WordPress Care Plans and Website Maintenance

Summary: Monthly WordPress care plans covering updates, backups, uptime monitoring, and malware cleanup, from developers who have maintained client sites since 2001. Clear pricing, no lock-in, and a person who answers when something breaks.

A WordPress site is not a thing you finish. It is a thing you run.

Plugins update, and sometimes an update breaks a page. Themes fall behind. A form quietly stops delivering and nobody notices for a month. The site slows down and no one can say when it started. None of this is dramatic, and all of it costs you.

A care plan is the arrangement where that stops being your problem.

The plans

Content edits and quick fixes are single requests of about 30 minutes or less. What counts as an edit?

What is a WordPress care plan?

A WordPress care plan is a monthly service that keeps your site updated, backed up, monitored, and supported, so that maintenance happens on a schedule instead of after something goes wrong.

The practical difference is who notices first. Without a plan, you find out your site is down when a customer emails you. With one, we have usually already fixed it.

What is included in every plan

• Plugin, theme, and WordPress core updates, applied on a schedule and checked afterwards rather than applied blindly
• A snapshot before every update, and rollback if one breaks something
• Off-site backups with tested restores, because a backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a backup
• Uptime monitoring with alerts to us, not just to you
• Malware scanning, and cleanup if you are compromised
• A report in plain language covering what was updated and what we found
• Support from a person who knows your site, not a ticket queue
• A 30-day money-back guarantee

How are updates actually applied?

On the Managed plan, updates are applied and tested on a staging copy of your site first, then pushed to production once they pass. Nothing reaches your live site untested.

On every plan, we take a snapshot before any update, and if something breaks we roll it back. That is the difference between managed updates and an automated updater: somebody looks at the result.

How does billing work?

Monthly, quarterly, or annual, whichever suits you. Annual billing saves you one month on Care, and two months on Care + Hosting and Managed.

There is no lock-in on monthly or quarterly. If a plan stops being worth it, tell us and we will stop billing at the end of the period. We would rather you left cleanly than stayed annoyed.

Every plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If the first month does not convince you, we refund it.

How fast do you respond?

Most requests get a reply the same business day, and on the Managed plan urgent problems jump the queue. Urgent means your site is down, or checkout, forms, or login are broken.

We publish that as a target, not a guarantee. Plenty of plans advertise a one-hour response time around the clock. We are a small team of developers rather than a 24-hour call centre, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a number we cannot keep every time.

What counts as a content edit or quick fix?

A single request we can complete in about 30 minutes. Swapping text or images, updating a menu or widget, adding a page from an existing template, adjusting a plugin setting, a small CSS fix. If you can describe it in a sentence or two, it almost certainly qualifies.

What it does not cover: new features, new page designs, custom development, or anything that needs planning before it needs doing. For those we quote first at our hourly rate, and Managed plan clients get 10% off. We will always tell you before anything becomes billable, so there are no surprise invoices.

Edits are per calendar month and do not roll over. If a request looks bigger than one edit, we say so up front and you decide whether to proceed.

What happens if my site gets hacked?

We clean it up, and it is part of your plan rather than a surprise invoice.

That covers sites that have been on a care plan with us for at least 30 days. If you come to us with an infection you already have, we will quote the cleanup as a fixed-price job before we start any work, so you know the number up front.

What a care plan is not is a security audit. Penetration testing and full security audits are a separate engagement, and we would rather tell you that plainly than let a monthly plan imply cover it does not provide.

Why is this different from the maintenance my host includes?

Most maintenance bundled with hosting is an automated updater and nothing else. It applies updates and does not look at the result. When an update breaks your checkout, the automation does not know, and neither does anyone else.

We have been building and running client sites since 2001, and the sites on our plans are ones we can actually fix, because we are developers rather than a support desk following a script. If a plugin update breaks a template, we go and fix the template.

Do I have to move my hosting to you?

No. The Care plan is built for sites that stay where they are, and we will work on your existing host.

If you would rather we handled the hosting too, Care + Hosting includes enterprise WordPress hosting, a global CDN, and a managed server runtime. Most clients end up consolidating, because it is faster for everyone when the team maintaining the site can also reach the server. See managed hosting and cloud operations for the larger infrastructure work.

What if I have several sites, or a store?

That is what the Custom plan is. When you have multiple sites, an ecommerce store, or a custom application, a per-site plan off a table stops being the right shape, so we scope one agreement that covers all of it: hosting, maintenance, monitoring, and a set number of engineering hours each month for the work a maintenance plan does not cover.

Ecommerce sites in particular need this. A store has a checkout, integrations, and data flowing to other systems, and the risk profile is different from a brochure site. We support stores on nopCommerce, AbleCommerce, Shopify, and WooCommerce, and we take on sites we did not build.

There is no price table for this because the honest price depends on what you run. Tell us what you have and we will put a number on it.

What if my site is not WordPress?

We support more than WordPress. We work in nopCommerce, AbleCommerce, Shopify, Umbraco, and custom .NET applications, and we take on sites we did not build.

Care plans on ecommerce platforms are scoped individually rather than bought off a table, because the risk profile of a store is different from a brochure site. See our ecommerce development services, or tell us what you are running and we will scope it.

Getting started

Tell us the site and we will look at it before quoting: what version it is on, how far behind the plugins are, whether backups actually exist. If there is remediation to do before a plan makes sense, we will tell you that rather than start billing monthly on a site that needs work first.

Get in touch and we will take a look.

Tell us which plan looks right and we will confirm it fits your site, or say so if a different one suits you better.