Engagement WordPress Engineering
Senior WordPress engineering on retainer. Same team every month. Defined SLAs. Maintenance and feature work in one budget. No hourly billing surprises. Retainers are scope-dependent.
WordPress site health, all clients
Why this matters
The plugin update breaks a custom block at 11pm on a Saturday. The PHP 8.4 bump deprecates a function your theme relied on. The security advisory lands and needs patching this week, not next quarter. Project-based engagements do not cover that work. A retainer does, with the same team that built the site doing the maintenance, and a budget you can actually plan around.
What the retainer covers
Dedicated senior team. Fixed monthly cost. Defined SLAs. Continuous maintenance. Feature work alongside maintenance. Quarterly architecture reviews.
01
Same engineers across every engagement. They learn your codebase, your conventions, your business. By month three they ship faster than a brand-new contractor ever could.
Onboarding cost amortized once, not every quarter.
02
No hourly billing surprises. No "you used 4 extra hours" invoices. The retainer covers a defined scope of work each month. Overflow is discussed before it ships, not after.
Finance team gets a budget number that holds.
03
P1 (production down): 2-hour response, 8-hour resolution target. P2 (degraded): 8-hour response, 48-hour resolution. P3 (planned work): scheduled in the next sprint. SLAs documented before you sign.
Your team knows when help arrives.
04
WordPress core updates, plugin updates, security patches, PHP version bumps, dependency updates, automated backups, uptime monitoring. The infrastructure stays current without you scheduling it.
Site stays current without weekly intervention.
05
Each retainer includes a defined number of feature engineering hours. Your team requests work, we scope it, the work ships in the next sprint. No separate purchase orders for every change.
Roadmap moves forward every month.
06
Every quarter we audit your WordPress install: performance, security, code quality, plugin health, infrastructure. Recommendations land in the next month roadmap.
Technical debt actually gets addressed.
2hr
P1 (production down) response SLA across all retainer tiers
24/7 coverage available on enterprise retainers.
How retainers work
01
Two weeks. Codebase audit, infrastructure inventory, runbook capture, SLA agreement, on-call setup. We document everything before we touch production.
Team is operational in 14 days.
02
Ongoing monthly. Sprints scoped, work shipped, maintenance happens in the background, P1 emergencies handled with the agreed SLA. Weekly check-ins, monthly reporting.
Roadmap moves every month.
03
Every quarter. Architecture audit, performance review, security audit, technical debt assessment, retainer scope review. Adjust the engagement as your needs change.
Engagement evolves with your business.
Common questions
Continuity, depth, and SLA. A team of senior engineers covers each other for sick days, vacations, and load spikes. Quarterly architecture reviews catch issues before they become incidents. SLAs mean your team can plan around defined response times. An individual developer is a single point of failure.
Three months. Most clients stay for years once the team is up to speed. Cancellation is 30 days notice after the initial three-month period.
We discuss before the month starts. Either we increase the retainer for that month, or the overflow lands in the next month, or we hire a temporary additional engineer for the project. We never silently bill overage.
Yes. P1 emergencies (production down) are covered with a 2-hour response SLA, 24/7. We have on-call coverage for production-critical clients. Emergency response time is included; the engineering hours used during the emergency draw down the monthly budget.
Yes. Single-site, multisite, headless WordPress with Astro, WooCommerce, BuddyPress, BuddyBoss, LearnDash, MemberPress, EDD, custom plugins, custom themes. Hosting on WP Engine, Kinsta, Pantheon, Pressable, AWS, GCP, or your own infrastructure.
WordPress development retainers are scope-dependent for maintenance and small feature work. Mid-tier retainers (40 to 80 engineering hours per month) are scoped after discovery. Enterprise retainers (160+ hours, 24/7 P1 coverage) are scoped after discovery. Discovery call is free.
Yes. Most clients start on pay-as-you-go for 1 to 3 months before converting to retainer. 20 hours upfront, then additional blocks in whatever size fits velocity (15, 40, or 60 hours are typical, you decide). Every hour tracked in Basecamp. Once cadence and load are clear, we right-size the retainer tier and switch billing.
Ready for WordPress engineering you can plan around?
Discovery call is free. Fixed-price quote within 48 hours. NDA on request.
