Website Maintenance & Care Plans

On this page: what maintenance actually covers, what’s changed about it in 2026, plan tiers, what we don’t cover, and the questions we get asked most.

What Website Maintenance Actually Covers

Maintenance is one of those services that gets sold as a bullet list and delivered as an invoice. Here’s the specific work:

• Core, plugin, and theme updates — tested in staging first. The update itself takes seconds. The reason it belongs in a plan is that updates do sometimes break things, and finding out on the live site during business hours is the expensive version. We apply updates to a staging copy, check the pages that matter (checkout, forms, anything custom), then push.
• Backups you can actually restore from. Automated, encrypted, stored off the server, and — the part that gets skipped — periodically test-restored. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hypothesis, not a backup.
• Uptime and certificate monitoring. Continuous checks with alerts to us, not just to you. SSL certificates renewed before expiry, not after a browser warning starts scaring customers away.
• Security monitoring and hardening. Malware scanning, firewall rules, login protection, and file-integrity monitoring. If a site is compromised, cleanup and recovery are included on Standard and Managed plans — see the table below.
• Performance monitoring. Core Web Vitals tracked over time rather than spot-checked once. Image and database bloat cleaned up before they show up as a slow site. Where a fix needs deeper work, it hands off cleanly to our site speed optimization service.
• Accessibility scanning (Standard Plan and above). New content reintroduces accessibility violations — a missing alt text, an unlabeled form field, a contrast failure in a new brand color. Recurring scans catch those while they’re cheap to fix. See accessibility monitoring for the deeper version of this.
• Content and small change requests (Standard Plan and above). A block of hours each month for the “can you just swap this photo / update this price / add this staff bio” work that otherwise piles up unaddressed.
• A monthly report that says something (Standard Plan and above). What was updated, what was caught, what changed in performance, and what we recommend next — written to be read, not to fill a PDF.

What’s Changed About Maintenance in 2026

Two things are genuinely new, and both are reasons a plan written three years ago is now out of date. AI crawlers are now a maintenance decision. Automated traffic — bots and AI agents — crossed 50% of all internet traffic in June 2026. Some of that traffic is valuable: the crawlers behind AI answers are how your business gets cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI results. Some of it is scraping and probing that costs you server resources and nothing else. Deciding which crawlers to allow, which to block, and how your content is presented to the ones you want is now part of keeping a site healthy — and it directly affects the AI visibility work on our Generative Ranking Optimization side. Attacks got cheaper to run. Credential stuffing and application-layer attacks that used to require effort are now automated and inexpensive. We’ve seen this first-hand: in one WooCommerce engagement, an automated card-testing attack put the store at 82% fraudulent orders, and the attacker adapted three separate times in the days after our fix went live. The lesson from that project applies to maintenance generally — the fix is never the end of the work, the monitoring is. That project is documented on our WooCommerce fraud prevention page.

Plan Tiers

Online stores — WooCommerce and Shopify — start at Standard, with a +$200/month commerce layer covering checkout monitoring, payment and fulfilment integration checks, and store-specific security. Most stores land at $549+/month. Save 10% on annual prepay — pay for eleven months, get twelve. Longer or custom scopes — multi-site portfolios, high-traffic stores, or sites with custom applications — are quoted individually.

What Maintenance Is Not

Being clear about this up front prevents the most common source of friction in maintenance relationships:

• It isn’t hosting. We work with your host or recommend one; the plan covers the site, not the server rental. (On Managed, we handle the hosting relationship on your behalf.)
• It isn’t unlimited development. Small changes are included; new features, redesigns, and new page builds are quoted separately — usually against the same team, so nothing gets handed to strangers.
• It isn’t marketing. SEO, PPC, and AI visibility work live on their own pages and their own retainers. Maintenance keeps the asset healthy; it doesn’t drive traffic to it.
• It isn’t a guarantee nothing breaks. It’s a guarantee that when something does, it’s caught quickly, restorable, and someone competent is already on it.

We’ll Take On Sites We Didn’t Build

Most maintenance providers prefer their own work. We’ll take over a site built by someone else, with one condition: a $750+ site health review first. Not upselling — a site with a fragile custom theme, abandoned plugins, or no staging environment has a different risk profile than one we built, and both of us should know that before signing a monthly agreement. The review is credited against your first three months if you go ahead. If the review turns up something structural, we’ll say so plainly, including when the honest answer is that maintaining the current site is money spent slowing down an inevitable rebuild — which is a conversation for our website redesign page, not this one.

Related Services

• Site Speed Optimization — when monitoring surfaces performance problems that need real remediation
• Accessibility Monitoring — ongoing WCAG scanning and remediation, deeper than the scan included here
• WooCommerce Fraud Prevention — for stores facing fake orders or chargebacks
• WordPress Website Design — if maintenance keeps surfacing problems the current build can’t solve