Knowledge · WordPress Web Design
WordPress Care Plans: What $200/mo and $800/mo Actually Cover
‘WordPress Care Plan’ means everything and nothing — every agency defines it differently. Some plans are $49/mo for plugin updates (theater). Some are $1,500/mo bundled with vague ‘strategy.’ Here’s exactly what our $200 and $800 tiers include, what they don’t, and how to evaluate a Care Plan from any agency.
№ 01What every Care Plan should include at minimum
If a Care Plan doesn’t include all five of these, it’s underpriced theater:
- Core + plugin + theme updates on a staging-first workflow. 2×/month minimum. Updates applied to staging, smoke-tested, then promoted to production. Not ‘auto-updates enabled.’
- Daily off-site backups via BlogVault, Updraft Premium, or Solid Backups. Stored in a different region from production.
- Uptime monitoring via UptimeRobot, Better Uptime, or the host’s native tool. Alert in under 60 seconds of downtime.
- Security monitoring via Wordfence/Solid Security premium with malware scans, plus the host’s WAF.
- A real human owns the relationship. Named technical contact. Email or Slack. Response SLA documented.
Anything under $150/mo is buying you 2-3 of these, not 5. Anything under $99/mo is buying you a script that runs automated plugin updates with no smoke test, which is how sites break.
№ 02Standard Care Plan: $200/mo
The Standard tier is for sites that don’t change much month to month. Service businesses, established B2B with stable funnels, lead-gen sites without active content marketing.
What’s included:
- 2 hours/month of developer time for small edits, content updates, plugin troubleshooting
- Plugin + core + theme updates 2×/month, staging-first
- Daily off-site backups (BlogVault), 90-day retention
- Uptime monitoring with SMS alerts to your team
- Monthly health email: uptime %, update log, any flagged security events
- Security plugin maintained (Wordfence or Solid Security premium license included)
- Email support with 24-hour business-day response
What’s NOT included: design changes beyond text/image swaps, new pages from scratch, new feature builds, integration work, performance optimization sprints, content authoring. Those scope out of the plan or into a separate engagement.
Unused hours: roll over up to 4 hours / quarter. Beyond that, they expire. Hours aren’t a bank.
№ 03Pro Care Plan: $800/mo
The Pro tier is for sites that are actively part of the business: marketing-led teams running campaigns, growth-stage SaaS iterating on landing pages, multi-author content operations.
What’s included:
- 8 hours/month of developer time
- Everything in Standard
- Monthly performance report: CWV field data, GA4 traffic trends, conversion event review, recommendations
- Quarterly security audit: plugin abandonment check, PHP/MySQL version check, file integrity scan
- Priority support with 4-hour business-day response SLA
- Slack channel with named technical contact
- Scope flexibility: small design tweaks, new sections, new pages within existing templates, A/B test setup, GA4 event configuration, schema additions
Pro Care fits: sites with $5M-$50M revenue where the website is a real channel. Below $5M, Standard is usually enough. Above $50M, you may need a dedicated retainer.
№ 04Care Plan vs. break-fix freelancer: the math
Common alternative: ‘I’ll just call a freelancer when something breaks.’
Break-fix model: $150/hour. Typical mid-market site needs 4-8 hours of dev attention per quarter. Plus emergencies (1-2 per year at 6-12 hours each). Annual cost: $2,400-$6,000. Plus the cost of downtime when the freelancer is on vacation. Plus the discovery cost: every new freelancer needs to learn your codebase.
Standard Care Plan: $2,400/year. Same agency, same codebase, predictable response time. Includes proactive maintenance, not just reactive fixes.
The cost is comparable. The reliability isn’t.
№ 05How to evaluate ANY Care Plan
When you’re comparing Care Plans from different agencies, ask these five questions:
- How many actual developer hours per month? ‘Unlimited support’ means ‘5 minutes when we feel like it.’
- Are updates applied staging-first? If they auto-update production, your site WILL break.
- Where are backups stored? Same server is not backup. Off-site (BlogVault, S3, different region) is.
- What’s the response SLA? ‘We’ll get to it’ isn’t one. 24 business hours minimum for Standard, 4 business hours for Pro.
- What’s the cancellation policy? Month-to-month with 30 days notice is the standard. Annual contracts at 10-15% discount are reasonable. Multi-year lock-in is a red flag.
⚠What to avoid
- Buying a $39/mo Care Plan and expecting real coverage. The math doesn’t work. At $39/mo the agency is selling 15 minutes a month. That covers a plugin update, not a real maintenance relationship.
- ‘Lifetime updates’ plans paid upfront. Agencies fold. Plans get abandoned. Recurring revenue keeps the maintenance real.
- Skipping Care Plans because ‘the site is built well, it doesn’t need maintenance.’ The site is built well today. WordPress core ships 4-6 major updates a year, plugins ship 50-100. Maintenance isn’t about fixing the build — it’s about keeping the build current.
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