Website maintenance with a named person on call.

An annual maintenance contract should cover four things: software and plugin updates, backups with a proved restore, monitoring, and a written report. What it usually does not cover, and should say so plainly, is new features, a redesign, incident response after a break-in, and the hosting and domain renewal fees themselves, which are billed by the providers rather than by us. The tell of a contract worth signing is the second list. A page that promises everything has bounded nothing, and the argument arrives in month four when you ask for something the fee was never priced for. Both lists go in the same document before anything is signed, and content edits are named in the first one with a monthly allowance against them.

Content changes are included, against a stated monthly allowance, and the allowance is the part that has to be written down. Updates, backups with a proved restore, monitoring and the report are the core; edits sit beside them as a named number of changes a month, because a plan promising unlimited edits is either priced for its worst month or renegotiated in month four. A change is a text edit, a swapped image, a corrected price, or a page built from a template that already exists. What is not a change is a new page type, a new section design, a new integration or a redesign, and each of those is quoted separately so nobody meets the line for the first time on a deadline. Unused changes do not carry forward, which is why the allowance is set from what you actually published last year rather than from a tier on a pricing page.

Two working days for changes and fixes, and immediately for anything that has taken the site down. The working week here is Monday to Friday, so a promise counted in hours has to say which hours it means, and ours are working ones. Cover across the weekend is available and it is written into the scope rather than implied by a badge, because a claim of constant availability nobody has staffed is worth less than a smaller promise that holds. Monitoring runs continuously either way, so an outage is detected outside working hours even when the repair begins inside them.

Yes, and it is the most common way an engagement here starts. The first week is a custody audit: which accounts exist, who holds each one, when each renews, and what state the site is actually in. Where an account sits in a former employee’s name it can usually be moved, and where a previous supplier holds the domain or the hosting the route back is a separate exercise, set out on website development. We read the code and the content model before touching either, because an update applied to a site nobody has read is how a maintenance plan breaks a working page in its first fortnight. On WordPress the paid theme and plugin licences get their own line in that audit. If the honest answer is that the site is past maintaining, we say so rather than take a retainer on it, and a first build is scoped on the pillar, or for a company trading inside one emirate on web design in Dubai.

Indirectly, and it is worth being precise about how. Maintenance protects the positions you already hold: a site that goes down, loses its certificate, slows as content accumulates or quietly stops being indexed will lose ground it earned, and monitoring catches all four early. What maintenance does not do is win positions you have not earned yet, which is content, structure and links, and that work is SEO rather than upkeep. A site that has genuinely become slow is also a measurement job before it is a maintenance one, because the cause has to be found before anything is worth tuning.

Downtime is worked immediately, and recovery starts from the most recent off-site copy rather than from whatever the host happened to keep. Monitoring usually catches an outage before a customer does, and the restore is one we have run before rather than one we hope works. A break-in is a different kind of event: getting the site back is inside the plan, while finding how it happened, hardening what let it in, and any duty you owe under the UAE personal data protection law are separate scope and quoted separately. We tell you which of the two you are in on the first call, because the second carries obligations a restore does not settle.

Yes, and where they are not already, putting them there is the first deliverable. The hosting account, the domain, the registrar login, the CMS administrator and every paid licence should sit under your entity, and you should be able to prove that without asking us. It matters more here than it looks: a name directly under .ae is open to any registrant worldwide, while a .co.ae asks for a trade licence behind it, so a licence-linked address registered against a personal email is a company asset in the wrong hands. All of it is listed in week one with the holder and the renewal date beside each entry.

There is no standard rate here, and the prices published on this term span an order of magnitude for the same words, which tells a buyer very little. Four things move the figure: the size and the platform of the site, how quickly you need something answered, how many content changes sit inside the plan rather than on top of it, and whether monitoring and backups have to be set up or are already running. We price against those four after the audit and put the number in writing. A figure quoted before anyone has opened the site is a guess with a currency in front of it.