What a website care plan should include

The essentials, for any website

• Hosting and deployment, with the site's SSL certificate (the padlock) kept current.
• Time each month for content changes and small fixes, with a clear rule for hours you don't use.
• Contact forms tested end to end, so a form that has stopped sending is caught by whoever looks after the site, not by a customer who never heard back.
• A monthly look at who visited and what they read, and at the searches bringing people to the site.
• The technical side of search kept in order: titles, descriptions, headings, structured data and the sitemap.
• Broken links found, and redirects kept so old addresses still work.
• The cookie notice and privacy page checked against what the site actually does.

Those are what my Essential Cover includes.

For a site that does things

A web application, a shop or a booking system has software underneath it that needs patching, and from time to time a bug that needs fixing. A plan for one should include dependency and security updates, and bug fixes to what was built that do not eat into the hours you have for changes.

For a system your business runs on

Once there is a database, the question is not only whether there is a backup but whether it can be restored. Ask whether backups are checked, and whether a restore is ever actually tried. On my Total Cover each backup is verified against its own fingerprint, and once a quarter one is restored and confirmed whole. A plan for a system should also cover adding and removing staff accounts, and watching the database's growth so there is warning before it becomes a problem.

Questions to ask about any care plan

With the answers for Cover beside each one:

• Do unused hours carry over? The monthly change allowance is per calendar month and does NOT roll over. Unused hours lapse; work beyond the allowance is quoted separately before it starts.
• How long am I tied in, and how do I leave? The minimum term is 3 months, and the notice is 1 month.
• Is there a deposit? No deposit on a care plan.
• What is outside the plan? New features, redesigns and anything requiring a new page or a new integration are project work, not care. Care covers keeping what exists working.
• Is it insurance? It should say plainly that it is not. Cover is a maintenance service, not insurance and not a warranty. It does not indemnify you against loss, and the limits in section 13 of the terms of business apply to it exactly as they apply to everything else.

My plans

From the same price list as the Cover page, where every service in them is listed and priced:

Every new website or system includes its first month of cover free, starting the day it goes live. Cover is for the websites and business systems I build; if yours is still to be built, the guide to what a website costs is the place to start.