Who Looks After Your Site?
WordPress Care Plans
Updates get applied, backups get tested, and somebody notices when the site goes down — before a customer calls to tell you. Three plans from $79 a month, or $125 an hour if you would rather pay as you go.
Every plan covers the same core work: WordPress core, plugin and theme updates with a restore point taken first, uptime monitoring, malware scanning, and a monthly report. What changes as you move up is how the updates are applied, how fast we answer, and how much hands-on work is included. No setup fee. Cancel any time.
Do You Actually Need A Care Plan?
Not every site does. Here is an honest way to tell, and we would rather you worked it out now than cancelled in month three.
You probably do not need one if somebody in your business already applies updates on a schedule, has restored a backup at least once to prove it works, and would know within minutes if the site went down. That is the whole job. If it is being done, paying us to do it again is waste.
You probably do need one if any of these are true. You cannot say when the site was last updated. You do not know whether your backups would restore, because nobody has tried. There is a plugin on the site that nobody remembers installing and nobody is willing to remove. The person who built the site has moved on and left no notes. You have put off an update because the last one broke something. Or the honest answer to “who would notice if the site went down on a Saturday?” is nobody.
The cost comparison people get wrong. The question is not whether $79 a month is worth an hour of updates — on that basis it never looks worth it, because most months nothing happens. The question is what one bad month costs. A compromised WordPress site typically means emergency developer time at a rush rate, a clean rebuild from a backup that may or may not exist, days of degraded search visibility while Google works out the site is safe again, and the phone calls from customers who hit a warning page. Set against that, the monthly fee is insurance with a maintenance service attached, and the maintenance is the part that stops you needing the insurance.
A site that earns money is the clearest case. If a day of downtime costs you more than a year of the plan, the arithmetic is not close. If your site is a business card that generates two enquiries a month, Essentials or hourly is genuinely the right answer and we will tell you so.
The Three Care Plans
Prices are per site, per month. Annual is ten months for twelve. Everything below is what we commit to in writing, not a best effort.
Plan | Price | Built for | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
Essentials | $79/mo $790/yr | One business site that needs to stay current and stay up. | Weekly updates with a full restore point taken first and the key pages checked afterwards. Uptime monitoring, malware scanning, monthly report. 30 minutes of hands-on work included. We reply within one business day. |
Business | $149/mo $1,490/yr | A site that earns money, or several sites under one roof. | Everything in Essentials, plus updates tested on a staging copy first, checks twice a week, and a documented restore test every quarter so you know the backups actually work. 2 hours included. We reply within 4 business hours, or 2 if the site is down. |
Commerce | $299/mo $2,990/yr | A WooCommerce store where downtime costs orders. | Everything in Business, plus checkout tested end to end after every update, release freeze windows you set around sales and launches, and priority queueing. 4 hours included. We reply within 2 business hours, or 1 hour, 24/7, if the store is down. |
In Every Plan, At Every Tier
Core, plugin and theme updates
Applied on a schedule by a person who checks the site afterwards, not by an automatic updater that emails you when something breaks.
A restore point before every update
Taken first, every time. If an update goes badly we roll back rather than debug your live site while customers watch.
Uptime monitoring
Checked continuously. If the site goes down we know before you do, and the clock on our response starts then, not when you email.
Malware and vulnerability scanning
Scanned for known plugin vulnerabilities and for changes to files that should not be changing.
A monthly report in plain English
What was updated, what broke, what we fixed, and what we think you should deal with next. One page. No dashboard login required.
A person who knows your site
The same team every time, with notes on your particular setup. You are not re-explaining your plugin stack to a new agent every month.
What We Commit To
Response time is when a human replies and starts work, not an automated ticket acknowledgement. Business hours are 9am to 6pm Eastern, Monday to Friday.
Essentials | Business | Commerce | |
|---|---|---|---|
We reply within | 1 business day | 4 business hours | 2 business hours |
If the site is down | 1 business day | 2 business hours | 1 hour, 24/7 |
Update method | Backup, update, visual check | Tested on staging first | Staging, then checkout tested |
Update frequency | Weekly | Twice weekly | Twice weekly, plus security same-day |
Work included | 30 minutes a month | 2 hours a month | 4 hours a month |
Restore testing | On request | Documented, quarterly | Documented, quarterly |
Freeze windows | — | On request | Yes, you set them |
Extra work | $125/hr | $125/hr | $125/hr |
Or Pay By The Hour
Hourly is a real option and some businesses genuinely prefer it — if your site rarely changes and you have someone in-house watching it, paying only when you need us is reasonable. For everyone else it is the more expensive way to buy the same work, and it buys none of the monitoring. Two hours of hourly work costs more than a month of the Business plan, which includes those two hours plus everything else on this page.
On a care plan | By the hour | |
|---|---|---|
Rate | From $79 a month, everything below included | $125 an hour, billed in 30-minute increments |
Updates | Applied on a schedule, checked afterwards | Only when you notice and ask |
Monitoring | Continuous. We call you | None. You find out when a customer calls |
Backups | Restore point before every change | Whatever your host happens to keep |
Response | Committed in writing, 1 business day to 1 hour | Scheduled when we have capacity |
Knowing your site | Same team, notes on your setup | We re-learn it, on your clock, each time |
Two hours of work | Included at Business — $149 | $250, and nothing else |
How A Care Plan Starts
1. We audit what is there
Before anything is charged beyond the first month, we go through the plugin list, the theme, the PHP version, the backup situation and what is out of date. You get that assessment whether or not you continue.
2. We back up and fix what is urgent
A complete restore point first. Then anything genuinely dangerous — an abandoned plugin with a known vulnerability, a missing certificate, a PHP version out of support — gets dealt with in the first month.
3. We set the rhythm
Update day, freeze windows, who we contact and how. Written down, so it happens the same way whether or not the person who set it up is around.
4. You get a report, and mostly forget about us
One page a month. The rest of the time the site is quietly current and someone is watching it. That is the entire product.
What A Care Plan Does Not Cover
Being clear about this up front prevents the awkward conversation later, and it is the part most care plan pages leave vague.
New features and redesigns. A care plan keeps what exists working. Building a new booking system, redesigning the homepage or adding a members area is project work. We are happy to quote it, and plan customers get scheduled ahead of new ones, but it is not covered by the monthly fee.
Content. We will publish a page you have written and make sure it does not break the layout. We will not write it, source the photography or maintain your blog.
Third-party licence fees. If your site depends on a premium plugin or theme, that licence is yours and we will tell you when it is about to lapse. A lapsed licence usually means the plugin silently stops receiving security updates while still appearing current, which is exactly the failure a care plan is meant to prevent — so we watch for it, but we do not pay for it.
Custom code somebody else wrote. We will keep it running and fix what we reasonably can. We will not take ownership of an undocumented custom plugin or rewrite a bespoke theme under a maintenance retainer. If that code is what keeps breaking, we will say so and quote replacing it.
SEO and marketing campaigns. We keep the site fast, current and crawlable, which is the technical foundation. Keyword research, content strategy and link building are separate work.
Hosting, unless it is ours. Care plans work on any host. If the problem is the host — resource limits, oversold servers, support that takes three days — we will tell you plainly, and moving to us is free, but a care plan does not make a bad host good.
Work beyond the included time. Once the monthly allowance is used, further work is $125 an hour. We quote before starting, never after, and we will always tell you when you are close to the line rather than letting you discover it on an invoice.
How We Decide What To Update, And When
“Keep everything updated” is not a policy, because applying every release the moment it appears is how sites break. This is the actual rule set.
Security releases go same day. If a plugin you run has a disclosed vulnerability, the update is applied as soon as it exists, on every plan, without waiting for your scheduled update day. This is the one category where the risk of updating is always lower than the risk of waiting.
WordPress minor releases go within the week. These are maintenance and security releases and they are extremely well tested before they ship. They rarely break anything.
WordPress major releases wait. A new major version goes on a staging copy first and sits there until the plugins you actually depend on have confirmed compatibility. Being three weeks behind on a major release is not a security problem. Being first is how you find the bug nobody has reported yet.
Plugin updates are batched. Applied together on your scheduled day so that if something breaks there is one change window to look at rather than fourteen scattered through the month. On Business and Commerce that batch runs on staging first.
Some things do not get updated. A plugin whose new version drops a feature you rely on, or which has a wave of one-star reviews reporting a fatal error, gets held and flagged rather than applied. We tell you what we held and why in the monthly report. Holding an update is a decision with a reason, not an oversight.
You can freeze us out. On Business and Commerce you set windows where nothing changes — a sale, a launch, your busiest fortnight of the year, the week you are on holiday and unreachable. Security releases are the only exception, and we will call you before applying one during a freeze.
Abandoned plugins get escalated, not ignored. If something on your site has stopped receiving updates, or has been pulled from the WordPress directory entirely, that goes in the report as an action rather than a note. Removal from the directory is the dangerous case, because your dashboard will keep showing the plugin as current while it quietly receives no further security fixes.
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WordPress Care Plan FAQs
A care plan is an ongoing arrangement where someone applies your WordPress updates, keeps a tested backup, watches the site for downtime and malware, and fixes small things as they come up. You need one if nobody in your business is currently doing that work, and you would not know for several hours that the site was down. If you have someone in-house who patches weekly and tests restores, you do not need one.
Ours are $79, $149 and $299 a month per site, or ten months for twelve on annual billing. Additional hands-on work beyond the time included in your plan is $125 an hour at every tier. There is no setup fee and no cancellation fee. If you would rather not commit to a retainer, the same work is available at $125 an hour with no monitoring and no committed response time.
Three things. At $149 updates are tested on a staging copy before they touch the live site, rather than applied directly after a backup. You get a documented restore test every quarter, so you know the backups actually work rather than assuming. And the response commitment tightens from one business day to four business hours, or two if the site is down. The included work time also goes from 30 minutes to 2 hours.
We take a full restore point before every update, so the answer is that we roll back rather than debug your live site while customers are on it. That is the single most important reason the backup step comes first at every tier, including Essentials. Once the site is back up we work out what broke in a staging copy, on our time, not yours.
No. Included time is 30 minutes, 2 hours or 4 hours in the month it belongs to, and it does not accumulate. That keeps the plans predictable for both of us — you are not paying for banked hours you never use, and we are not facing a customer who wants twelve saved hours spent in one week. Work beyond the allowance is quoted at $125 an hour before we start.
No. Care plans work on any host where we can get the access we need. If you are hosted with us the two fit together more neatly — we can see the server side as well as the site — but it is not a requirement, and moving to us is not a condition. If you do want to move, migration is free and we handle it.
Yes, at any time, effective at the end of the current billing period. Monthly plans stop at the end of the month. Annual plans are refunded pro rata for whole months remaining. You keep your backups and we hand over anything we hold about your setup.