My web maintenance has stopped
Old agency gone quiet, plugins out of date, site quietly falling behind. Here is how to get it back under proper care without the drama.
01 / What probably happened
The agency did not announce it, they just stopped
Maintenance rarely ends with a phone call. It ends with the agency quietly taking on bigger clients, your point of contact leaving, or the freelancer who built your site deciding to go travelling. The invoices might still be going out. The actual work might have stopped months ago.
The site looks fine from the outside. Then one day the contact form stops sending emails, or Google flags the SSL certificate, or a plugin conflict takes a page down. That is the moment most owners realise nobody has been watching for a long time.
Good news: none of this is permanent and none of it needs the old team's cooperation. We take over the site, do the catch-up work, transfer the accounts into your name and keep it looked after from then on. No anger, no legal drama, just a quiet handover.
02 / What catching up actually looks like
Six things a lapsed site usually needs
Every case is different but the shape of the work is similar. Here is what we work through.
Take a proper look at what you have
Before anything changes, we audit the live site, the hosting, the domain and any plugins or third-party tools attached. You get a plain-English summary of what is working, what is broken and what is silently rotting in the background.
Catch up on months of missed updates
Plugins, themes and the underlying platform all get security patches released constantly. When maintenance stops, those patches pile up. We work through them carefully, test on a staging copy first, and bring the site back to a safe current version without taking the live site down.
Take ownership of accounts you forgot existed
Old maintenance arrangements often sit on the agency's hosting account, their domain registrar, their plugin licences. We transfer everything into your name so nobody else can switch things off, move them or bill you without your say-so.
Fix the quiet damage already done
Broken contact forms, expired SSL certificates, 404 pages Google is now listing in your search results, images that no longer load. Most sites that have been left alone for months have a handful of these. We hunt them out and fix them.
Put monitoring in place
Uptime checks, SSL expiry alerts, broken-link scans and backup verification. So if anything goes sideways again, we know about it before you do. This is the bit the old agency was meant to be doing but clearly was not.
Keep the site looked after from here
Once the catch-up is done, you move onto a flat monthly plan. Hosting, backups, updates, changes on request, all included. No more wondering whether anyone is watching the site on your behalf.
03 / How we take over
Audit, catch up, transfer, look after
Audit
Send us the URL and whatever logins you still have. We do a thorough health check on the live site and tell you in writing what state it is actually in.
Catch up
We patch what needs patching, fix what is broken, and take a clean backup before we touch anything. Everything happens on a staging copy first so the live site stays up during the work.
Transfer
Domain, hosting, email routing and any other accounts come into your name and onto infrastructure we can support directly. You end up with one login, not eight.
Look after
From there we look after the site on a flat monthly plan. You get a named team, a customer portal, and changes on request at no extra charge.
FAQ
Common questions
My old agency has stopped replying. Can you just take it over?
Yes, in almost every case. We do not need the old agency's cooperation as long as you have access to the domain (or can prove the business owns it). The site, the content and the hosting can all be rebuilt or moved without them lifting a finger.
How do I know if my site is actually being maintained?
A few tell-tale signs: plugins and the platform itself are out of date in the admin panel, the SSL certificate (the padlock in the browser) is expired or missing, recent backups do not exist, or nobody has been able to tell you when the site was last patched. If any of those are true, maintenance has almost certainly lapsed.
Will any of my content or SEO be lost in the handover?
No. We copy the content across cleanly, keep the URL structure the same so Google is not confused, and set up redirects for anything that does need to move. Your rankings and any existing Google Business linking stay intact.
How quickly can you take over?
The audit is usually done in a day or two. The catch-up and transfer take anywhere from a few days to two weeks depending on how deep the rot goes. Your site stays up the whole time.
What if something has already been broken for months and I never noticed?
Very common. We find these in the audit and flag them. Most are quick to fix once someone is actually looking. Broken contact forms are the classic one: people think their site has gone quiet when actually every enquiry has been bouncing.
What does ongoing maintenance actually include with you?
Hosting, SSL, daily backups, platform updates, uptime monitoring, security patching, and changes on request through your portal. All on the same flat monthly plan. Plans from £39/mo on Starter, £79/mo on Standard.
Want someone actually watching your site again?
Send us the URL. We will do a full health check, tell you what needs doing and give you a flat monthly price to keep it looked after properly.