Application maintenance: your peace of mind over the long term

A site ages, even when nothing moves on screen

On launch day, your site is clean: the code and the dependencies are up to date, and everything runs. Over time, the libraries your site uses release new versions, some of which fix security flaws. The CMS ships an update and the programming language evolves; a browser changes a display rule. Nothing moves on screen, and yet the technical foundation shifts, slowly, month after month.

Many SMEs in French-speaking Switzerland discover this drift too late. The site works, so nobody touches it for two years. Then a small change turns into a major job: the dependencies have aged so much that a simple update breaks five others. What would have taken an hour with regular upkeep takes fifteen.

Application maintenance deals with this drift calmly, through continuous technical upkeep made of small, regular steps.

What a Voren maintenance plan covers

Voren maintenance covers the application layer of your site and falls into five types of work.

Application updates

Your site rests on a software foundation: a CMS, a framework, a programming language. These building blocks release new versions regularly. We apply these updates at the right pace, after checking that nothing breaks. A CMS kept up to date receives its security fixes; a CMS left on an obsolete version becomes a target.

Security fixes for the application layer

Flaws are discovered all the time in the software components of the web. A widely used library can announce a vulnerability on a Tuesday morning. We follow these announcements for the building blocks your site uses, and apply the fix before the flaw becomes a problem: application security comes down to responsiveness, and an annual audit would come too late.

Dependency management

A modern site relies on dozens of dependencies: pieces of code written by others that your site imports. Each one lives its own life, releases its own versions, and sometimes stops being maintained. Our job is to monitor this ecosystem, upgrade versions in small steps, and replace an abandoned dependency before it causes trouble. Upgrading a dependency by two versions is simple. Jumping eight versions at once is a major job.

Small changes

A site lives alongside the business. Opening hours change, a team grows, a price moves, a new service appears. The maintenance plan covers these content adjustments and small functional changes, within a time allowance set each month. You write to us, we make the change, and then you approve it.

Compatibility monitoring

Browsers evolve. A Safari release changes how a component renders, a display rule changes, a behaviour is deprecated. We monitor these changes and fix incompatibilities before a visitor comes across a broken display on your site.

What maintenance does not cover

A clear plan also states what it excludes. Application maintenance is neither a redesign nor a development project.

• A complete visual redesign is a separate project, priced separately.
• A major new feature (a members’ area, a configurator, a shop) falls outside the plan and gets its own quote.
• Producing regular editorial content (articles, campaign pages) is a separate writing service.
• SEO strategy and ranking monitoring are a separate service.

This boundary protects both parties. You know what you pay for each month; we know what we commit to doing. When a request goes beyond the scope, we say so before we start, with a quote.

Three plans, three paces

Voren’s maintenance plans adapt to the size and pace of your site.

Plan	Who it is for
Standard	Stable business website, a few pages
Pro	Active site, content that changes
Premium	Extensive site, regular changes

Each plan has its own fixed price: Standard CHF 49, Pro CHF 119 and Premium CHF 290 per month.

The Standard plan covers application updates, security fixes, compatibility monitoring, daily backups and two hours of small changes per month, with a response within 24 h. The Pro plan raises this allowance to 5 h per month, adds a monthly Lighthouse audit and responds within 8 business hours. The Premium plan extends it to 10 h and responds within 4 h, 7 days a week, for sites that change a lot.

The right plan depends on how often your site changes. A business website that changes twice a year does very well on Standard. A site where you adjust content every week deserves Pro.

The real calculation: maintained versus neglected

Take an SME business website left without maintenance for three years. At the first serious request, the bill often looks like this: the dependencies have drifted, two components are no longer maintained, the CMS has skipped three major versions. Bringing the foundation back up to standard, before even dealing with the original request, easily takes one to two days of work. At agency rates, this catch-up costs more than CHF 2,000, before the business gets any added value at all.

The same site on the Standard plan builds up no technical debt over those three years: the foundation stays ready to take on any request in one hour instead of fifteen, and the catch-up never happens. The difference lies in regularity: a little monthly upkeep avoids the big catch-up and costs considerably less.

This reasoning applies above all to older foundations. A poorly maintained WordPress site builds up this debt faster than average, and the cost climbs every year.

How it works in practice

A maintenance plan follows a simple rhythm.

1. Every month, we check the versions of your software building blocks and your dependencies, and we apply the useful updates after testing.
2. As soon as a security flaw affects a component of your site, we apply the fix without waiting for the monthly cycle.
3. Your requests for small changes arrive by email; we handle them within the plan’s allowance and you approve them.
4. Once a quarter, you receive a short update: what has been done, the health of the foundation, what deserves your attention.

You have nothing to monitor: with a plan, we take on the mental load of upkeep and keep your site healthy while you focus on your business.

Common mistakes

Mistake 1: waiting for a breakdown to act. A site that works today may carry a flaw that has been known for six months. Maintenance acts before the incident, so that there is nothing to repair after it.

Mistake 2: letting dependencies freeze. The longer you wait, the heavier the upgrade becomes. Small, regular steps cost less than one big jump every three years.

Mistake 3: confusing maintenance with a redesign. They are two different services: a maintenance plan keeps a site healthy, while a redesign rebuilds it.

Mistake 4: choosing a plan that does not match your real pace. A very active site on Standard ends up exceeding its allowance; a business website on Premium pays for time it does not use. The right plan follows how often you make changes.

What Voren does

Voren maintains the sites it builds, and also takes over existing sites after an initial assessment. The principle stays the same across all three plans: an up-to-date application foundation, security fixes applied quickly, dependencies managed in small steps, an allowance for small changes depending on the plan, a clear quarterly update.

The scope is in writing, and anything outside it is quoted before any work begins: you know your bill before the month ends.

Going further

See our Maintenance plan: the three options, Standard, Pro and Premium, in detail.

See our Business website plan: a site built cleanly from the start is easier to maintain over time.

Read our article on the cost of a poorly maintained WordPress site: why technical debt climbs every year without upkeep.