Most maintenance plans are quiet. They cost $79/month, do almost nothing, and you only find out it failed when the site goes down or gets hacked. Ours are loud — proactive monitoring, real security, performance tuning, and the kind of support response that keeps your site live and earning.
Three priced tiers plus Custom — for sites at different stages of risk and traffic. Every tier includes real security monitoring, performance tuning, and a senior engineer on call — not a help-desk script. Same shape across every industry we serve.
Most maintenance plans skip 3 of these 5. Cheap plans skip 4. Here's what each discipline covers — and what changes between Essential, Premium, and Enterprise.
Plugin and core updates are the #1 cause of WordPress site outages. We test every update on a staging copy before applying to production, monitor the site for 24 hours after every push, and roll back instantly if anything fails. Most maintenance plans just click "update" and hope.
Most maintenance plans install a free security plugin and call it done. We layer real protection: file integrity monitoring, malware scanning, brute-force protection, vulnerability database alerts, and a hardened hosting profile. Premium adds an active WAF; Enterprise adds penetration testing.
Backups are worthless if they don't restore. Ours are tested quarterly on Premium and monthly on Enterprise — we actually run a restore against a sandbox to verify the backup is intact and complete. Most maintenance plans don't, and 31% of WordPress backups silently fail to restore.
Uptime monitoring is cheap and ubiquitous — what matters is what happens when an alert fires. Essential plans get a 1-business-day response; Premium gets 4 hours; Enterprise gets 1 hour with PagerDuty escalation to a senior on-call engineer. Real humans, not auto-responders.
Most sites get slower over time as content accumulates and plugins compound. Premium and Enterprise plans include active performance optimization — Core Web Vitals monitored, image compression automated, slow queries identified, plugin overhead audited. Essential plans monitor; the higher tiers actively improve.
Cheap maintenance plans technically exist. Here's what they actually do compared to a real plan — so you can decide which makes sense for your business.
| Discipline | $79/mo budget plans Most "WP care" plans |
Redefine — Premium $299/mo |
|---|---|---|
| Plugin updates | Auto-updated · no testing | Tested in staging first |
| Security | Free Wordfence install | WAF + file integrity + active scanning |
| Backups | Daily · never tested | Daily · quarterly restore verified |
| Uptime monitoring | 5-minute cadence · email alert | 60-second · 5 regions · human response |
| Response time | "We'll get to it" · often days | 4-hour priority · in writing |
| Edits included | "30 minutes" · barely useful | 5 hours/mo · senior dev |
| Performance work | None | Quarterly review + active tuning |
| If something breaks | Hourly billing · $150–$300/hr | Covered if it's our update |
| Who's on the account | L1 ticket queue · offshore | Senior engineer · same person |
| Year-1 hidden cost | $1,500–$4,000 in surprises | $0 · price is the price |
Maintenance is the most over-promised, under-delivered category in agency services. Here's what we actually do — and what we don't.
No — about 75% of our maintenance clients are sites we didn't originally build. Onboarding starts with a free audit so we can see what we're inheriting. If it's a complete mess (rare but real) we'll either say no or quote a one-time cleanup before starting the plan.
WordPress (with or without WooCommerce), Webflow, Shopify, custom Node.js / Next.js sites, Drupal, Craft CMS, ModX, and most static-site setups. We don't maintain Wix, Squarespace, or fully proprietary platforms because we can't actually intervene at the code level.
Real changes to your site, made by a senior developer — text updates, image swaps, new pages, form modifications, plugin configuration, that kind of thing. Not "we'll talk to support about it." We track hours transparently in a shared dashboard. Hours don't roll over month to month.
Bigger projects (a new section, a redesign, a migration) are quoted separately as add-on work.
Cleanup is covered on Premium and Enterprise. On Essential, we'll quote the cleanup separately (usually $400–$1,500 depending on severity), but you have the option to upgrade to Premium first for ongoing protection.
The bigger value is prevention — Premium and Enterprise security features make actual compromises rare. We've had 2 successful intrusions in the trailing 12 months across 180+ sites; both on Essential plans.
Three things: (1) the SLA — Premium is best-effort, Enterprise is contractual with financial penalty for breach; (2) response time — 4 hours vs 1 hour with PagerDuty; (3) the level of attention — Premium shares an engineering team, Enterprise gets a dedicated senior engineer who knows your stack.
Most clients are correctly on Premium. Enterprise makes sense when downtime translates directly to revenue loss — high-traffic e-commerce, lead-gen sites doing $50K+/mo in pipeline, etc.
We don't host — that's a different business. We work with your existing hosting (or recommend a host if you need one) and manage maintenance on top. Most clients are on WP Engine, Kinsta, Pressable, Cloudways, or AWS. Hosting costs are separate and pass-through.
If your hosting is part of the problem, we'll tell you on the audit and recommend a switch — with migration handled by us if you want.
Yes — 30 days notice, period. No long-term contracts, no buyout fees. Most maintenance clients stay 24+ months because the value is real, but the protection is structural: if we're not delivering, you leave.
If you do leave, we provide a clean handover — credentials, documentation, and a written summary of recent maintenance work for the next team.
Not for emergencies caused by our maintenance work — that's covered, full stop. For emergencies caused by external factors (a third-party plugin gets compromised, your hosting provider has an outage, etc.), Premium and Enterprise include up to 4 hours of emergency response per month. Beyond that, billed at $185/hr.
A sampling of recent engagements that match this work.
A Virginia coworking brand expanded from 3 to 7 locations during COVID — 12× inbound ROI, $950K attributable revenue, 67% more tours, and 33% member growth, all built on HubSpot automation and inbound-funnel expansion.
A precast concrete leader unified fragmented regional websites under one cohesive UX-driven build — bounce rate down 65%, conversions doubled, and 100% in-house content management efficiency.
A central London mailbox + virtual office provider replaced an outdated, plugin-heavy site with a custom build + managed hosting + restructured Google Ads — 400%+ ROAS, 35% conversions, 100% uptime.