WordPress maintenance services and care plans from $150/month. A real WordPress website maintenance plan with weekly core + plugin updates tested on staging, daily off-site backups, uptime monitoring, security patching, and a written monthly report. 4-hour SLA direct to the founder. Month-to-month, no annual contract.
Just your name and email. 30 seconds.
A WordPress maintenance plan is a recurring monthly service that keeps a WordPress website updated, secure, monitored, and performant. The strongest WordPress website maintenance services include weekly core and plugin updates tested on staging, daily off-site backups, uptime monitoring, security patching, and a defined SLA for support. Care plans are sometimes called WordPress site maintenance, WordPress support services, or website maintenance services depending on the agency.
Recurring monthly engagement covering technical maintenance, monitoring, security, and limited content updates.
$150 - $400/month, month-to-monthBroader category that covers care plans plus one-off engagements (recovery, audits, specific updates).
Plans monthly, projects quoted per scopeReactive break/fix engagement, hourly or block-of-hours, no proactive maintenance schedule.
$150/hr or $1,500 / 10-hour blockWhen you need one
If two or more match, the right answer is a real WordPress care plan, not a bot or a $99/month "managed hosting" upsell. Predictable monthly maintenance prevents most of the issues clients pay emergency rates to fix.
If nobody on your team logs into wp-admin weekly to test plugin updates and run backups, your site is already drifting toward a security incident or a broken update. A WordPress maintenance plan stops the drift.
WooCommerce or Elementor pushed an update, you clicked update, the homepage broke. Now you're paying a freelancer $300 to roll back. A care plan tests every update on staging first, no production breakage.
If your hosting provider's daily backup is your only safety net, you're one ransomware attack away from rebuilding from scratch. Off-site encrypted backups are the foundation of every legitimate WordPress maintenance service.
$99/month bot plans don't have a human you can email at 11 PM when checkout breaks. A real care plan has a 1-4 hour human SLA, including weekends on Pro tier.
Lighthouse was 92 at launch, now it's 67. Plugin bloat, image optimization drift, server config changes. A monthly Core Web Vitals audit catches it before rankings drop.
Ad-hoc emergency support is the most expensive way to maintain a site. A predictable $150-$400/month care plan replaces $1,000+ emergency invoices with proactive prevention.
Three plans
Every plan is month-to-month with no minimum term. Move up, down, or cancel any time without a fee.
The minimum viable care plan. Updates, backups, monitoring, security. For sites under ~10,000 monthly visitors.
Start EssentialEverything in Essential plus content updates and quarterly SEO reporting. For sites under ~50,000 monthly visitors.
Start GrowthFor high-traffic sites or businesses where the website is the primary lead-gen channel. Full strategic care.
Start ProA real human runs through this list every week. Updates tested on staging before production. Backups verified, not just scheduled.
Test on staging first. Roll back if any issue. Document each update in the monthly report.
Test on staging. Apply during off-peak hours. Verify forms, schema, performance afterwards.
Full database + uploads to encrypted off-site storage (S3 or Google Drive). Verified weekly.
5-minute interval monitoring with email alerts on any 1-minute outage. SLA-tracked.
Wordfence + manual review of changed files, suspicious logins, and access patterns.
Lighthouse + PageSpeed Insights. Flag any page that drops below 90.
Verify LocalBusiness, FAQ, Service schemas still render. Check Search Console for warnings.
Written email with all updates applied, performance numbers, uptime %, and any issues found.
SLA breakdown
SLA covers our first response (diagnosis + ETA). Critical issues like site down or a security breach get worked on immediately regardless of plan tier. For sites that need a full one-time hardening before going on a care plan, see our standalone WordPress security service covering malware removal and server-level hardening.
| Plan tier | Response SLA | Channel | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | 4 business hours | Mon-Fri | |
| Growth | 2 business hours | Email + Slack | Mon-Fri |
| Pro | 1 hour | Email + Slack + SMS | Mon-Fri + weekends |
Average actual response time across all tiers in 2025: 47 minutes. SLA is the floor, not the goal.
No. All Upcoming Brand WordPress care plans are month-to-month with no minimum term. Cancel any time with no penalty or fee. We don't believe in trapping clients with annual commitments. If the plan isn't worth it, you should be able to leave. About 90% of clients who start a care plan stay on it indefinitely; the few who cancel typically do so because they sold the business or shut down the site.
$99/month plans are typically automated. A bot updates plugins on a schedule with no testing, no backups before changes, no manual review, and no human you can actually email when something breaks. Our care plans involve a person testing every update on staging first, rolling back if anything breaks, monitoring uptime live, and personally responding to your emails within hours. The $51 difference buys real human accountability instead of automation that fails silently.
The 4-hour SLA on Essential (2-hour on Growth, 1-hour on Pro) covers our response to your email or ticket, not necessarily resolution. We respond within the SLA window, diagnose the issue, and either fix it immediately (usually) or give you a written ETA for resolution. For critical issues (site down, security breach), we begin work immediately regardless of SLA. We've never let a critical incident sit unaddressed past 30 minutes.
Essential covers technical maintenance only, no content edits. Growth includes 1 hour of content updates per month (rolls over up to 3 months unused). Pro includes 3 hours per month. Any content work beyond your plan's allotment is billed at $150/hr in 30-minute increments, with a written estimate before work begins. Most clients on Growth or Pro never exceed their monthly content allotment.
Care plans include malware recovery as part of the security work. We restore from the most recent clean backup, identify and patch the vulnerability, scan for residual malware, and document the incident in writing. There's no hourly billing for incident response on care plan clients. If your site isn't on a care plan, recovery is billed at $150/hr or as a $1,000 fixed-scope security recovery engagement.
No. You pay your own hosting (we recommend specific hosts at three price points: Cloudways for budget, Kinsta for mid-tier, WP Engine for enterprise). Care plans cover the maintenance, monitoring, and support, not the server. We chose this structure so you keep ownership of the hosting account; if you ever cancel the care plan, you don't lose your server.
Yes. Care plans can start at any time: at launch, three months later, or three years later. Most projects start their care plan at launch because the 30-day post-launch monitoring is included in the build engagement, and clients tend to want continuity. But there's no cliff. You can pause the relationship at launch and pick up a care plan later when it makes sense.
Tell us about your project. We reply within 4 business hours, no sales pitch.
Just your name and email. 30 seconds.
