What most maintenance plans actually sell
Scroll any WordPress care-plan pricing page and count the checkmarks: weekly scans, 47-point audits, optimization reports, "24/7 monitoring." Most of it is theater, reports nobody reads, scans that produce noise, and monitoring that alerts a dashboard nobody watches. The plan sells the feeling of care. What a site actually needs is a short list of unglamorous work done in the right order, and knowing that list is the difference between paying for insurance and paying for confetti. The full reasoning sits on the maintenance page; this guide is the checklist to hold any plan against, including this practice's own.
The non-negotiables (what "included" must mean)
- Updates, tested before they touch production. Core, themes and plugins updated on a schedule, applied to a staging copy first, with a known rollback path. "Auto-updates on" is not maintenance; it is how the broken-update emergency happens.
- Backups, off-server, tested, with restore drills. Daily database + weekly files at minimum, stored somewhere that dies independently of the site, and, the test nobody runs, an actual restore rehearsed periodically. A backup that has never been restored is a wish; the full arithmetic is on the backup-restore page.
- Uptime, monitored by a human who answers. Downtime detection is a free plugin; the product is response: who sees the alert, how fast, and what they do. Make the plan state its response commitment in writing.
- Security hardening, and a real cleanup path. Sensible lock-downs (login protection, file permissions, plugin hygiene) plus a defined route when something gets through, which is a different engagement (security, recovery), stated as such.
- A monthly human report, short and honest. What was updated, what was tested, what broke, what it cost, what is next. Two paragraphs of truth beat forty rows of green ticks.
What should NOT be bundled (priced separately, honestly)
Content edits, new pages, design changes, SEO campaigns, performance overhauls, these are projects, not maintenance, and bundling them into a low monthly number is how care plans afford to lie. A good plan links to project pricing instead. Equally: "unlimited small fixes", the phrase that starts every scope dispute, should be a stated fix-hour allowance or a clear per-fix price. The rates page shows how those lines get drawn.
Questions that expose a weak plan in two minutes
- "When did you last run a restore test from a backup, and what did it restore?"
- "Show me a redacted monthly report from another client."
- "An update breaks my checkout at 11am, what happens in the next hour, exactly?"
- "Where do my backups physically live, and what happens if the hosting account is compromised?"
- "What is NOT included, and what does it cost when I need it?"
Vague answers to any of these are the product review. Plans that do this work properly exist at every price point, the honest ones price the labor, not the checkmarks: rate context, and if the verdict is "stop maintaining, start over," the cost calculator prices the rebuild.