthly report. You run your business. We handle the website.
See Growth Starter pricing →