$95 a month, and the person who built your site is the person who maintains it. Tested updates, real backups, and someone who picks up the phone when something breaks.
A website is not a finished product. WordPress core, PHP, plugins and themes all keep changing underneath it, and a site left alone for two years is a site waiting to break or get broken into. A care plan is what keeps the thing you paid for working.
What Breaks When Nobody Is Watching
Most WordPress problems are not dramatic. They are quiet, and that is what makes them expensive.
A plugin update changes a function and your contact form stops sending, but the page still shows a thank you message so nobody notices for six weeks. An abandoned plugin stops receiving security patches and nothing tells you. Your host upgrades PHP and half a layout disappears on a page you rarely visit. Links to pages you deleted last year quietly turn into errors, which is a problem worth checking even if you never sign up for anything, and our guide to finding broken links in WordPress covers how.
The one that costs the most is backups. Plenty of sites have nightly backups saved onto the same server as the website, which is fine right up until the server is the thing that fails. If you want to check your own setup first, our overview of WordPress backup methods explains what a usable backup actually looks like.
Tested Updates, Not Automatic Ones
This is the real difference between a $30 plan and a plan worth paying for, and it is the question most people never think to ask.
Automatic updates apply changes straight to your live site and hope nothing breaks. When something does break, the plan does not know, and neither do you until a customer mentions it. We apply updates to a staging copy of your site first, check the pages that actually matter, your homepage, your service pages, your forms and your checkout, and only then push them live. If an update breaks something, it breaks somewhere your customers never see.
Updates run weekly rather than monthly. That is 52 checks a year instead of 12, and it matters because the gap between a plugin vulnerability being published and being exploited is usually measured in days.
What Is In the Plan
- WordPress core, plugin and theme updates, tested on staging before they go live
- Weekly update cycle, not monthly
- Daily backups stored off your server, with restores tested rather than assumed
- Uptime monitoring, so we know your site is down before you do
- Security scanning, with malware cleanup and restoration included rather than billed as an emergency
- Monthly performance check on your key pages
- Up to one hour of content changes each month: text, images, prices, hours, staff, a new blog post
- A short monthly note in plain language telling you what was done and what needs attention
Why Fewer Plugins Means Less Goes Wrong
Maintenance is easier on some sites than others, and the reason is usually what the site was built on.
A site built on a purchased theme typically arrives with a dozen bundled plugins it did not choose, each one a separate thing that can break, and each one dependent on a theme author who may stop updating next year. Every site we build uses the Solid Maple Build approach, which starts from a blank canvas with no inherited plugins. Fewer moving parts means fewer update conflicts and a shorter list of things that can fail at 2am.
If your site was not built that way, we can still maintain it. We just look at what is under the hood first and tell you honestly whether it is worth maintaining or whether the plugin stack is the actual problem.
What Happens When Something Breaks
Every care plan promises to prevent problems. Fewer of them tell you what happens when prevention fails, which is the part you are really buying.
If an update breaks something, we roll back to the pre-update snapshot, which exists because we took it before touching anything. If your site goes down, monitoring tells us, not a customer email. If malware gets in, cleanup and restoration are covered by the plan rather than quoted as an emergency at an hourly rate, which is one of the biggest hidden differences between care plans and worth asking any provider about.
And you contact one person directly, not a ticket queue. There is no scenario where you are explaining your site from scratch to someone who has never seen it.
What It Costs
Care Plan, $95 a month
For business and brochure sites. Everything listed above, including the hour of content changes.
Store Care, $165 a month
For WooCommerce sites, where a broken checkout costs money by the hour rather than by the week. Adds checkout testing after every update cycle, payment gateway monitoring, and priority response. Pairs with our e-commerce web design builds.
Beyond the plan
Work outside the included hour is $95 an hour, always quoted and approved before we start. No contract and no minimum term. Cancel with thirty days notice, and you keep every login the entire time because they were always yours.
For context, care plans across this market run from about $30 to $500 a month. Under $50 you are almost always buying automated updates with nobody checking the result. Over $200 you are usually paying for a team you will never speak to directly. Ad-hoc fixes without a plan run $50 to $150 an hour from a freelancer and $100 to $250 from an agency, which is why a single broken update can cost more than a year of maintenance.
What Is Not Included
Honest boundaries, so nothing surprises you on an invoice.
Hosting is not included and we do not resell it. Your hosting stays your account, in your name, with your billing. If you are unsure whether your current host is the problem, our comparison of cheap and premium WordPress hosting is a useful starting point.
SEO is not included. Maintenance keeps a site healthy. SEO makes it visible. Those are genuinely different jobs and bundling them lets providers charge for one while doing neither properly.
New pages, new features and redesigns are quoted separately. If we think your site needs rebuilding rather than maintaining, we will say so instead of billing you monthly for something that cannot be maintained into working. That conversation starts at website redesign.
Who Actually Does the Work
You can win the auction and still lose the customer. If your ad promises furnace repair and the click lands on a homepage listing nine services, most of that traffic leaves. Agencies that do not build websites either charge separately for landing pages, commonly $1,000 to $5,000 each, or send your paid traffic to whatever page already exists.
We build WordPress sites, so a dedicated landing page is part of the campaign build rather than a separate invoice. If your existing site is too slow to convert paid traffic, we will say so and quote a redesign instead of charging you monthly to send clicks at a page that cannot hold them.
We Did Not Build Your Site. Can You Still Help
Usually yes, and it is a common way clients start with us.
We begin with a look at what your site is running: WordPress version, PHP version, how many plugins, how old they are, whether anything is abandoned, and whether a real backup exists. That review is free and takes about fifteen minutes of our time.
If everything is in reasonable shape, we start the plan. If there is a backlog of neglected updates or a security problem already present, we quote a one time cleanup before the plan begins, so you are not paying a monthly fee to sit on top of an existing mess. And occasionally the honest answer is that the site is too far gone to maintain economically, in which case we will tell you that rather than take the monthly fee.
Questions Worth Asking Any Provider
Use these on us too.
- Do you test updates before applying them, or do they run automatically on the live site?
- Have you ever actually restored one of your backups? A backup nobody has tested is a hope, not a plan.
- Is malware cleanup included, or billed separately as an emergency?
- How often do updates run, weekly or monthly?
- Where are backups stored, on the same server as the site or somewhere else?
- Who will I actually be speaking to when something breaks?
- If I leave, what do I take with me?
Any provider who answers these clearly is probably fine. Any provider who gets vague on more than one of them is selling you automated updates with a nice invoice.
Common Questions
How much does website maintenance cost?
Most WordPress care plans cost between $30 and $500 a month, and ours is $95. Under about $50 a month you are usually buying automated updates with nobody reviewing the result. Above $200 you are typically paying for a larger team you will not deal with directly. Store maintenance costs more than a brochure site because a broken checkout is a revenue problem rather than an inconvenience.
Do I really need a website maintenance plan?
You need one if your website matters to your business and you cannot fix it yourself. WordPress, PHP, plugins and themes all change independently of each other, and most sites break at the seams between them rather than all at once. If your site is a hobby project, skip it. If it produces enquiries, a month of downtime costs more than a year of maintenance.
What happens if I do not update WordPress?
Your site stays online for a while and then becomes a security risk. Outdated plugins are the most common way WordPress sites get compromised, because published vulnerabilities become public instructions the moment they are announced. Sites also drift out of compatibility, so when you finally do update, several things break at once instead of one at a time.
Can I just use automatic updates instead?
You can, and it works until it does not. Automatic updates apply changes to your live site with nothing checking the result, so a broken form or a broken layout stays broken until a customer mentions it. The value of a care plan is not the updating. It is the testing before and the noticing after.
Is hosting included in your care plan?
No. Hosting stays your own account in your own name, and we do not resell it. That means you are never locked in and you can leave at any time with everything intact. Expect to pay roughly $150 to $300 a year for decent WordPress hosting on top of the plan.
Do you maintain websites you did not build?
Yes, and it is a common way clients start with us. We review what your site is running first: WordPress version, PHP version, plugin count and age, and whether a working backup exists. If there is a backlog of neglected updates or an existing security problem, we quote a one time cleanup before the plan starts, so you are not paying monthly to sit on top of a mess.
How often do you back up my website?
Daily, stored off your server rather than on it, and we test restores rather than assuming they work. Backups saved to the same server as the website are the most common false sense of security in WordPress, because they fail in exactly the situation you need them.
What if my website gets hacked?
Can I cancel anytime?
Yes. There is no contract and no minimum term. Cancel with thirty days notice and keep every login, because they were always in your name. We will also hand over documentation of anything we set up so whoever takes over is not starting blind.
Start a Care Plan
Send us your website address. We will look at what it is running, how current the plugins are, whether a real backup exists, and whether anything needs fixing before a plan makes sense.
15 minutes, no cost, and you get the findings either way.
Serving Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, New Westminster, Richmond and Surrey.
