What is the difference between maintenance and support?

Maintenance is the scheduled work: updates on a staggered rollout, backups with restore drills, vulnerability scans, performance monitoring. Support is the unscheduled work: something broke, or somebody needs an answer today. Plans that only cover the first one leave you paying a monthly fee and still hunting for help on the day it matters, so every plan here includes both.

What does a WordPress maintenance plan include?

Updates (core, plugins, themes) on a staggered rollout. Daily backups with quarterly restore drills. Vulnerability scans every 24 hours. Uptime monitoring with response SLA. Performance monitoring with monthly review. Monthly report. Two hours of dev time per month for small fixes.

What is NOT included?

New features, design changes, plugin development, content work, marketing, SEO. Those are separate scopes, quoted separately. The retainer is purely operations and maintenance. Larger requests get scoped as projects.

What if my site goes down?

External uptime monitoring detects within five minutes. We acknowledge within fifteen minutes during business hours, sixty minutes outside. Investigation starts immediately, root cause documented within 24 hours. Higher tier retainers include 24/7 response.

Can you maintain WooCommerce or BuddyPress sites?

Yes. Both are within scope. WooCommerce sites get extra QA on plugin updates because of the ecommerce surface area. BuddyPress sites get monitoring on the activity stream and notification surfaces. We have shipped and maintained both for years.

Your host stays your host. We work with WP Engine, Kinsta, Pressable, Pantheon, Cloudways, Rocket.net, and managed VPS hosts. We will recommend a host change if the current one is the bottleneck, but we do not force a migration.

Is maintenance already covered by my hosting?

No. A host keeps the server up and usually takes backups. It does not update your plugins, test that an update did not break checkout, watch a paid theme whose licence has lapsed, or tell you when a plugin has been abandoned. That gap is what a maintenance plan covers.

Do you check custom code and custom plugins too?

Yes, and this is the part most plans skip. Bespoke plugins, child themes, and one-off integrations do not appear in the WordPress update screen, so nothing warns you when a PHP or WordPress release is about to break them. We track your custom work alongside the third-party stack and tell you when it needs attention, before it fails.

How much do WordPress maintenance plans cost?

Four fixed tiers, billed monthly per site: Essentials $99, Professional $179, Ultimate $299, and Care Pro $499 which includes four development hours a month. Malware cleanup, restores and emergency response are inside the price rather than billed per incident, so a bad month does not produce a surprise invoice. Multi-site pricing starts at five sites.

Service Maintenance

Hands-off WordPress maintenance, fixed monthly cost.

Updates done right. Backups that actually restore. Security monitored. Performance watched. Uptime alerts that wake the right person. Built for sites that cannot go down.

Start a project See our work

WordPress agency since 2013, retainers are scope-dependent

Why maintenance

Most WordPress sites are one plugin update away from breaking.

The site works. Until WordPress 6.5 ships and the auto-updater pushes it live and three plugins were not tested against trunk and now the admin is a white screen at 3pm on a Friday. Or until a vulnerability in a plugin you forgot you installed gets exploited. Or until backups stop running and nobody notices for six months.

Maintenance is the thing that keeps the site you spent money building from quietly degrading. We do it the way we run our own production sites: staged updates, tested backups, monitored uptime, and a response SLA that does not depend on the customer noticing first.

Health, live

The dashboard we check before you wake up.

Four meters from a real client site we maintain. Uptime, Core Web Vitals performance, security patch status, backup recency. The actions feed below shows the maintenance events that ran in the last 24 hours. Scroll up and back down to replay.

0.00%

Uptime · 30d 12.6 sec total downtime

0/100

Lighthouse · mobile LCP 1.4s · CLS 0.04 · INP 142ms

Security patches 14 of 14 plugins current

Backup age last 1.2 GB · next in 2h

Recent maintenance · last 24h 8 events

WP 6.7.1 security patch applied · 14 plugins on latest 14m ago
Backup completed · 1.2 GB · 6h retention slot 4h ago
SSL renewed · 89 days remaining · CT-log verified 7h ago
PHP 8.3 upgrade scheduled · next maintenance window · 2 sites tested on staging 11h ago
Cache flushed and re-warmed across 12 region edges 18h ago

60s health check cadence on every retained site
P1 acknowledged within 1 business hour · 4h overnight
Every action logged, summarised in weekly written status

Updates done staggered

Core, plugin, and theme updates rolled out on a staging environment first. Visual regression check against the live site. Production deploy in a low-traffic window. No surprise white screens on Monday morning.

Updates ship without breaking the site.

Off-site backups, tested restores

Daily incremental backups to S3 or B2 in a region separate from your host. Quarterly restore drills to verify backups actually work. Documented restore procedure, tested on real data, not just hoped to work.

Recovery time objective measured in hours, not days.

Security monitoring and response

File integrity monitoring active. Failed login alerts. Vulnerability scans against the active plugin list every 24 hours. Critical vulnerabilities patched within the SLA, not whenever we get to it.

Vulnerabilities closed before exploitation.

Performance watched, not just hoped at

Real User Monitoring on Core Web Vitals. PageSpeed scores tracked monthly. Slow query log reviewed for regressions. Performance regressions investigated and fixed under the retainer.

Site stays fast as plugins update and content grows.

Uptime alerts that wake the right person

External uptime monitoring from multiple regions. Alerts to Slack, email, or PagerDuty depending on tier. We respond, not just notify. Outages investigated and root-caused, not just acknowledged.

Mean time to detect under five minutes.

Monthly report, no jargon

What was updated, what was patched, what changed in performance, what we recommend next. Written for the person paying the invoice, not for a developer audience. Trends visible across months.

Stakeholders see the value every month.

13 years

running WordPress production stacks for ourselves and clients

Same operational discipline applied to every retainer site.

Backups

How much work a restore costs you

Essentials backs up every 24 hours, Professional every 12, Ultimate every 6, and Care Pro inherits Ultimate. The figure that matters is not the frequency, it is how much of a working day you lose when you actually restore.

Busier the site, shorter the window worth paying for.

Response

Who answers, and how fast

Essentials is email in business hours. Professional adds 24/7 priority. Ultimate adds a dedicated account manager and emergency response when production is down. Care Pro puts you in a same-day queue with a direct Slack channel to the engineer doing the work.

Match this to what one bad hour actually costs.

Included time

Whether changes ship, or only get logged

Professional includes an hour of technical support and a 30 minute consultation. Ultimate doubles both. Care Pro adds four hours of senior development a month, rolling unused hours forward to a cap of eight, which is what clears a backlog rather than growing one.

Care Pro is the tier that ships, not just maintains.

What it costs

Four tiers, billed monthly per site.

Malware cleanup, restores and emergency response sit inside the price rather than being billed per incident, so a bad month does not produce a surprise invoice. Multi-site pricing starts at five sites.

Essentials

$99per site, per month

A site that rarely changes. No checkout, no active build.
Professional

$179per site, per month

Regular content changes, plugins that matter, a real audience.
Ultimate

$299per site, per month

High-traffic stores and busy communities where downtime costs money.
Care Pro

$499per site, per month

Still being built on. Includes four development hours a month.

Compare what each tier includes

Quick enquiry

Want a quote on this?

Tell us what you need in a line. We reply within four business hours, and the discovery call is free.

Prefer the full form? Start a project

What is the difference between maintenance and support?

Maintenance is the scheduled work: updates on a staggered rollout, backups with restore drills, vulnerability scans, performance monitoring. Support is the unscheduled work: something broke, or somebody needs an answer today. Plans that only cover the first one leave you paying a monthly fee and still hunting for help on the day it matters, so every plan here includes both.
What does a WordPress maintenance plan include?

Updates (core, plugins, themes) on a staggered rollout. Daily backups with quarterly restore drills. Vulnerability scans every 24 hours. Uptime monitoring with response SLA. Performance monitoring with monthly review. Monthly report. Two hours of dev time per month for small fixes.
What is NOT included?

New features, design changes, plugin development, content work, marketing, SEO. Those are separate scopes, quoted separately. The retainer is purely operations and maintenance. Larger requests get scoped as projects.
What if my site goes down?

External uptime monitoring detects within five minutes. We acknowledge within fifteen minutes during business hours, sixty minutes outside. Investigation starts immediately, root cause documented within 24 hours. Higher tier retainers include 24/7 response.
Can you maintain WooCommerce or BuddyPress sites?

Yes. Both are within scope. WooCommerce sites get extra QA on plugin updates because of the ecommerce surface area. BuddyPress sites get monitoring on the activity stream and notification surfaces. We have shipped and maintained both for years.
Where do you host?

Your host stays your host. We work with WP Engine, Kinsta, Pressable, Pantheon, Cloudways, Rocket.net, and managed VPS hosts. We will recommend a host change if the current one is the bottleneck, but we do not force a migration.
Is maintenance already covered by my hosting?

No. A host keeps the server up and usually takes backups. It does not update your plugins, test that an update did not break checkout, watch a paid theme whose licence has lapsed, or tell you when a plugin has been abandoned. That gap is what a maintenance plan covers.
Do you check custom code and custom plugins too?

Yes, and this is the part most plans skip. Bespoke plugins, child themes, and one-off integrations do not appear in the WordPress update screen, so nothing warns you when a PHP or WordPress release is about to break them. We track your custom work alongside the third-party stack and tell you when it needs attention, before it fails.
How much do WordPress maintenance plans cost?

Four fixed tiers, billed monthly per site: Essentials $99, Professional $179, Ultimate $299, and Care Pro $499 which includes four development hours a month. Malware cleanup, restores and emergency response are inside the price rather than billed per incident, so a bad month does not produce a surprise invoice. Multi-site pricing starts at five sites.

See Care Plan pricing