Guides
Guides for people who own the website.
Eight guides written by the team that builds, maintains and reviews these sites. What monthly care actually costs, what to do in the first day after a compromise, and how to buy a security review without buying the wrong one.
Cost and care
What a website costs after launch
The part of the invoice most quotes leave out: the recurring hours, the restore test, and the month something breaks.
Care
What WordPress maintenance actually costs
What $20, $129 and $500 a month each buy, which line items drive the price, and the five questions that separate a plan from a monitoring subscription.
9 min read · Updated November 2026
Read the guideCare
DIY WordPress maintenance vs a care plan
Six recurring jobs with honest hour estimates, the arithmetic on your own hourly rate, and the cases where doing it yourself is the right call.
7 min read · Updated November 2026
Read the guideWhen something is wrong
Recovery, hardening and platform limits
Ordered checklists for the week a site gets attacked, and an honest split of what WordPress and Shopify leave to you.
Incident
Your site is hacked: the first 24 hours
Contain, preserve evidence, find the entry point, then clean. What to do in the first fifteen minutes and what to avoid doing at all.
8 min read · Updated November 2026
Read the guideSecurity
WooCommerce security checklist
Fourteen fixes ordered by risk reduced per hour, with the screen or config file where each one lives.
10 min read · Updated November 2026
Read the guideSecurity
What Shopify secures for you
The platform owns checkout and infrastructure. Staff accounts, app permissions, theme scripts and DNS are still yours.
7 min read · Updated November 2026
Read the guideBuying a review
How to buy security work without overbuying
Scans, audits, penetration tests and a vendor questionnaire you can answer once and reuse.
Security
Pentest vs vulnerability scan
What each one produces, what it cannot prove, and the five questions that decide which to buy first.
8 min read · Updated November 2026
Read the guideSecurity
Managed security vs in-house
The fully loaded cost of a first security hire at 20 people, and the coverage neither option gives you alone.
9 min read · Updated November 2026
Read the guideTrust
What buyers ask in a security questionnaire
Twelve questions enterprise buyers ask small vendors, the answers that pass review, and the evidence to keep ready.
8 min read · Updated November 2026
Read the guideHow these are written
Same team, same numbers.
Every guide is written and reviewed by the people who do the work: the same team that builds the sites, runs the care plans and writes the audit reports. There are no ghostwritten SEO pages here and no gated PDF at the end.
Prices and response times match the pricing page on the day the guide was updated. Where a number is a market range rather than our own price, the guide says so. Where we do not sell something, such as a penetration test or a 24/7 monitoring contract, the guide says that too.
Nothing on this site invents a client, a logo, a certification or a metric. Our work page labels reference engagements as lab work, and the trust page lists the certifications we do not hold. If a guide is wrong, email hello@your-domain.com with the sentence and the source; corrections are dated in the page.
If you would rather ask a person than read, book a 30-minute fit call and we will answer the same questions on the phone, including the ones where the answer is "you do not need to buy this".