A small monthly retainer that keeps the site you already have alive, fast, current, and one phone call away from a person who actually knows it.
Updates, security patches, backups, the occasional content tweak. The unglamorous ongoing work that keeps a site healthy — done by the same person, on a known day each month, for a known monthly figure. The boring service that prevents the dramatic crises.
There’s a moment, usually about eighteen months after launch, when the original developer has gone quiet, a plugin update has gently broken the contact form, a backup nobody checks has stopped running, and the site is two security patches behind. Nothing looks wrong from the outside. The slow rot is the point.
Then something visible breaks — the site goes down on the morning of a press release, an enquiry form silently stops sending for six weeks, a flagged security warning appears next to your domain in Chrome — and suddenly a developer is being phoned in a panic, at panic-rate, to do the work that should have been a thirty-minute job a quarter ago. It costs more, it takes longer, and the person doing it doesn’t know your site.
A small monthly retainer is the unsexy alternative. The work is genuinely boring — check the updates, run the backup, confirm the forms still send, watch the speed numbers, do the little content tweak you’ve been meaning to ask about. It costs less than one panic phone call a year, and the panic phone call doesn’t happen.
Pick the tier that fits the site. Move up or down with a month’s notice. Everyone gets the same person on the other end of the email; the tier just decides how much of that person’s time is reserved for you.
Essential is the safety net — the bare minimum to keep a small marketing site healthy. Monthly WordPress updates done carefully on a staging copy first, security patches as they ship, off-host backups that are actually tested, a quick monthly check on speed and uptime, and a short note each month confirming what was done. For most small five-to-twenty-page sites this is plenty.
Standard is the comfortable middle. Everything in Essential, plus an hour or two of small jobs every month — the “could you just” tasks that previously needed an awkward email to a developer. New team member on the about page. Updated phone number across the site. A blog post wrangled into a tidy layout. The aim is that you stop saving these up and just send them as they come.
Editorial is for sites that are working assets. Everything in Standard, plus a meaningful block of content and structural time each month — a new service page, a case study build-out, the small ongoing improvements a marketing manager would otherwise have to commission. Often pairs with the SEO or AEO retainer when the page-level work needs to actually land in the site.
Across all tiers, the same quiet contract: real human on the other end, response inside one working day, twelve months of message history kept in a shared doc so we can both remember what we said last March. No tickets, no dashboards, no surprise invoices.
Maintenance earns its keep where the site matters but isn’t the day job. Three signals of fit.
— A / Self-managers who’ve had enough
You meant to log in last month to do the updates and didn’t. The reminder emails are piling up. You don’t want to learn what a plugin compatibility matrix is. Hand it over and we’ll do the same job, better and quieter, on a known day each month for less than the cost of an afternoon of your time.
— B / Small teams without a developer
There’s a freelancer who built the site three years ago, an agency that built the one before, and a current freelancer who answers on Mondays if you’re lucky. The retainer replaces all three with one phone number and a written record of who said what.
— C / Agencies handing off care
You built a lovely site, the client is delighted, and now they keep ringing you about a plugin update at half past eight on a Saturday. White-label care, in your name or mine, with a clear lane between “creative work” and “keep the site alive.” You stay the trusted partner; the late-evening calls come to me.
When · A patch ships
Plugin and WordPress updates are applied to a private staging copy first, regression-checked, and only pushed live once they’ve sat quietly for a day. You hear nothing because nothing breaks. If anything does, it doesn’t reach your live site.
When · The site slows
Monthly speed and Core Web Vitals are tracked in the background; when something drifts — a bloated image, a third-party script gone rogue, a host wobble — I fix it before anyone in your team has noticed. You get a one-line note in the monthly report.
When · Something breaks
Email me and you get a reply inside one working day — same working day on Standard and Editorial. Critical issues (site down, checkout broken, security alert) jump the queue. No ticketing system; no “please log it in the portal.” You email Rich; Rich emails back.
When · You need a small edit
Within your monthly time, small edits are simply done — no quote, no project number, no “raise a ticket.” If a job is bigger than the monthly allowance, I tell you in advance what it would take. Most months, nothing needs quoting.
“It’s the bill I’m happiest to keep paying. Two years and I’ve genuinely forgotten the site exists.”
David Norcross
Managing Director, Trax Hydraulics
If yours isn’t here, send it to rich@flexiweb.digital and I’ll reply within a working day.
For ongoing retainer work, yes. WordPress is what I know inside out, and trying to be casually expert at five other platforms is how people miss things at half-past-eleven on a Saturday. I’d rather be properly excellent at one.
If your site is on Webflow, Squarespace, or Shopify and you’d like a one-off health check or some structural editorial work, I’m happy to do that as a project — I just won’t take it on as an ongoing care client.
Honestly: it probably won’t, because almost everything that takes a site down at unsocial hours is upstream of me — the host. The hosts I recommend (Kinsta, Rocket.net, WPEngine) have 24-hour technical staff whose actual job is exactly this, and they’re better at it than any solo consultant could be.
What I do is the morning-after work: confirm the cause, check nothing’s missing, restore from the off-host backup if needed, and write the post-mortem so we know what to change. I’m not a 24/7 emergency line and won’t pretend to be one — anyone selling a small business that promise is overcharging for sleep they aren’t getting.
You can, but I’d gently steer you away from it for two reasons. The first is mine: pay-when-it-breaks clients are the ones I don’t know well, and the ones I don’t know well are the ones I take longest to help when something does break.
The second is yours: the work that prevents the dramatic breakage costs less than the dramatic breakage. A year of Essential is roughly the bill for one rushed weekend fix. The maths almost always favours boring.
The monthly fee covers everything listed under your tier — the updates, patching, backups, monitoring, and the included hours of small jobs each month. Small content edits, image swaps, plugin tweaks, and the “could you just” bits all sit inside that allowance and never trigger a separate invoice.
Genuinely substantial work — building a new section of the site, a redesign of a template, a migration to a new host — sits outside the retainer as a small fixed-fee project, agreed in writing before anything starts. No surprises; no creep.
You provide it, in your own account, in your name. I’ll recommend a host (most often Kinsta or Rocket.net for the UK), help you set it up, and manage the technical side — but the billing relationship is yours, and the credentials live with you. If we ever part ways, your site stays where it is and nothing breaks.
Reselling hosting is one of the small old tricks of the trade that I think is genuinely worse for clients than the alternative. So I don’t.
Send me your URL. I’ll spend an hour with the site — updates state, plugin health, backups, speed, the obvious quiet risks — and send back a short written read on what would need doing and which tier would actually suit you. No deck, no upsell, no obligation.