Get website maintenance in Singapore with hours of changes included

Website maintenance in Singapore costs from about SGD 50 a month for a small brochure site to SGD 1,200 or more for a busy online shop, depending on what's included. With me, a content retainer is SGD 550 a month for 5 hours of changes or SGD 950 a month for 10 hours, with updates, daily backups and security included. Without a retainer, I charge SGD 150 an hour.

A website maintenance plan should include software updates, daily backups, security fixes, uptime monitoring and some hours for changes. My content retainers include all five: WordPress, theme and plugin updates tested on a staging copy first, daily backups, security, monitoring, and 5 or 10 hours a month for text, images, banners, page edits and fixes. Unused hours roll over one month.

Yes. Taking over a site from another agency or freelancer starts with its address on WhatsApp. I look at what it runs on and which plugins it has, then tell you which plan fits. You give me logins to the hosting, the website and the domain, the accounts stay in your name, and I take a full backup before I change anything.

Every website needs some maintenance, but how much depends on what it's built on. WordPress needs the most, because WordPress itself, the theme and every plugin update separately. Hosted builders like Shopify, Wix and Squarespace update their own software, and a static site has very little to patch. My retainers are built around WordPress, so for anything else, send me the address and I'll tell you straight whether you need me.

If your website has been hacked, change every password first: the hosting, the website's admin and the email account tied to them. Then restore a clean backup from before the hack, update everything, and find how they got in, which is usually an outdated plugin or a weak password. If you'd rather hand it to me, message me the address. A one-off fix is quoted per job from SGD 850.

Most slow websites are slow because of oversized images, too many plugins, cheap hosting or no caching. Monthly maintenance won't fix that on its own, so I don't sell speed as a monthly charge. A slow site gets a one-off job instead. I find what's slowing it down, quote the fix, and you decide whether to go ahead.

WordPress plugins should be checked for updates every week, with security fixes applied within a day or two of their release. Test each update on a staging copy first, because an untested update is one of the most common ways a working site breaks. On my retainers, updates are part of the job, and the live site only gets an update after it has worked on the staging copy.

A business website should be backed up every day, files and database together, so a hack or a failed update can be rolled back to yesterday. Keep the copies somewhere other than the server the site runs on, and keep a few weeks of them. Daily backups are included in both of my retainers.

Website maintenance affects SEO because Google drops pages that break, flags sites that get hacked, and favours pages that load quickly on phones. Maintenance stops a site losing ground for those reasons. Moving up the rankings takes SEO work on top, which is a plan of its own, from SGD 2,500 a month.

Unused hours on either of my retainers roll over for one month, then lapse. If a month runs over, the extra hours are SGD 120 an hour, agreed with you before I start, which is less than my ad hoc rate of SGD 150 an hour.

There's no minimum term on either website maintenance retainer. Both are month to month, and you can stop with 30 days' notice. If you'd rather not commit at all, ad hoc work is SGD 150 an hour, booked in 30-minute blocks.

You send the change to me on WhatsApp: a screenshot of what's wrong, the new text, or the photo you want up. I make the change myself and message you when it's live. Nobody sits between you and the person doing the work.