Senior site stewardship — updates with rollback discipline, security monitoring, uptime alerts, and a direct line to someone who knows your site, not a ticketing queue.
What senior means here: Managing publishing infrastructure for Postmedia and government properties means an update failure is a newsroom outage, not an inconvenience. That discipline — staged updates, rollback plans, and verification before the maintenance window closes — applies to every site I steward, regardless of size or industry.
Most maintenance plans are a recurring invoice for someone to click “Update All” once a month and send you a PDF. That’s not what this is. This is senior-level stewardship: understanding what each update actually changes, what the interaction risks are with your specific plugin and theme stack, and whether an update should be applied immediately, staged, or held pending compatibility review. If something breaks, you get me — not a ticket number.
Who this is for
- ✅ Local businesses and regional organizations with a site that’s working and needs to stay that way — without the owner having to think about it. You want updates handled, the site monitored, and a real person to call when something goes wrong.
- ✅ National brands and enterprise organizations that need senior-level stewardship for a web property that carries real business weight — not a junior contractor clicking update buttons on a schedule.
- ✅ Publishing operations, training platforms, and government digital properties where an outage has real operational consequences and update failures are not acceptable.
- ✅ Sites I didn’t build, if they’re in reasonable shape: clean codebase, no page builders, no plugin sprawl, and no outstanding security issues. I assess the site before quoting maintenance — I don’t steward sites I wouldn’t have built.
- ❌ Sites on page builders (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery). The update surface is too large and the failure modes too unpredictable to steward responsibly at a flat rate. I can rebuild it, but I won’t take it on for maintenance as-is.
- ❌ Shared hosting environments. The infrastructure constraints make performance and security stewardship unreliable regardless of code quality. Managed hosting (WP Engine, Kinsta, Pressable) is a prerequisite.
- ❌ Sites with more than 40 active plugins that haven’t been reviewed recently. Plugin sprawl requires a cleanup engagement before ongoing maintenance makes sense.
What’s included
Every plan includes
- Core, plugin, and theme updates reviewed and applied with rollback discipline — not batch-clicked and forgotten.
- Uptime monitoring with immediate notification and first-response investigation — I know about the outage before you do.
- Security monitoring and malware scanning. If a component is flagged with a known vulnerability, it gets evaluated and patched or isolated before you hear about it in the news.
- Off-site backup maintained in a separate environment from the host. Not the host’s own backup — an independent copy that survives a host-level failure.
- Monthly summary of what was updated, what was reviewed, and anything worth your attention. One page — what changed, what was reviewed, and anything that warrants your attention.
Local plan — from $150/month CAD
For single-site local businesses and small organizations. Includes everything above plus one small content change per month — a phone number, an address, a new staff photo, a service change. The kind of thing that should take five minutes and always takes a week when you try to do it yourself.
Brand plan — from $550/month CAD
For national brands, enterprise properties, and multi-site networks. Includes everything in the Local plan plus: a monthly performance review against Core Web Vitals field data; component compatibility review before major updates; a 30-minute advisory call for anything that needs a senior voice; and priority response (four-hour acknowledgement, same-day for production outages). Priced by site complexity after a discovery call.
What I charge for separately
Maintenance covers stewardship, not development. New features, content migrations, design changes, integrations, and e-commerce configuration are billed at the standard development rate ($275/hr CAD). I tell you upfront if a request crosses into development scope rather than absorbing it and building resentment.
Get in touch or email directly at cross@thisismyurl.com. Tell me your site URL, your host, and what you currently have in place for updates and backups.