What Should a WordPress Maintenance Plan Include and What Should It Cost?
Most maintenance plans are sold as a monthly fee with a vague list of benefits. Some are worth every dollar; some are a script running updates automatically with nobody reading the results. This is how to tell them apart, what the honest price range is, and what you should insist on before signing up.
What a real plan covers
These are the items that should be non-negotiable. If a plan is missing one of them, ask why.
- Core, plugin and theme updates — applied on a staging copy first, with the site checked afterwards. Auto-updating straight to production is not maintenance, it's a gamble.
- Off-site backups — stored somewhere other than your hosting account, with a stated retention period. A backup living on the same server that fails is not a backup.
- A tested restore — ask when they last actually restored one. Most providers have never tried.
- Uptime monitoring — with someone who gets alerted and responds, not just a dashboard you can look at.
- Malware and security scanning — plus a stated policy for what happens if the site is compromised.
- Database cleanup — revisions, transients, spam, on a schedule.
- A monthly report you can understand — what was updated, what broke, what was fixed. In plain English, not a plugin's auto-generated PDF.
- A small allowance of content edits — the thing clients actually use most.
The honest price tiers
| Price / month | What it usually is | Right for |
|---|---|---|
| $30–80 | Automated updates and backups, no human reviewing them | A brochure site that would cost you little if it broke |
| $100–250 | A person applying updates, checking the site afterwards, fixing small things, reporting monthly | Most small businesses and stores |
| $300–800 | Agency retainer with SLA, dedicated hours, priority response | Sites where downtime has a measurable hourly cost |
| $1,000+ | Ongoing development capacity, not just maintenance | Stores and platforms under active development |
Do you actually need one?
Honest answer: not every site does. If your site is a simple five-page brochure, has no forms taking customer data, and you'd lose nothing by being offline for two days while a developer fixes it, you can run manual updates yourself every month or two and be fine.
You do need a plan if any of these are true: you take payments, you collect customer data, you get leads through the site, you rank for terms that bring in business, or you don't personally know how to roll back a bad update. In those cases the plan is insurance, and it costs less than one emergency repair.
Six questions to ask before you sign
- Are updates tested on staging before production, or applied straight to the live site?
- Where are backups stored, how far back do they go, and when did you last restore one?
- If the site goes down at 2am, what actually happens?
- What counts as "small edits" — and what gets billed separately?
- If the site gets hacked, is cleanup included or extra?
- Is there a contract term, and do I get my backups and credentials if I leave?
That last one matters more than people expect. A plan you cannot leave is not a service, it's a hostage situation.
“All good every month :)”
mariannmarthinu · Norway · Fiverr maintenance client
The red flag list
No mention of staging · backups stored only on your host · "unlimited edits" with no definition · no monthly report · a twelve-month lock-in on a $50 plan · no answer to what happens after a hack.
How I run maintenance
My plans start at $100/month: updates applied and checked, off-site backups, uptime monitoring, malware scanning, database cleanup, small content edits, and a short plain-English report each month showing what changed. No lock-in — you can stop whenever you like and you keep your backups and credentials.
Every new site I build also comes with thirty days of free fixes after launch, so you're not paying for a plan to cover my own mistakes.
Want a straight answer on whether you need a plan?
Tell me what your site does and what it would cost you to lose it for a day. I'll tell you honestly whether monthly care is worth it for you.