Give your website an owner. Retainers from £500 a month with patches inside 48 hours, typical first fix inside 18 hours and an annual review of what you pay.
Right now, your website's maintenance plan is probably a person. Maybe it is you, fitting CMS updates around a full-time job you were actually hired to do. Maybe it is whoever built the site, responding when they respond. Maybe, if you are honest, it is nobody, and the site has been quietly running itself since the last project ended.
The old way, the ad hoc way, feels cheap because most months cost nothing. The bill arrives all at once instead: the security patch nobody applied, the form that stopped submitting weeks before anyone noticed, the emergency developer at emergency rates, the afternoon of your team's time every time something small needs changing. Ad hoc is not a cheaper plan; it is a deferred one.
Looking after websites is the steady half of our business. A retainer gives your site what it actually needs: named people responsible for it, time reserved for it every month, and someone who notices problems before your customers do.
We review the code, hosting and content setup when we take a site on, fix anything urgent, and note the quirks. From then on, you are never explaining your website to a stranger.
Security patches within 48 hours of release, monitoring watched by people who understand Umbraco, backups proven by test restores. The quiet months are the product working.
Your reserved days each month go where you point them: fixes first when needed, then improvements, features and advice. Typical first fix on a reported problem lands inside 18 hours.
Once a year we compare what you pay with what you used. If you are on too big a tier, we tell you and move you down. Overpaying clients are not a business model we want.
Three monthly tiers, priced plainly: Essentials at £500 reserves one day of specialist time, Growth at £950 reserves two, Partner at £1,800 reserves four. Every tier gets the same underlying service; the days are the variable. A stable site that mostly needs patching and the occasional tweak lives happily on Essentials. A site your marketing team leans on weekly belongs on Growth or Partner, where the reserved time becomes a standing improvement budget: speed work, accessibility fixes, editor experience, the small things that compound. The full comparison is on our Umbraco retainers and support page.
The people doing the work are the same two developers every month, an Umbraco MVP and an Umbraco Certified Master among the three of us, which matters more than it sounds: familiarity is speed. The developer who already knows why your checkout integration is shaped the way it is fixes it in an hour, not a day. That accumulated knowledge is the real asset a retainer builds, and it is the thing ad hoc support can never give you, because every incident starts from zero.
Many clients pair the retainer with our managed hosting, from £99 a month, so a single supplier is accountable from server to CMS with no gap in the middle for problems to fall through. It also means an outage is usually our news to break to you, from monitoring, rather than a customer's news to break to your inbox.
Our FAQ covers the two things buyers rightly probe: exactly what a retainer includes and what happens to unused days, including the annual review that keeps the pricing honest. If your site was built by someone else, that is no obstacle; taking over other agencies' work is routine for us. Tell us about your site and we will recommend a tier, honestly, including the smallest one if that is truly what you need.
Tell us what you're working on and we'll come back within one working day.
An Umbraco Silver Partner agency in Llandudno, North Wales and the Isle of Man, building and looking after Umbraco and .NET websites for businesses and agencies across the UK and beyond. Simon Antony is a brand of Simplepage Ltd.
Maesgwyn, 3 Claremont rd,
Llandudno, North Wales, LL30 2UF