The 90-minute maintenance month: how Northlane runs 142 sites

Priya Raman walks through the update cadence, rollback policy and reporting template her nine-person studio uses — and the three things they deliberately stopped doing.

Three years ago maintenance was the least profitable line on our balance sheet and the one everybody dreaded. We were charging £45 a month per site and spending, honestly, closer to £70 of someone’s time on it. The work itself was not hard. It was the switching cost of doing the same ten-minute job 142 times.

What follows is the actual process we run now. It takes one person roughly ninety minutes a month, plus alerts we handle as they arrive.

Batch by plugin, never by site

The single biggest change. Going site by site means re-reading the same changelog dozens of times. We now group every pending update by plugin, read the changelog once, decide once, and push it to every site that has it.

Sites with custom code sit in a separate group called fragile. Those get the same update a week later, after the wider fleet has proved it safe.

A rollback policy written down

Our rule is boring and non-negotiable: a restore point before every batch, a visual check on three key templates after, and automatic rollback if either fails. Because it is automatic, nobody has to be brave at 6pm on a Friday.

Three things we stopped doing

We stopped manually testing every site after every update, because visual checks do it better and never get tired. We stopped writing bespoke monthly emails, because the templated report says more in less space. And we stopped offering an unlimited-support tier, which was quietly funding the least organised clients with the patience of everyone else.

Maintenance is now our highest-margin service, and the one nobody on the team argues about owning.