Knowledge base / For owners
What a website care plan should include, and what is padding.
Most plans list the same eight things. Two of them do nothing for you, and the two that matter most are usually absent.
Key takeaways
- What should every plan cover? Core and plugin updates applied with a way back, off-site backups that have been restored at least once, security monitoring, uptime checks, and a named amount of change time each month.
- What is usually padding? Line items with no outcome: “performance optimisation” with no metric attached, “SEO monitoring” that produces no report you read, and database cleanups sold as a service.
- What is usually missing? Two things. An off-site backup that somebody has actually restored, and on-page work that changes the pages rather than only watching them.
- What should it cost? Ours is $995 a month flat, with no tiers, covering the care and the search work in one invoice. Lower prices exist and generally buy the watching without the changing.
What should be in every care plan?
| Item | What good looks like | The question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Core and plugin updates | Applied regularly, checked after, with a documented way back. | What happens if an update breaks the site on a Friday? |
| Backups | Off-site, automatic, retained for weeks, and restored at least once as a test. | When did you last restore one, and how long did it take? |
| Security | A firewall or scanner, file-change monitoring, hardened logins. | Who gets told first when something trips, you or me? |
| Uptime monitoring | Checks every few minutes from outside the host, with alerts to a human. | Does anyone act on the alert at 3am, or is it just logged? |
| Change time | A named number of minutes a month for edits you ask for. | What counts as change time, and what gets quoted separately? |
| Reporting | A short monthly report a non-specialist can read. | Can I see last month's for another client, with the name removed? |
What is usually padding?
Three line items appear on most plans and rarely produce anything.
Performance optimisation, with no metric. Optimisation towards what number, measured how? If the plan does not name a measurement, there is nothing to hold it to. We report Core Web Vitals from real user data as pass or fail, not a lab score out of a hundred, because the lab score is a diagnostic and not an outcome.
Database optimisation. Worth doing occasionally, on a schedule, automatically. It is not a monthly service and it has never been what was wrong with a site.
SEO monitoring. The word doing the work there is monitoring. Watching your rankings move is not the same as changing anything, and it is sold at the price of changing things.
What is usually missing?
A backup somebody has restored. Nearly every plan lists backups. Very few include a restore test, which is the only thing that proves the backup works. An untested backup is a belief, not a safeguard, and people find out which at the worst moment.
On-page work. Updates, backups and monitoring keep the site alive. None of them make it better. A plan that never changes a title, rewrites an answer, adds a question to the Master FAQ or fixes schema is a plan to stand still, and standing still on a site is a slow decline because everyone else is editing theirs.
That second gap is why our plan is one price covering care and search work together. Separating them lets the search half get cut in a quiet month, which is exactly when it should not be.
How to compare two quotes honestly
Put them side by side and ask four questions of each.
- What arrives at the end of a month when nothing goes wrong?
- Where do the backups live, and when was one last restored?
- How much of the fee is work on the pages, rather than watching them?
- What do I get on the day I leave, and how long does it take?
A cheaper plan that answers all four well is a better plan. Ours is $995 a month, month to month from day one, and the terms are published rather than sent on request. If a quote you are comparing is half that and answers those four questions properly, take it.
Care plan questions
No, and keeping them apart matters. Build support is a warranty on what was built; ours runs 90 days. A care plan is ongoing work on a live site. Anyone merging the two in a proposal is either confused or counting the warranty as a service you are paying for twice.
The site changing is not the risk. WordPress, the theme and every plugin keep changing underneath it, and a site nobody touches for a year is the one that breaks on an update nobody was watching. The honest minimum for a static brochure site is updates, backups and monitoring.
In our plan they do not roll over, and we say so rather than burying it. Rolled-over hours sound generous and create an incentive to bank work rather than do it. If you have a big month coming, tell us and we schedule it.
You can, and you should know what they actually are. Many host backups live on the same infrastructure as the site, which protects you from your own mistakes and not from the host's. The question to ask is where the backup is stored and when it was last restored.
Ask what arrives at the end of a month in which nothing broke. If the answer is a report that everything is fine, you are buying watching. If the answer is a list of pages changed and what moved, you are buying work.
You should be able to, within a month, with everything. Ours is month to month with 30 days' notice and no cancellation fee, and Fair Exit means you get a full export including credentials, schema files and all the content we were involved with.
Before you buy a plan, find out what your site needs.
The free AI Visibility Score reports eight points measured on your live pages, so a plan can be judged against real findings rather than a generic checklist.
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