A year. Zero outages. Nobody noticed. That's the point.
A year. Zero outages. Nobody noticed. That's the point.
A twelve-month Site Care retainer for a small-business marketing site — dependency upkeep, performance monitoring, content publishes, and zero unplanned downtime.
The challenge
Small-business marketing sites have a predictable failure pattern. They get built well in week one, run cleanly for three months, and then quietly accumulate technical debt: outdated dependencies, broken third-party embeds, slow CMS pages, expired SSL warnings, and stale content that erodes search rankings. By month nine, the site that felt premium at launch feels neglected, and the founder has neither the time nor the appetite to dig back in.
Site Care is the retainer that prevents that arc. A monthly subscription with a fixed scope: dependency and security updates, performance regression checks, content publishes, broken-link sweeps, monthly health report, and a small allotment of design or copy tweaks. No surprises, no reactive emergency fixes, no quarterly rebuild conversation.
The challenge with retainers is that the value is invisible when they are working. A successful Site Care month produces no incident, no broken page, no angry email — which is exactly the point, but it also means the retainer has to make its work visible without theater. The monthly health report has to do that job.
How we built it
Onboarding: full site audit, dependency inventory, monitoring setup. Synthetic uptime checks configured for the homepage and three critical pages. Lighthouse baseline captured for performance regression detection. Backup and rollback procedure documented.
Monthly cadence: dependency updates within 7 days of release for security advisories, within the month for non-critical updates. Lighthouse run weekly with diff against baseline; regressions investigated within 48 hours. Broken-link and 404 sweeps monthly. Content publishes within 2 business days of submission.
Communication: monthly health report on the first Monday with a one-page summary — uptime, performance, content shipped, dependencies updated, and any items flagged for the founder. No status calls. No meeting overhead. Slack channel for ad-hoc questions, with a 24-hour response SLO during business days.
System map
How the pieces talk to each other.
Selected screens
Real product surfaces from the engagement — not stock illustrations.
Uptime status — 12 sites, 99.98% uptime over the last 30 days, no SEV pages.
What shipped
Synthetic uptime monitoring on 4 critical paths (homepage, services, contact, key landing page), 1-minute interval, alerting via email and Slack.
Weekly automated Lighthouse runs with budget thresholds (LCP < 2.5s, CLS < 0.1, TBT < 200ms); regressions auto-create a tracked task.
Monthly dependency update PR with changelog summary and test results; security advisories handled within 7 days regardless of cadence.
Monthly broken-link sweep across the entire site; redirect map maintained for any moved or removed pages.
Content publishing pipeline: founder submits markdown, copy, or assets via shared folder; content lives on production within 2 business days, including image optimization and OG image generation.
Monthly health report: PDF with uptime numbers, performance trend, dependencies updated, content shipped, and a forward-looking risks-and-recommendations section.
Results
12-month retainer completed with zero unplanned downtime and zero security incidents. All dependency updates landed within the cadence policy. Lighthouse performance held within the budget every month with one investigated regression that traced to a third-party embed and was resolved in 36 hours.
Content publishing throughput tripled compared to the pre-retainer baseline because the founder no longer touched deployment pipelines. Twenty-eight content publishes shipped in the first six months — a volume the founder had not been able to sustain on their own.
Pattern: Care retainers turn the relationship from transactional to compounding. The longer the retainer runs, the better the studio understands the system, and the smaller the marginal effort to keep it healthy. Year two of a Care retainer is meaningfully cheaper to deliver than year one — and that compounding is what makes the retainer pricing sustainable for both sides.
Available
- Sample monthly health report (anonymized PDF)
- Onboarding audit checklist
- Dependency update policy document
- Lighthouse budget configuration
- Content publishing workflow document
Talk to people on this work.
No fabricated quotes. Reference contacts are shared during discovery, with both parties' consent.
Engineering lead
Worked alongside on production trading systems for 5+ years. Available for technical reference calls — code quality, on-call discipline, incident behavior.
Founder
Engaged Sage Ideas for a Ship + Operate combination. Willing to talk about scope discipline, timeline accuracy, and what handoff actually looked like.
“The most valuable retainer hour is the one nobody noticed. The deploy that didn't break. The dependency you didn't have to read about.”
What almost happened.
Every project has near-misses. Decisions that, if we'd kept going, would have shipped a hole. The list below is the diff between the version that almost made it to prod and the version that did.