WordPress Maintenance & Care Plans.
Updates applied and tested, backups verified, uptime watched, security monitored and small fixes handled — so your site does not quietly rot.
WordPress sites rarely break dramatically. They degrade. A plugin update is postponed, then another, then a security advisory arrives that cannot be applied safely because everything is now several versions behind. Meanwhile the backup nobody tested turns out not to restore.
Maintenance is unglamorous and it is the difference between a site that works for five years and one that becomes an emergency. The work is small and consistent: test updates in staging, apply them, verify a restore actually restores, watch for the signals that matter.
It also means someone already knows your site when something urgent happens, which is worth more than the plan costs on the day it matters.
Ongoing WordPress care.
Tested updates
Core, theme and plugin updates applied in staging first, with a visual check before going live.
Verified backups
Off-site backups with periodic test restores — an untested backup is not a backup.
Uptime & error monitoring
Alerts on downtime, PHP errors and broken forms, so you hear from me before your customers.
Security monitoring
File integrity checks, vulnerability alerts on your installed plugins and login monitoring.
Performance checks
Core Web Vitals tracked over time so gradual slowdown gets caught early.
Small fixes included
The steady trickle of tweaks and content changes, without a quote for every one.
How I approach it.
Test the restore, not the backup
Almost every site has backups. A much smaller number have backups that have ever been restored. Corrupted archives, missing database dumps and incomplete uploads folders are all common, and you find out at the worst possible moment. A periodic test restore is the only thing that turns a backup into insurance.
Update in staging, then live
Updating directly on production is a bet that nothing conflicts. It usually pays off, and the one time it does not you are debugging a white screen in front of customers. Staging costs a few extra minutes and removes the gamble entirely.
Watch for silent breakage
The failures that hurt most are invisible: a contact form that stopped sending, a payment gateway failing quietly, a plugin conflict affecting only one browser. Monitoring the actual user journeys — not just whether the homepage returns 200 — catches those.
The process.
Listen
A 30-minute call to understand the problem behind the brief. The fix is often not what you first ask for.
Quote
A real number tied to a real scope — never a copy-paste price list. Sent within 24 hours.
Build
I work in staging, in your repo, with commits you can audit. I send a daily update so you are never wondering.
Deliver
Smoke test together, document, deploy. Then I stick around to catch the edge cases.
What you get with me.
- Weekly tested updates via staging
- Off-site backups with periodic verified restores
- Uptime, error and form-submission monitoring
- Vulnerability alerts on your installed plugins
- Core Web Vitals tracked over time
- Monthly report of what changed and what was found
- Small fixes and content changes included
Maintenance is available standalone or as part of The Year With Me retainer, which also covers development bandwidth.
Questions, answered.
How often do you update the site?
Weekly for routine updates, immediately for security releases. Security patches do not wait for the schedule.
What if an update breaks something?
That is why staging exists. If a conflict appears there, it never reaches your live site — I resolve it, or hold that specific update and tell you why.
Do you keep backups off-site?
Yes. A backup stored on the same server as the site does not protect you from the most likely disaster scenarios, including a compromise or a host-level failure.
Are content changes included?
Small ones, yes — text edits, image swaps, a new page. Larger work like a new template or custom functionality is quoted separately, and I always say which is which upfront.
Related services.
WordPress Developer
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Read moreThe Year With Me
An annual partnership — senior developer on your team, flexible unlimited hours, four tiers.
Read moreNeed this built?.
Tell me what you need. I send a real quote based on your specific project — never a fixed price for a problem I have not heard.
Or book a slot directly — cal.com/