WordPress Website Maintenance

WordPress maintenance is a monthly plan covering updates, backups, security monitoring and technical support. Mine costs $25 per month, with no lock-in and no hidden fees. Outdated plugins are the most common cause of WordPress sites being compromised — which is why controlled updates, tested before they go live, are the core of any maintenance plan.

What I actually do each month

Maintenance here is defined work, not general availability:

• Controlled updates — core, plugins and theme, each checked before it goes live. An automatic update can take a site down as effectively as an intrusion.
• Daily backups, stored away from the site's own server. A backup on the same server as the site is not a backup.
• Uptime monitoring — I learn about an outage before your customer calls you about it.
• Security review — new vulnerabilities in the plugins you run, login attempts, file changes.
• Small fixes — a text change, an extra page, a mobile layout correction. Without quoting every five-minute job separately.

Why outdated plugins specifically

Because it is the most common way into a WordPress site. The mechanism is always the same: a vulnerability is disclosed, and within hours automated scanners are sweeping the internet for sites that have not patched yet. You are not a target — you are one of thousands of addresses on a list.

So what matters is not whether you update, but how quickly after a patch ships. A site updated once a quarter is effectively unprotected for most of the year.

What happens when a site goes down

I restore from backup rather than operating on the live patient. That distinction matters — picking through a compromised site can take days and rarely ends with certainty that nothing was left behind. Restoring yesterday's verified backup takes minutes.

Only then do we find how they got in and close that route.

What maintenance does not cover

So there are no surprises on the first invoice:

• Rebuilds or new features — separate work, quoted normally
• Writing content — I will fix copy you give me, but I will not write it
• SEO — maintenance keeps the site healthy, which helps, but it does not replace work on rankings
• Hosting — you pay your provider directly, not me with a markup on top

How this compares on price

Agency plans typically run $50 to $200 a month. Mine is $25. That is not less work — it is the absence of an account manager, a project manager and an office to fund. You write to me, I do it.

No lock-in and no notice period. If you decide you do not need it, you stop.

When maintenance makes no sense

If your site is a static brochure with no forms, no admin panel and no plugins, there is nothing here to watch and I will not sell you a plan. If you already have a system administrator doing this, the same applies.

Maintenance earns its cost where a site actually works for a living: taking enquiries, selling, integrating with something. Which is to say, anywhere its failure costs you money.