WordPress maintenance plans: what you should get for your money

What you're buying with a maintenance plan is somebody's attention. Everything else on the feature list is either software doing the same job for everyone, or filler.

That's the test worth holding every plan up against, including ours. Does a person look at my website, and what happens when they find something.

Four things a plan has to cover

Updates, then a check. WordPress core, the theme and every plugin, applied promptly, then somebody loading the site afterwards to see that the shop still takes money and the form still sends. Updates that run on a schedule with nobody watching are a coin flip you're paying for monthly.

Backups somewhere else. Daily, kept off the server the site runs on, and restorable by someone who has actually done it before. If the backups sit on the same box as the website, one bad night takes both.

Security that runs while you're asleep. Brute force protection on the login page and monitoring around the clock. Bots don't keep office hours.

A person on the end of a phone. Not a form that generates a ticket number. When your checkout breaks at half three on a Friday, you want a human who knows your site.

Hosting is the fifth thing, and most plans leave it out without making a fuss about it. We'll come back to that.

Phrases that sound good and mean nothing

Some of these turn up on our own competitors' pages. A few, in fairness, have turned up on ours over the years.

"24/7 monitoring." Monitoring what? Nearly always it's a service pinging your homepage every five minutes. Useful, and it tells you nothing about whether your enquiry form is still sending.

"Unlimited edits." Read the fair use paragraph underneath it. Unlimited means one small job at a time, queued behind everyone else's small jobs, and small is defined by them.

"Security hardening." For some agencies that's real work. For others it's a free plugin installed once in 2021, still sat there on the version it shipped with.

"Cloud hosting." Everything is cloud hosting. Your website is on a computer in a shed somewhere either way. The question is how many other websites are on that computer with it.

"Speed optimisation." Ask whether that's a one-off at the start or something anyone looks at each month. Sites get slower on their own, so a one-off is a photograph of a day that's already gone.

"Priority support." Priority over who? Everyone on that page is reading the same sentence.

"Monthly reports." The report is only worth anything if a human wrote the top of it. Forty pages of automated graphs with no sentence saying what changed is a PDF built to look like work.

The hosting trap

A lot of maintenance plans cover the WordPress side and nothing underneath it. You pay them, you pay a hosting company separately, and when the site goes down on a Tuesday the two of them explain to you in turn that it's the other one's problem. Meanwhile, your site is still down and you're the one relaying messages between two suppliers who won't ring each other.

Ours include the hosting, an SSL certificate and a content delivery network. One bill, one number to ring, nobody to blame but us.

How to read the plan you're on

Get the page up and go through it with these:

• Is hosting in there, or is that a separate direct debit you'd forgotten about
• Does a person check the site after updates, or does a plugin run them and send an email saying "12 plugins updated"
• Where are the backups kept, and how long does a restore take
• Is anything tested each month that makes you money, like the contact form or the checkout
• How much time is included for changes, what counts as a change, and what happens to time you don't use
• When somebody answers the phone, and who that somebody is

Six answers, and you'll know within about ten minutes whether you're paying for attention or for automation. Both are legitimate. They shouldn't cost the same.

What ours cover

Better is £150 a month plus VAT: hosting, SSL, a content delivery network, daily backups with a separate provider, updates, brute force protection, monitoring around the clock, a check that emails and forms arrive, and a monthly report.

Better+ at £500 adds the deeper monthly dig. Search Console, GTmetrix, PageSpeed and Semrush read together rather than one at a time, broken links, redirects, page titles and descriptions, a Screaming Frog crawl for whatever's left, contact form spam protection, SEO work with 10 tracked keywords, and 45 minutes of studio time a month for the ordinary changes. Better Marketing at £2,000 adds a Google Ads campaign we run.

Full lists are on the pricing page, and we've written up what maintenance costs across the UK if you want to see where those sit against everyone else.

When you don't need any of this

If your website is a single page with your phone number on it and no forms, no shop and no traffic to speak of, a £40 plan is fine. Buy the cheap one. Spend the difference on something that brings work in.

The moment a website starts earning, though, the maths flips, and the cost of nobody looking is bigger than the plan. That's the pitch, and we're obviously not neutral about it. Bring us the plan you're on and we'll tell you honestly whether it's doing the job.