Each of the five suits a different brief. Fyresite is the developer to call for a Shopify Plus migration or a site with an app attached; Zion & Zion suits brands that want user research behind every layout decision; Rule29 and Attic Salt make sense when the website is one piece of a broader rebrand, Rule29 for B2B and mission-driven groups and Attic Salt for startups and destinations; and Ideas Collide fits health-care and nonprofit clients that want the site and the campaign from one agency. Whoever you hire, the maintenance terms matter as much as the design, and the three upkeep questions below belong in that conversation: PHP versions, certificate renewals and accessibility widgets.
Which PHP version should a WordPress site be running?
WordPress recommends PHP 8.3 or later, and the calendar makes that pressing. According to the PHP project’s supported-versions page, PHP 8.1 stopped receiving security fixes on December 31, 2025 and PHP 8.2 follows on December 31, 2026, while 8.3 is covered until the end of 2027, 8.4 until the end of 2028 and 8.5, released on November 20, 2025, until the end of 2029. Plugins and themes can break on a version jump, so a care plan should cover testing on a staging copy before the host switches, and a proposal for a new site should name the PHP version it will launch on.
How often will a site’s SSL certificate need renewing?
More often each year. Under a schedule the CA/Browser Forum adopted in April 2025 (ballot SC-081v3), publicly trusted TLS certificates issued from March 15, 2026 can be valid for no more than 200 days, down from 398, falling to 100 days from March 15, 2027 and 47 days from March 15, 2029, while the window for reusing domain-validation checks shrinks to 10 days. Renewal therefore has to be automated, usually through the ACME protocol that most hosts and CDNs support, and any page still served over plain HTTP now costs visitors a click: with Chrome 154, Google switched on its “Always Use Secure Connections” setting by default for public sites, so the browser asks before loading them.
Can an accessibility widget make a website compliant?
Don’t count on one. In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed order against accessiBe, which sells an AI-driven accessibility plug-in, over deceptive claims, and the final order it approved on April 22, 2025 required a $1 million payment, barred the company from claiming without evidence that its automated products can make any website conform to WCAG or keep it conformant, and barred it from presenting paid reviews as independent. Accessibility comes from how a site is designed and coded, from heading structure and color contrast to keyboard navigation, form labels and captions, so ask a designer for results from testing with screen readers rather than a toolbar icon.