Who this is for
Businesses whose website matters and who have nobody in-house to look after it. Owners who last logged into the admin a year ago and now see 34 pending updates. Companies whose site went down or was defaced and who would rather not repeat the experience. And clients who want small changes made without opening a new project every time.
If your site is currently broken, hacked or crawling, that is a repair job, quoted separately. Care plans keep a working site working; they are not a way to inherit somebody else’s emergency at a monthly rate.
What a care plan covers
- Core, theme and plugin updates, applied on staging first and checked before going live. Applying updates directly to a live site is how a plugin conflict takes down a shop on a Friday.
- Off-site backups on a schedule that matches how often your site changes, stored away from the hosting account and, importantly, test-restored so you know they work.
- Security. Hardened logins, two-factor for administrators, malware scanning, file change monitoring and a review of who still has access. Old accounts belonging to former staff and agencies are a common way in.
- Uptime monitoring with an alert to me, not just to you, so a problem at 2am is being looked at before you open your laptop.
- Speed check each month, because sites slow down gradually as content and plugins accumulate.
- Broken link and form check. Forms are tested from an outside address monthly. A silently broken contact form is the most expensive fault a site can have, and it can run for months unnoticed.
- Small content changes within a monthly time allowance: text edits, new pages, image swaps, price updates.
- A monthly report saying what was updated, what was found and what needs a decision, written for an owner rather than a developer.
What happens each month
- Backup first, always, before any change.
- Updates on staging. Core, theme and plugins applied to a copy, then key pages and the checkout or enquiry path checked by hand.
- Push to live at a quiet hour for your audience, with the rollback ready.
- Checks. Uptime record, malware scan, speed test, broken links, and a form submission from outside your network.
- Your requests. Content changes for the month, done within the agreed allowance.
- Report. What was done, what was found, what I recommend, and how much of your allowance was used.
What is not included
- New features, new templates or redesigns. Those are projects: see website redesign or custom web development.
- Content writing beyond placing text you supply. Writing is copywriting or content marketing.
- Hosting, domains and premium plugin licences, which stay in your name and are paid at cost.
- SEO work. Maintenance protects a site’s technical health; ranking work is under SEO services.
- Recovery from a hack that predates the plan, or repairs to a site that was already broken when it arrived.
Why unmaintained WordPress sites fail
- An outdated plugin with a known, published vulnerability. This is how most WordPress sites are compromised, and the fix existed before the break-in.
- An abandoned plugin that stops working after a PHP version change on the host.
- No backup, or a backup stored on the same server that was compromised.
- An expired SSL certificate, which turns every visitor away with a browser warning.
- A contact form that quietly stopped delivering after an update, discovered when someone asks why they never heard back.
- Administrator accounts still active for a developer who left two years ago.
Hosting is not maintenance
Hosts keep the server running. They do not test your plugin updates, restore your site if a bad update breaks it, or notice that your enquiry form stopped sending email. If the server itself is the problem, that is a different job: hosting and website migration. Site speed that comes from the theme and the images rather than the server is page speed optimization.
Pricing pointer
Care plans are quoted monthly by the type of site and the size of the change allowance you want; a store needs more attention than a five-page business site. Prices are on request, plans are month to month, and every site I build includes 30 days of post-launch fixes whether or not you take a plan.
Next step
Send me your site URL and tell me who currently updates it. I reply within 4 business hours with what state it is in and which level of plan it actually needs, which is sometimes less than you expect.