A build-it-yourself guide for the agency selling the plan — not a pitch for one. Scope, pricing method, and how to run it across every client site without hiring.
A WordPress care plan is a subscription. The client pays a fixed amount each month and, in return, somebody takes ownership of the work that keeps the site alive: applying updates, holding backups, watching for downtime, scanning for malware and fixing the small things before they become large ones.
The name varies and the product does not. WordPress maintenance plans, WordPress care plans, website maintenance plans and WordPress website maintenance packages all describe the same arrangement. Agencies tend to say “care plan” when selling to non-technical clients because it names the outcome rather than the chore, and “maintenance plan” when selling to people who know what a plugin is.
Project work is lumpy. A studio that bills £40k in Q1 and £6k in Q3 spends Q3 discounting to fill the pipeline. Recurring revenue flattens that, and it changes what the business is worth if you ever sell it. It also keeps you in the client's inbox every month, which is where the next project brief comes from.
The second reason is less discussed: a care plan is how you stop giving the work away. Most agencies already do a version of this for free — the “quick favour” plugin update, the emergency restore, the four emails about a contact form. A plan takes work you are performing anyway and attaches a price to it.
Almost never because they want plugin updates. They buy the removal of a worry: that the site will go down during a campaign, that a hack will surface in Google's results, that nobody will answer when something breaks. Scope the plan around updates; sell it around consequences.
Three tiers is the sweet spot. One tier gives the client nothing to choose between; five gives them a reason to postpone deciding. The table below is a starting scope, not a rule — the point is that each tier should differ in ways a non-technical buyer can actually perceive.
| What it covers | Essential | Recommended | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core, plugin and theme updates | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Off-site backups | Weekly | Daily | Daily + pre-update snapshot |
| Uptime monitoring | Hourly | 5-minute | 1-minute + phone alert |
| Malware scanning | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Malware cleanup if hacked | No | Billed hourly | Included |
| Broken-link and 404 checks | No | Monthly | Weekly |
| Database optimisation | No | Monthly | Weekly |
| Performance report | No | Monthly | Monthly + remediation |
| SEO meta and alt-text audit | No | No | Yes |
| Content edits included | No | 30 min/mo | 2 hrs/mo |
| Staging site for testing updates | No | No | Yes |
| Response time commitment | 5 business days | 2 business days | Same business day |
| Client-facing report | Quarterly | Monthly | Monthly + call |
This is your floor, and the tier most agencies price wrong. It exists to be the obvious yes for a small brochure site, which means it has to survive being sold thirty times. Everything in it should be automatable. The moment the essential tier contains something that requires a human to think, its margin depends on nothing going wrong.
Note what is deliberately absent: malware cleanup. Scanning is cheap and predictable; cleanup is neither. Including recovery at your lowest price point means one compromised site can consume the annual revenue of several others. Offer it billed hourly here and included only at the top tier.
Design the middle tier to be the one you would pick, then make it look that way. Faster backups, a real response-time commitment and a monthly report are what most small businesses need and can justify. A small allowance of included content edits — thirty minutes is plenty — is the single feature that makes clients feel the plan is worth paying for in a month when nothing broke.
Premium is for sites where downtime has a number attached: WooCommerce stores, booking systems, lead-generation sites running paid traffic. Here you are not selling maintenance, you are selling response time and someone else carrying the risk. A staging site for testing updates before they touch production, included malware recovery, and a same-business-day commitment are what justify the step up.
Two premium-tier items are worth pricing carefully because they are more work than they sound: the SEO and accessibility pass — see how to add alt text to WordPress images for what that actually involves on a site with years of uploads — and the staging workflow, which is a per-site setup cost before it is a monthly one.
Before a site joins any tier, run a WordPress care plan audit: check what version of core and PHP it is on, how many plugins are abandoned, whether backups exist, and whether it is already compromised. Price remediation separately as a one-off. Onboarding a neglected site at your monthly rate and absorbing six months of deferred work is the most common way agencies lose money on care plans in year one.
Most pricing advice starts with a published benchmark range. That is the wrong place to start, because the number that decides whether your plan is profitable is not the market's — it is your hours per site. Two agencies charging identical monthly fees can have opposite margins depending on how much manual work each one is doing.
So price from the bottom up:
The inputs that move that number are below. Measure them for one month before you publish anything — most people are surprised by the hours figure, and it is the term the whole calculation is multiplied by.
| Input | Why it moves the number |
|---|---|
| Your hours per site per month | The single biggest driver. Measure it for one month before you price anything. |
| Your effective hourly rate | Not your dream rate — what you actually clear after admin and non-billable time. |
| Tooling cost per site | Backups, monitoring, security, your management platform. Divide by sites covered. |
| Incident allowance | What you set aside for the month a site breaks. Skip this and one hack erases a year of margin. |
| Response-time promise | Same-day support is a staffing commitment, not a feature toggle. Price it as one. |
| Risk multiplier | A bespoke WooCommerce build is not a five-page brochure site. Tier by complexity, not by client size. |
Offer both, and discount the annual option by roughly the value of one month. Monthly wins signups; annual wins the cash-flow and the retention. A client who has paid for a year does not churn in month three because one update went sideways.
The reason agencies dread price rises is that they leave them until the plan is visibly unprofitable, then ask for a large increase with resentment attached. Put a modest annual adjustment in the contract from day one. It stops being a negotiation and becomes a line item.
Run your numbers through the care plan pricing calculator to see the floor price and margin for each tier.
The scope above is not difficult work. It is repetitive work, multiplied by the number of sites — which is the specific shape of problem that automates well.
Set the monthly work once per site — updates, scans, link checks, database cleanup — and let it run on a schedule instead of a reminder in your calendar.
A disclosed vulnerability in a plugin you use on eleven client sites is one instruction across the fleet, not eleven logins.
The plan renews on visible proof of work. Reports generate from what was actually done, under your logo.
White-label reportsAutomating maintenance across client sites is only sensible if you can reverse it. An unattended update that breaks a checkout page at 3am is worse than no automation at all. Every action is snapshotted before it runs, so the recovery path is one click rather than a restore from last night's backup and a difficult phone call.
See how one-click undo works, or read the wider WordPress maintenance guide this page sits under. If you run client sites at volume, the agency overview covers fleet workflows in more detail.
Three things belong in the written plan and are usually missing: what is explicitly excluded, what your response time actually means, and what happens when the client wants something outside scope. Adapt the wording below.
“This plan covers WordPress core, plugin and theme updates, off-site backups, uptime monitoring, malware scanning and up to [30] minutes of content changes each month. It does not cover new design work, new functionality, third-party service failures, or content written by us. Work outside this scope is quoted separately and never started without your approval.”
“We respond to support requests within [2] business days, and to a site being offline within [4] business hours. Response means a human has looked at it and replied — not that the issue is resolved, which depends on what it is.”
That second sentence prevents most care plan disputes. Clients hear “same-day” as “fixed today” unless you say otherwise in writing.
“You can cancel with 30 days' notice. On cancellation we provide a final backup and hand over any credentials we hold. We do not hold your site hostage.”
Say this out loud in the sales conversation. The fear of being locked in is a bigger obstacle to signing a monthly WordPress maintenance plan than the price is.
Launching a care plan is rarely the hard part. The hard part is the twelve past clients who have had your help for free whenever they asked, and who will experience a monthly WordPress maintenance plan as a new charge for something that used to cost nothing. Handle that badly and you lose the relationship along with the recurring revenue.
Start with the audit. Run a free check across their site — core version, PHP version, abandoned plugins, whether a backup exists and whether it restores — and send the findings as a short document. You are not selling yet, you are showing them a picture of the site they already own. In most cases the audit does the selling, because most neglected WordPress sites are in worse shape than their owner assumes.
Tell existing clients the date ad-hoc support ends and plans begin, and give them a reasonable run-up — sixty days is generous and workable. Offer a grandfathered rate for anyone who signs before that date. This converts far better than an open-ended offer, and it is fair: they get a discount for the inconvenience of a change they did not ask for.
Some clients will decline. A share of those will come back within the year, usually after something breaks. Two things make that return easy: do not act wounded when they say no, and make sure the exit terms in your contract are genuinely clean. The agencies that struggle here are the ones who treat a declined plan as a betrayal.
If ad-hoc support remains available at a comfortable rate, the plan will not sell. Set your incident rate high enough that a plan is obviously the cheaper option for anyone who needs you more than twice a year, and say so plainly when you quote. That is not a trick — it reflects the real cost difference between scheduled work and dropping everything.
Clients renew WordPress website maintenance packages on the strength of what they can see. A monthly report showing updates applied, threats blocked and uptime held is the artefact that justifies the line item at budget time — particularly with the person who approves the invoice but never touches the site.
Agencies price a care plan once, in year one, when they have four sites and lots of time. By site forty the hours per site have crept and the plan is underwater. Re-measure every six months.
“Unlimited edits” sounds like a differentiator until one client discovers it. Cap it in hours, state the cap plainly, and bill overflow. Clients respect a stated limit far more than a quietly resented one.
The single most common reason a care plan gets cancelled is that nothing appeared to happen. Maintenance done well is invisible. A monthly report is what makes it visible.
A WordPress care plan is a recurring service — usually monthly — where an agency or freelancer takes ongoing responsibility for a site's updates, backups, security, uptime and small fixes, in exchange for a flat fee. It is different from hosting, which supplies the server, and different from ad-hoc support, which is billed per incident.
At minimum: core, plugin and theme updates; off-site backups you have actually tested restoring; uptime monitoring; malware scanning; and a report the client can read. Above that, tiers usually add faster response times, included content edits, performance and SEO work, and a staging site for testing updates before they go live.
Price from your own numbers rather than a published benchmark: measure your real hours per site per month, multiply by your effective hourly rate, add your per-site tooling cost, then add an allowance for the month something breaks. Our pricing calculator does that arithmetic and shows the resulting margin per tier.
In practice, nothing — WordPress maintenance plans, WordPress care plans and website maintenance plans are the same product under different names. “Care plan” tends to be used by agencies selling to non-technical clients because it describes the outcome rather than the task. Reactive help — things breaking, questions, ad-hoc changes — is a separate product, covered on the WordPress support plans page.
Up to a point, and the limit is usually somewhere between fifteen and thirty sites depending on complexity. Past that the work is not hard, it is just repetitive across sites — which is exactly the part that automates. Scheduled routines, one instruction applied across a fleet, and generated client reports are what move the ceiling.
Bundling hosting makes the plan stickier and the margin easier to hide, but it also makes you the first call for every server problem. If you bundle it, price the support load in. If you do not, be explicit in the contract about where your responsibility starts and ends.
Scheduled maintenance across every client site, white-label reports, and one-click undo on anything it does.
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