Ongoing Support
The work that keeps your site working hard.
Launch is the midpoint of a website, not the end of it. Platforms fall behind, content and audiences change, and the small problems nobody has time for become the expensive ones. COLAB stays on after launch to keep your platform secure, current, and improving, at whatever level of involvement your team actually needs.
Partnerships that outlast the launch
30+
clients in ongoing development partnerships
300+
client engagements over 15 years
90+
PageSpeed scores across delivered platforms
What ongoing support delivers
- A platform that stays current. Core, plugin, and module updates applied on a regular cadence, with version control and backups behind every change, so security patches land before they turn into incidents.
- Fewer surprises for your team. Uptime and performance monitoring catches problems before your patients, members, or staff report them. Most of what we fix, you never hear about.
- Accessibility that holds after launch. New content and new features introduce new issues. Regular review and remediation keep WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance from slipping in the months and years after go-live.
- Capacity you do not have to hire for. Design, development, content, and QA available at the level you need this quarter, without carrying every one of those roles on payroll year round.
- A backlog that gets worked down. Bugs, deferred features, and the ideas that did not make the launch cut go into one prioritized list and get scheduled, rather than sitting in someone’s inbox.
- Decisions grounded in what users do. Analytics reviews and performance data shape what gets built next, so the site keeps getting better instead of slowly drifting out of step with the organization.
Why COLAB for ongoing support
- The people who built it are the people who keep it running. Support is staffed by the engineers and designers who worked on the platform, so nobody is reverse-engineering decisions they were not part of.
- We take on sites we did not build. Inherited platforms start with a structured review of the code, hosting, content model, and accessibility, so we are not guessing at what we have taken responsibility for.
- Your team keeps the keys. We document what we change and train your editors as we go. Support should reduce what you depend on us for, not deepen it.
- We say when something is not worth doing. Retainer hours are finite. If a request will cost more than it returns, we will tell you before we start rather than bill you for finding out.
- Support flexes with your year. Engagements move between levels as budgets, campaigns, and internal capacity change, without starting the relationship over.
- Hosting and platform health are part of the work. Regardless of where the site is hosted, we handle hosting support, security patching, uptime monitoring, and any migrations the platform needs. Your team manages content. We manage the platform.
What ongoing support includes
Scope depends on what your platform does and how much your own team handles. Engagements draw from the following areas, and the mix changes as your needs do.
Quarterly business reviews and roadmap
A standing review of performance, completed work, and upcoming priorities with your stakeholders, and a roadmap that reflects what the next year needs.
Platform updates and security patching
Core, plugin, and module updates on a set cadence, with SSL management and security patches applied as they are released rather than when something breaks.
Backups and version control
Automated backups with secure storage and a Git-based history of every change, so a bad release can be identified and reversed quickly.
Uptime and performance monitoring
Continuous monitoring with alerting, paired with periodic performance review and tuning of code, caching, and hosting to keep Core Web Vitals healthy.
Accessibility review and remediation
Scheduled scanning and manual review against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with the findings fixed rather than handed over as a report.
Quality assurance
Visual inspection after updates, plus automated testing on the engagements where regression risk justifies it.
Bug backlog and work down
One prioritized list of defects and deferred items, scored and scheduled into the retainer so the backlog shrinks instead of accumulating.
Iterative design and feature development
Design refinements and new functionality released in small batches, drawn from the roadmap and from what analytics and user feedback surface.
Content production and edits
Ad hoc edits to existing pages and original content produced to your defined voice and tone, for teams without the capacity to keep the site current themselves.
CMS support and editor training
Email or ticket-based help for your content team, along with documentation and recorded training so new staff can get up to speed without a project.
Analytics and goal review
Regular review of GA4 and conversion data to see where people drop off and what to change, with recommendations tied to the goals set at launch.
Technical SEO and content performance
Ongoing review of indexation, structure, and page performance so the work you publish keeps being found.
Three ways to work together
Most organizations start at one level and move as their capacity and ambitions change. The difference between them is not how well the site is looked after, it is how much we are building alongside you.
Essential Maintenance
Baseline updates, monitoring, and security for teams who handle content and strategy themselves. Updates, backups, SSL, uptime monitoring, and periodic accessibility and performance review. The objective is a site that stays current, secure, and working properly.
Proactive Support
Everything in Essential Maintenance, plus a steady amount of design and development iteration. Accessibility and performance issues get fixed rather than reported, the bug backlog gets worked down, and quarterly reviews keep priorities honest against real data.
Fractional Digital Team
Our deepest ongoing engagement. We work as an extension of your team against a shared roadmap, at higher velocity, with access to senior staff and specialists across strategy, design, development, and content, plus the documentation that keeps knowledge from walking out the door.
Our approach
Support is the part of our process we call Grow, and it is a cycle rather than a finish line. Build, Launch, and Learn repeat for as long as we work together, at whatever pace the engagement supports.
Build what was agreed
Each cycle starts with a short list of work we have agreed is worth doing: a defect, an accessibility remediation, a feature carried over from the backlog, a set of content updates. We estimate it, schedule it into the retainer, and tell you what it displaces if capacity is tight that month. Nothing goes into a cycle because it was easy to sell.
Launch in small batches
Work ships steadily rather than saved up for a quarterly release. Every change moves through version control, quality assurance, and a staging review before it reaches production, so a routine update does not become an outage. Where the risk warrants it, automated testing runs against the release.
Learn what it actually did
We look at what changed. Analytics, performance data, accessibility scans, and the support requests coming from your team tell us whether the work helped, and that answer shapes the next cycle. Quarterly business reviews put the same picture in front of your leadership, along with what we would recommend next.
Who we work with
We support organizations where the website is doing real work every day, and where going dark or falling out of compliance costs more than the support itself.
- Healthcare systems and specialty practices where a broken form or an out-of-date provider listing has consequences for patients
- Credit unions and member organizations serving thousands of members through the site every day
- Nonprofits without a developer on staff, carrying a platform that has to keep running between campaigns
- Marketing teams who inherited a site from an agency that has since moved on
- Digital and IT teams who want a partner for the web platform so internal capacity can go somewhere else
- Organizations whose site launched well and has not been touched since
When ongoing support matters most
This work earns its keep when at least one of the following sounds familiar.
- Your site launched recently and you want the momentum, and the backlog, to keep moving
- Updates have been deferred long enough that nobody is sure what will break when they are applied
- The one person who understood how the site works has left, or is the only one who does
- Accessibility has become something you have to evidence, not just intend
- Leadership is asking what the website will do next year and there is no roadmap to point at
- The site is stable, but nothing about it has improved in two years
Support from the team that knows the platform
Many of our support engagements are with clients we launched, and the engineers who built the platform are the ones maintaining it. Where we take over a site built by someone else, we start with a review of the code, hosting, content model, and accessibility so we understand what we have taken responsibility for. Either way, the work is done by people who know why the platform is the way it is, and who will still be here next year.
Frequently Asked Questions
Every engagement covers the baseline: CMS core, plugin, and module updates, backups, version control, SSL, uptime monitoring, and periodic accessibility and performance review. Above that baseline, engagements add remediation, bug work down, design and feature iteration, content production, analytics review, and roadmap work. The mix is set when we scope the engagement and revisited as your needs change.
Hosting is the infrastructure your site runs on. Support is the work of keeping the site itself healthy on top of it. We manage hosting support, security patching, uptime monitoring, and any migrations the platform needs, on Pantheon, Acquia, Pressable, or wherever the site lives. Your team manages content. We manage platform health.
Yes, and it is a normal way for our support relationships to start. We begin with a structured review of the code, hosting setup, content model, and accessibility so we know the actual condition of what we are taking on. That review sometimes turns up work that has to happen before a support agreement makes sense, and we will tell you if that is the case.
We do not publish a blanket response time. A commitment that applies to every client at every hour of the day requires standby staffing that costs more than many support engagements are worth, and we would rather not quote a number we cannot hold to. Response expectations are agreed per engagement, based on what your platform does and what an outage would mean for the people who rely on it. Critical issues escalate to a development lead.
Cost depends on the size and complexity of the site, the level of involvement you need, and how much your own team handles. Essential Maintenance engagements typically run $500 to $2,000 per month. Proactive Support typically runs $2,000 to $10,000 per month. A Fractional Digital Team engagement typically runs $10,000 and above per month. We scope against your actual platform before quoting, so treat these as ranges rather than a price list. See our blog post on ongoing costs for a more in-depth explanation.
We tell you before the work starts, not after the invoice. If a request will not fit in the current month, we will show you what it would displace, schedule it into a later cycle, or quote it separately as a project. Retainer hours are finite and we would rather say so plainly than let quality slip to absorb the overage.
Yes. Most of our long-running clients have moved between levels more than once, usually because a redesign, a campaign season, or a staffing change shifted what they needed. Moving up or down is a conversation and an amended agreement, not a new procurement.
Yes. We work in both, along with the hosting platforms built around them. If your site runs on something else, tell us what it is and we will be honest about whether we are the right team to look after it. Though we don’t advertise it we support many other
That is a legitimate goal and we plan for it rather than around it. We document what we change, train your editors and developers as we go, and can run a structured handoff when you are ready. Support should reduce what you depend on us for.
