Your website is a process, not an event

The day your website goes live is day one, not the finish line. It is tempting to treat a launch as the end of the project: the invoice is paid, the site looks good, everyone moves on. But a website that is left alone does not stay where you left it. It quietly decays. Search position slips as competitors keep publishing and Google keeps changing how it ranks. Software ages, and old software accumulates known vulnerabilities. Security drifts as new threats appear and old patches go unapplied. Content goes stale, and a site that was accurate at launch slowly stops matching the business it represents.

The build is the cheap part. It happens once. Keeping the site working, fast, secure, and current is the real work, and that work never stops.

What ongoing website care actually involves

Care is not a vague retainer. It is a set of concrete, recurring jobs:

• Software updates. Your CMS, plugins, themes, framework, and server packages all release updates, often weekly. Many of those updates close security holes. Applying them on a test copy first, then live, is routine but skilled work.
• Security. Monitoring for malware and unauthorised changes, keeping firewalls and access rules current, forcing strong logins, and cleaning up fast if something does get in. Most hacked sites we see were running outdated software with no one watching.
• Backups. Regular, tested, off-site backups so that a bad update, a server failure, or a compromise is a quick restore rather than a rebuild from scratch. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan.
• Uptime and monitoring. Knowing the site is down before your customers tell you, and knowing why.
• Performance. Pages get slower over time as content, images, and third-party scripts pile up. Keeping load times tight protects both your search ranking and the people trying to use the site.
• Content and SEO upkeep. Fixing broken links, refreshing outdated copy, adding new pages, and keeping the basics of search optimisation healthy so the site keeps earning its position.

None of these are one-off tasks. They are cycles. That is why care is a plan and not a once-off line item.

What it costs in South Africa

Here is an honest answer, because this is the question most people are really asking. Our care plans are priced monthly:

• Site Care, from R1,250 per month. Updates, backups, security monitoring, and uptime checks. The baseline that keeps a site safe and current.
• Digital Care, R2,300 per month. Everything in Site Care plus performance work and ongoing content and SEO upkeep, for sites that are actively used to win business.
• Operational Care, R4,500 per month. For sites that are business-critical, with faster response times and the heavier monitoring and maintenance that more complex platforms need.

What moves the cost is real, not arbitrary. Site complexity matters: a five-page brochure site is less work than a large content site. E-commerce raises the bar, because a store handles payments and customer data and cannot afford downtime. Update frequency matters: a site that changes weekly needs more attention than one that rarely changes. And response time matters: if a problem at 2am needs fixing at 2am, that costs more than next-business-day.

Those are the only numbers we publish, because they are the real ones. Be wary of a quote that cannot explain what drives it.

We run our own site the same way

This is not a product we sell and then ignore on our own properties. We run our own site, stratalogic.co.za, on the same care discipline we put your site on. The updates, the backups, the security monitoring, the performance budgets: we do them here first. We do not sell a service we do not practise ourselves, and that keeps us honest about what care actually takes.

Where to go from here

If your site is live and currently unmaintained, that is the gap worth closing first. Have a look at our care plans to see which tier fits how you use your site, or read more about our web practice for the bigger picture of how we build and maintain sites.