Monthly retainers for website support vary enormously. Some cover nothing more than keeping a server running. Others provide genuine ongoing stewardship of a business-critical platform. If you are paying a monthly fee for ExpressionEngine or Craft CMS support, understanding what a well-structured retainer looks like will help you assess whether you are getting good value, or just paying for a contact you rarely use.
A retainer should cover the platform itself, not just the server it runs on. For ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS, that means keeping the core installation up to date, monitoring addon and plugin compatibility, and applying security patches promptly. Hosting is a commodity. Platform expertise is not. The two should not be conflated in what you are paying for.
Business-critical websites attract automated attacks constantly. A properly structured retainer includes monitoring for unusual activity, prompt response when something is flagged, and a clear process for what happens if there is an incident outside normal business hours. If you do not know what your developer's incident response process looks like, that is worth asking about directly.
The difference between a retainer that protects your business and one that just fixes things when they break is proactive review. A good support arrangement includes periodic checks on PHP compatibility, addon health, server performance, and any upcoming changes that could affect your site. You should not be the one discovering problems first.
A retainer should have a defined scope: what is included, what falls outside it, and what happens when out-of-scope work is needed. Vague arrangements tend to create friction when something significant needs doing. The best retainers also include a clear escalation path, so that when something serious happens you are not trying to reach someone through a generic support inbox at the worst possible moment.
If you have an existing support arrangement, the questions worth asking are: what specifically is covered, what is the response time commitment, when did you last proactively review the site, and what would happen if something went wrong tonight? The answers will tell you quickly whether you have a genuine support arrangement or just an informal understanding that exists on paper.
If you want to know whether your current retainer actually covers what it should, get in touch with Karl.
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The question I get asked most often by business owners is some version of: what will this cost? It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is that it depends on things that are specific to your site. But there’s enough of a pattern to give you a useful framework.
Most clients come to us when their site has started to feel like a risk rather than an asset. Whether the agency relationship has ended, an upgrade has been delayed, or the site has simply grown beyond what it can handle, a conversation costs nothing.
Get in touch with KarlTrusted by established businesses and growing brands across the UK
Expression 37 works with a small number of clients at any one time. These are some of them.
Karl founded Expression 37 in 2007 and has worked exclusively with ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS ever since. He does not take on work in other platforms and does not hand work to other developers. Expression 37 is deliberately small, because the kind of support that matters to clients with business-critical sites is specific to their site, not something that scales in the conventional sense. If you work with Expression 37, you work with Karl.
Find out how we workUpon completion of the Thornfields Primary Care Trust website, we had no hesitation on asking Expression 37 to help out with some further development updates with our main company website. As with the Thornfields project Karl and his team turned around our requests with flawless speed and efficiency, often adding further advice and guidance on how to best implement the features required. If you are looking for a tried and trusted ExpressionEngine specialist we strongly recommend these guys.
Chris Ibbetson - FPM Group General Manager.
First Practice Management Ltd.