WordPress
Your WordPress site needs maintenance whether you know it or not. Here's what should be happening behind the scenes.
You built a WordPress website. Or someone built it for you. Either way, it's sitting there, doing its thing, and you haven't touched it in months. Maybe longer. That's a problem, and a care plan is the answer.
WordPress doesn't maintain itself. Behind that clean homepage, there are plugins that need updating, a database that's collecting junk, security patches that aren't being applied, and backups that probably aren't running. I know because I look at sites like this every week.
Eventually something breaks. The site goes down, gets hacked, or starts throwing errors at customers. Then it's an emergency. And emergencies cost more than maintenance ever would have.
A proper WordPress care plan isn't someone logging in once a month and clicking "update all." That approach breaks sites. Plugins conflict with each other. Theme updates override customistions. A bad update on a Friday afternoon can take your booking form down for an entire weekend before anyone notices.
Here's what I reckon should be happening on any site that matters to the business:
WordPress core, plugins, and themes release updates constantly. Some are security patches. Some add features. Some break things. A good care plan tests updates in a staging environment before applying them to your live site, so if something goes wrong, I find out before your customers do.
Having a backup plugin installed doesn't mean you have backups. You need to know: where are they stored? Can you restore from them? Have you tested it? Daily backups stored offsite, with a tested restore process, is the bare minimum I'd accept for my own sites. If your host says "we do backups," ask them to restore last Tuesday's copy. Watch what happens.
WordPress powers about 40% of the internet. That makes it a massive target. Brute force login attempts, malware injections, spam form submissions, these happen constantly. A care plan includes firewall rules, login protection, malware scanning, and someone actually looking at the results, whilst most cheap hosting leaves all of that to you.
Sites slow down over time. Database tables grow. Cache gets stale. Images pile up. A care plan includes periodic speed checks and cleanup, because a slow site loses visitors, and Google notices.
Changed your phone number? Got a new service? Need to update your holiday hours? Most care plans include a number of small content edits per month. Enough for the routine changes that keep your site current without you needing to learn how WordPress works.
Warning: Nothing, for a while. That's the trap. It feels fine. Then one morning you get an email from a customer saying your site is showing pharmacy ads. Or your contact form hasn't been working for three weeks and nobody noticed. Or Google flags your site as "not secure" because your SSL expired. I've seen all of these. An emergency security cleanup runs $500 to $2,000 depending on how deep the hack went. A care plan that would have prevented it costs $49 to $99 a month.
In Australia, WordPress care plans typically range from $49 to $200 per month depending on what's included. Here's my rough guide:
If someone quotes you less than $30 a month, they're either using fully automated tools with no human oversight, or they're planning to upsell you later. If someone quotes you more than $300 for a basic small business site, they're overcharging you. I'd walk away from both.
If your website went down right now, at 8pm on a Sunday, who would you call?
If the answer is "I don't know" or "I'd Google it and hope for the best," you don't have a care plan. You have a time bomb with a nice homepage.
My care plans start at $49/month. No lock in contracts. No jargon. Just a working, secure, updated WordPress site that doesn't keep you up at night.
See Our Care Plans