What website maintenance should include

A website care plan is a monthly fee that keeps a site online, backed up, patched and edited. The trouble is that two plans at $99 a month can differ by a factor of ten in what they actually do. Here are the frequencies to ask for, ours, what we charge for everything else, and one case where you should not buy a care plan at all.

What should a website care plan include?

Seven things, each with a number attached. Backups (how often, kept how long), uptime checks (how many seconds apart), software updates (how often applied), an SSL certificate that renews itself, included edit time (how many minutes), a written monthly report, and a named human who replies. If a plan will not state the number, that item is not really in it.

The 30 minutes covers what a small business actually changes: opening hours, a price list, three photos swapped, a paragraph rewritten, a staff member added. Unused minutes do not roll over; better you know that now than in month four.

What is actually in the monthly report?

One page, by email, with no dashboard to log into. Eight sections, every one a number you can go and check yourself:

1. Uptime. The percentage for the month, and every failed check with date, time and duration.
2. Backups. How many ran (28 to 31), how many failed, and the date of the last restore we tested.
3. Updates. What was patched, which version, on what date.
4. Speed. Two pages scored against Google's thresholds — web.dev puts "good" at LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less and CLS of 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile of loads.
5. What people did. Forms sent, taps on your phone number, clicks for directions — with dates, not one total.
6. Search Console. Impressions, clicks, your top ten queries, and any page that lost position since last month.
7. Edits. What we changed, and how many of the 30 minutes you used.
8. Decisions. A short list of anything that needs you: a review to answer, a stale page, a price we think is wrong.

The accounts stay in your name, so you can open Search Console and check our figures against Google's. See who owns your website.

What is not included, and what does it cost?

Anything past the 30 minutes is quoted in writing first, and nothing is charged until you agree the number. The full rate card, September 2026:

Five things we do not build at any price: online stores, booking systems, custom web apps, membership portals, multi-location franchise sites. If that is what you need, we say so on the first email.

Is a care plan cheaper than paying someone when it breaks?

Not always. It depends on how often you change things. Codeable, the WordPress freelancer marketplace, publishes a rate of "$80–$120 USD hourly rate" (checked September 2026), with fixed-price jobs from $420. Two two-hour incidents a year is $320 to $480, plus hosting.

What is in a website maintenance package, tier by tier?

Maintenance packages are sold under a dozen names — care plan, support retainer, WordPress support services — and contain three or four recognisable tiers underneath. What separates them is not how much maintenance happens but how much human time is included.

The question that sorts them: how many minutes of somebody's time is in this, and what happens when I go over? "Unlimited small edits" is a quantity only once "small" is defined in writing.

What do other care plans cost in 2026?

Published prices from the providers' own pages, 14 September 2026:

Read that honestly, with the break-even written out. Ours is $69 plus $20 an hour beyond the included 30 minutes, so it reaches $179 — the price of unlimited — at five and a half extra hours, which is six hours of edits in a month. Below that we are cheaper. A business rewriting its site every week should buy unlimited from someone who sells it; almost no local business changes six hours' worth of pages a month.

I like my website. Can you just maintain it?

No. We only maintain sites we built, so we rebuild first, then maintain. That sounds like an upsell, so here is the arithmetic behind it.

Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2025 reports that "7,966 new security vulnerabilities were found in the WordPress ecosystem in 2024" — 96% in plugins, 4% in themes, seven in core itself. The number that matters more for a care plan is the next one: the same report finds that "in 2024, 33% of vulnerabilities were not fixed in time for public disclosure". A third of the time the update you are paying someone to apply did not exist on the day the flaw became public. A small business site typically runs 20 to 40 plugins. Keeping that patched and unbroken is recurring, unpredictable work, which is why plans for someone else's WordPress start near $89 and reach $435.

We build in Next.js and serve from our own servers. No plugins to break, no database to inject, no admin login to brute-force. Maintenance is cheap because we removed the thing that generates it. The rebuild costs $299 once; a plugin stack costs every month, forever.

You need not take that on faith. We rebuild your homepage free, at a private link, before any money moves. If it is not better, say no and we delete it. Old page addresses get redirected so the rankings come with you — redesigning without losing rankings covers how.

Why is $69 a month so cheap?

Because the expensive half of a website build is not the building. It is discovery — chasing you for your services, hours, photos, license numbers and copy. That is where the weeks go. You already have a website, so all of that is already on the open web. We take it from there. You send us nothing.

The rest is structural. One person builds the sites and answers the email, so no account manager sits in the price. The sites are static and cheap to serve, and no plugin stack means few emergencies — the cost nobody can quote in advance. See pricing and the monthly plan guide.

How do I check my current plan is real?

Send your provider this. The reply tells you more than any sales page — one with real backups answers in five lines.

Subject: Five quick questions about our maintenance plan

Hi,

Could you confirm in writing:

1. How often is our site backed up, and how long is each backup kept?
2. Are backups stored on the same server as the site, or off it?
3. When did you last actually restore one, and to what?
4. How many seconds apart are the uptime checks, and who gets the alert?
5. If I asked today for a full copy of the site files and database,
   how long would it take and what would it cost?

Thanks,

Question 3 matters most — a backup nobody has restored is a file, not a backup. On question 5, a fee or a delay means you have a lock-in problem, not a maintenance problem: see moving your website. If the site is already broken rather than neglected, start at fixing a broken website.