Essential
Core, plugin and theme updates with verification, daily off-site backups, uptime monitoring, SSL monitoring, security patching and a monthly report. This is the floor, and it should be genuinely comprehensive rather than deliberately thin.
Care plans
Build WordPress care plans people renew without thinking about it
A care plan is a recurring maintenance service with a defined scope, a price and a way of proving the work happened. Getting all three right is the difference between reliable recurring revenue and a line item that gets cut in the first budget review.
Free during early access. Connects to any host.
What you get
Included on every plan
- Essential: Core, plugin and theme updates with verification, daily off-site backups, uptime monitoring, SSL monitoring, security patching and a monthly report.
- Standard: Everything in Essential plus performance monitoring, a defined allowance of support time, faster response targets, staging for larger changes and quarterly review.
- Priority: Everything in Standard plus same-day response, real-time backup for stores, freeze windows around campaigns, a named contact and a formal SLA with uptime commitments.
- Store add-on: Order-safe continuous backup, checkout and cart monitoring, payment gateway update caution and trading-hours freeze windows.
Why care plans get cancelled
Rarely because the work was bad. Usually because the work was invisible. A month with no downtime, no compromise and no broken form looks identical from the outside to a month where nothing happened at all. Success in maintenance is the absence of events, which is the hardest thing to charge for.
The second reason is scope drift. A plan sold as updates and backups quietly becomes unlimited small edits, then unlimited support calls, then a retainer that loses money on the accounts that use it most. Nobody notices because nobody measures margin per client.
Capability
WordPress maintenance packages: what to include at each tier
Standard
Everything in Essential plus performance monitoring, a defined allowance of support time, faster response targets, staging for larger changes and quarterly review. This is where most clients should land.
Priority
Everything in Standard plus same-day response, real-time backup for stores, freeze windows around campaigns, a named contact and a formal SLA with uptime commitments. Appropriate for stores and anything revenue-critical.
Store add-on
Order-safe continuous backup, checkout and cart monitoring, payment gateway update caution and trading-hours freeze windows. Stores carry different risk and should carry a different price.
Reporting
Every tier gets a report. The difference between tiers is depth and cadence, not whether the client hears from you.
Support allowance
Define it in hours or tickets, track it, and show usage in the report. Undefined support is the single biggest cause of care plan margin collapse.
Approaches
How to price a care plan
Cost-plus
- Estimate hours per site, multiply by your rate, add margin
- Simple and defensible
- Anchors the price to your cost rather than the client's risk
- Tends to underprice critical sites
Value-based
- Price against what downtime or a compromise would cost the client
- Captures more of the value on revenue-critical sites
- Harder to justify to a small brochure site
- Requires a conversation about consequences
Recommended
Tiered hybrid, recommended
- Three published tiers with a cost-plus floor
- Store and revenue-critical sites priced against risk
- Support allowance defined and tracked
- Margin measured per account, reviewed quarterly
Getting there
Delivering a care plan profitably
Define scope in writing, including what is excluded
The excluded list matters more than the included list. Content edits, new features, third-party integrations and design changes should be explicitly outside the plan or explicitly allowanced.
Automate everything that does not need judgement
Delivery cost is what determines whether the plan works. Routine updates, backups, monitoring and reporting should not consume billable attention.
Track hours against the account
You cannot manage margin you do not measure. The account that generates the most support requests is rarely the one paying the most.
Report every month without exception
The report is the product as far as the client is concerned. It should arrive on the same date every month, in your branding, and lead with outcomes rather than changelogs.
Answers
Frequently asked questions
A recurring service that keeps a WordPress site updated, backed up, monitored and supported for a fixed monthly fee. A well-defined plan states exactly what is included, what is excluded, what the response times are, and how the work is reported.
Typical market rates run from around $50 a month for a basic brochure site to $500 or more for a business-critical WooCommerce store with a formal SLA. The right number depends on your delivery cost, your support allowance and what the site is worth to the client. The care plan calculator models it with your own figures, and the pricing article covers the bands in detail.
Healthy care plans typically run at 55 to 75 percent gross margin once routine work is automated. Below 40 percent the plan is fragile: one incident or one long support call wipes out the month on that account.
Lead with what happens without one, specifically and without drama. Show them the current state of their site: how many known vulnerabilities are present, when the last backup was taken, whether it has ever been restore-tested. A pre-sales audit is far more persuasive than a feature list.
Either exclude them or allowance them explicitly, with tracking. Unlimited small edits is the most reliable way to turn a profitable plan into an unprofitable one, because the clients who use it most are rarely the ones paying most.
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