At Fireside, we understand how important your website is to your business — especially if you run an active e-commerce store. When something goes wrong, it’s natural to feel frustrated, especially if it impacts sales or takes time away from your team.
One of the questions we hear sometimes is:
“If I’m paying for website maintenance, why am I being charged extra to fix this issue? Didn’t YOU break my website?”
Let’s break it down so you know what’s covered, what isn’t, and why certain fixes require additional support.
What Website Maintenance Plans Include
Our maintenance plans are designed to keep your website secure, up to date, and running smoothly. This typically includes:
✅ Regular updates to WordPress, plugins, and themes
✅ Security monitoring
✅ Backups
✅ Performance checks
These tasks are preventative — they help reduce the risk of issues, but they can’t eliminate all potential problems.
Why Things Still Sometimes Break
Websites — especially dynamic e-commerce sites — are complex. They rely on many different parts (WordPress core, plugins, themes, integrations with other systems) working together.
Even with regular maintenance, problems can still occur:
- A plugin update might conflict with another plugin
- A server setting might change
- A third-party integration might stop working as expected
These are not errors caused by our team — they are part of the normal reality of running a modern website.
Why Rolling Back a Backup Isn’t Always a Solution
It might seem like restoring a backup would be the fastest fix. In some cases, that can help. But for an active e-commerce site, rolling back a backup can create new risks, such as:
⚠ Losing customer orders placed since the backup
⚠ Losing customer account updates or data
⚠ Missing out on changes or updates you’ve made
Because of this, we aim to resolve the specific problem rather than roll back and risk losing important data.
What’s Outside of Maintenance — And Why
Our maintenance plans cover preventative care — not active troubleshooting or fixing issues that arise due to plugin conflicts, third-party changes, or other factors outside of routine updates.
When we need to investigate and fix an issue, it takes dedicated time and expertise — and that’s why it’s billed separately.
How We Can Help
If you’d prefer a plan that includes more hands-on troubleshooting or support time, we’re happy to discuss options that offer broader coverage. We also offer support bundles at a discounted rate to help manage these situations more cost-effectively.
👉 Reach out any time — we’re here to help keep your site healthy and your business running smoothly.
