What is Included in My Website Maintenance Fee?
Website Maintenance is fundamentally an insurance policy for your digital asset. Clients often experience friction when they expect routine maintenance fees to cover new feature development or major design overhauls. This document clearly defines the rigid scope of your recurring maintenance agreement and outlines our guaranteed protocols for critical security emergencies.
Defining the Scope: Maintenance vs. Enhancement
To prevent
scope creep and ensure your monthly retainer is efficiently used, we must clearly differentiate between proactive, recurring
Maintenance and reactive, billable
Enhancement work.
| Category | Definition (Included in Retainer) | Examples (Recurring Tasks) |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance (Proactive) | Work required to ensure security, stability, and optimal function of existing features. This work prevents future errors and secures the site. | Security scans, platform updates/patching, daily backups, uptime monitoring, link monitoring, theme/plugin compatibility checks. |
| Enhancement (Billable) | Work required to introduce new features, major functionality changes, or aesthetic overhauls. This work adds new capability to the site. | New landing page design, adding a payment gateway, integrating a new third-party CRM, significant content reorganization. |
The Protocol: Any request that falls under Enhancement must be submitted through our formal Change Request (CR) Process (See FAQ 3). Your Project Manager will provide a separate quote and timeline for approval before work commences.
Routine Content Updates and Allowance
A common source of confusion is routine content updates (e.g., changing staff, updating business hours).
The Annual Update Allowance: Your platform fee includes a 12-Hour Annual Development Allowance (equivalent to hour per month). This allowance is designed to cover routine content updates like:
- Changing staff member information or photos.
- Updating business hours, services, or locations.
- Making minor text edits or aesthetic adjustments to existing pages.
Over-Allowance Policy: If your request exceeds the cumulative -hour annual allowance, your Project Manager will notify you immediately. The work will then be billed at the standard agency rate, but only after your explicit approval.
Emergency Security and Uptime Guarantees (SLAs)
Your maintenance retainer ensures we are actively defending your site, which is built on our My Builder platform. If a critical issue occurs, we initiate immediate response protocols to minimize downtime and risk.
Website Critical Incident SLAs
| Priority Level | Incident Type | Guaranteed Response Time | Resolution Protocol |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1: CRITICAL | Total Website Outage (Global 5xx/4xx error), Complete Checkout/Conversion Pathway Blockage, Confirmed Security Breach, or PII Data Leakage. | 1 Hour (24/7 After-Hours Protocol applies) | Immediate site restoration from backup, isolation of the breach, or repair of the conversion path. |
| P2: HIGH | Severe performance degradation (very slow load times), core feature malfunction (e.g., site search is broken), or significant data gaps in tracking. | 4 Hours (During Business Hours) | Root cause diagnosis and deployment of necessary patch or fix. |
Disaster Recovery: Our Duda platform creates a full backup of your entire website (files and database) every time a change is made. In the event of catastrophic data loss, we commit to restoring your site from the latest clean backup, minimizing lost data.
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