Website Care Plans and WordPress Maintenance
The part most agencies stop doing the month after launch.
A website is not a deliverable, it is a system that decays. Plugins update, licences lapse, browsers change, the team that knew how it worked moves on, and the copy slowly stops matching what the business actually does. A care plan is a standing arrangement to keep all of that from happening quietly — updates applied and checked, edits made when you need them, and somebody senior who still remembers why the site was built the way it was.
Who this is for.
Care plans suit organisations where the site matters but nobody's job title contains the word WordPress.
Marketing teams without a developer
You can write the copy and swap an image, but the moment something needs a template change, a new form or a plugin conflict resolved, the work stalls. A care plan is the developer you do not have to hire.
Companies whose site was built by somebody who left
An agency that folded, a contractor who moved on, a staff member who built it in evenings. Somebody has to pick it up, and picking it up carefully is a specific skill.
Businesses that need edits to happen the same week
A new product, a price change, a job posting, a trade show page. Waiting three weeks for a small change is how a site becomes out of date, and out-of-date is what customers notice.
Organisations with a real security or uptime obligation
Healthcare, financial services and anyone with a procurement questionnaire to complete. Maintenance is much easier to evidence when it is somebody's contracted responsibility.
Anyone who has been quoted hourly for every small thing
Hourly billing makes people avoid asking, and avoidance is how sites rot. A retainer removes the friction from small requests, which is most of the value.
What actually goes wrong between launches.
The failures we are called in for are remarkably consistent.
Forms stop delivering and nobody finds out
A plugin updates, a mail provider tightens its rules, a recipient address belongs to someone who left. Enquiries vanish silently for weeks, and the first sign is a quiet quarter. Testing form delivery on a schedule is unglamorous and catches real money.
Updates get deferred until they are dangerous
Skipping one update is sensible caution. Skipping eighteen months of them turns a routine job into a risky one, because now the versions are far apart and something will break. The backlog is the problem, not the updates.
The site drifts away from the business
Services change, people join, the positioning sharpens — and the site still describes the company as it was three years ago. Nobody schedules that fix, which is why a review cadence is part of the plan rather than an optional extra.
Small changes never get made
Not because they are hard, but because requesting them is awkward. Every deferred small change is a slightly worse site, and they compound faster than anyone expects.
What a month on a care plan actually looks like.
Predictable by design. You should never have to wonder whether anything is happening.
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01
Updates run on schedule
Applied in a set window, staged where needed, verified afterwards. If something cannot be updated safely we say so and explain what it would take.
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02
You send requests as they come up
Email is fine. Small things get done in the ordinary run of the month; anything larger gets an estimate before it starts, so nothing is a surprise.
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03
Checks happen whether or not you ask
Backups verified, forms tested end to end, monitoring reviewed, security events looked at. Most months this produces nothing, which is the point.
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04
You get the report
Plain language, one page, what happened and what we noticed. Including the things we think are worth doing that you have not asked for.
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05
Every so often, we step back
A scheduled review of whether the site is still doing its job — what is converting, what is stale, what the business has outgrown.
Where the line sits, stated up front.
Care plans go wrong when "unlimited" is left undefined and both sides discover the boundary during an argument. Ours is drawn before you sign.
Edits: yes, and genuinely
Text, images, pages, posts, products, team members, documents, landing pages. If it is changing what is on the site within its existing design, it is an edit and it is covered.
Fixes: yes, including ones we did not cause
If it broke, we fix it. We do not distinguish between a problem introduced by an update and one that arrived with the site — that distinction is our business to manage, not yours.
New functionality: scoped separately
A new integration, a customer portal, a configurator, a redesigned section. These are projects, and pretending otherwise would either cost you quality or cost us the relationship. You get an estimate first.
Third-party licences: yours, tracked by us
Premium plugins and themes stay licensed in your name so you keep them if we ever part ways. We track renewal dates so nothing silently deactivates.
The site stays yours, always
Your hosting, your domain, your licences, your content, full administrator access throughout. No part of this arrangement depends on you being unable to leave.
Response time, in writing
Four business hours for a first reply, from somebody senior who can actually assess it. Urgent means urgent; the rest gets handled in the ordinary run of the week.
Clients we look after month to month.
Some of these relationships are over a decade old, which is the only care-plan statistic that means very much.
Questions about care plans.
What counts as an "unlimited" edit?
Changing what is on the site within its existing design — copy, images, pages, posts, products, documents, team members, landing pages. What it does not mean is unlimited development: a new integration or a new section of functionality is a project with its own estimate. We would rather tell you that now than negotiate it later.
How quickly do edits get made?
Small requests generally inside a couple of business days, and same-day when something is genuinely time-sensitive. The first reply is within four business hours either way, so you always know where a request stands.
Do you manage WooCommerce sites?
Yes, on a separate scope. A store has payment, tax, shipping and customer data attached, it cannot be cached the way a brochure site can, and a broken checkout is an emergency rather than a bug. The plan is shaped around that rather than sold as the same thing.
What if we did not build the site with you?
That is most of the sites we take on. We start with an audit — what is installed, what is out of date, what has been edited directly, what is at risk — and give you a plain assessment before anything is agreed. Occasionally that assessment is that the site is not worth maintaining, and we will say so.
Can we cancel?
Yes, monthly. Your hosting, domain, licences and content are yours throughout and you keep full administrator access, so leaving is a matter of telling us. A care plan that relies on lock-in is not a care plan.
Do we need hosting from you as well?
No. The care plan works on your existing host. Taking both simply means one party is responsible for the whole stack, which makes some problems faster to resolve — but it is a convenience, not a condition.