Most small businesses don’t actually need to pay for a maintenance plan for their website.
This might sound strange coming from a full stack developer. After all, many businesses in this industry often sell these plans. So here’s why you may (or may not) need a maintenance plan for your WordPress website.
When Maintenance Makes Sense
This is when I sold my clients maintenance plans.
- Client wanted one, as a form of insurance. The main reason was peace of mind in a project where the client wanted to lower their risks as much as possible after the main project delivery.
- The code base of the website had some characteristics that made updating plugins, themes, or core, risky.
I don’t think it’s honest forcing these plans on every single client for every single project.
Most WordPress websites, especially those built with solid plugins and themes, can run smoothly without any major issues for the long term. Especially when these are websites for small businesses.
Different Types of Maintenance Plans
Maintenance is a very generic word in this context. It means different things to different developers. If you’re considering purchasing a plan of this kind, most of the time I would recommend one with specific features included.
In this industry I often see two types of maintenance, often they’re separate:
- Insurance-like: you pay a fixed quote per month regardless of the work done on the website. To the point where the developer may actually do zero work on your website if all works well. But in case something goes wrong, regardless of the complexity of the problem, the developer will fix the issue(s) for no additional cost.
- Based on scheduled time each month: the developer schedules X hours of work each month on your website: to test if everything is working, maybe update some components manually. But if anything serious happens to the website, fixing it will cost additional fees not included within the monthly plan.
Both of these approaches may have their role in different contexts. If you have doubts or questions about the best approach for your website, you can book a consultation here.
Maintenance Plans Pricing
Pricing can vary for these types of plans. As always, pricing without context means little. For some businesses it makes perfect sense to pay thousands of dollars every month, while for others even $50 USD would be a waste of budget.
Generally, these plans vary from $60 to $400 for a generic approach, and of course can easily end up in the thousands for plans that require more hands-on work.
Here’s what a typical plan ($60 to $400 per month) may include:
- Uptime monitoring
- Emergency support
- Daily Backups
- Malware removal
- Minor page load speed and security optimization
As a developer, I can confirm most of these features can be automated (of course it doesn’t mean that the service should be free), and it’s difficult that your website will be easily infected with malware as long as it was well-built.
Websites with a lot of technical debt and with a more intricate build history may benefit more from regular maintenance, as these often tend to fall apart easily. Back when I was an employee I remember we inherited some websites where it was enough to change 1 single page to put down the entire website. It happens especially with cheap developers or in general when a business has employees that aren’t qualified and tamper with the website too much. 🙂
My approach with clients
So far in my experience I’ve rarely recommended any kind of maintenance plan. The plans I sold to clients happened because they asked for them and there were good reasons for them.
I offer a 6-months bug free guarantee with everything I deliver to clients. Mostly because my business is more focused on building products: websites, custom themes, and plugins.
There are businesses in this industry that do the opposite: they maintain websites but never build them. It comes down to specialization.
I also offer an all-inclusive monthly plan to a limited set of clients, which of course, would also solve any kind of maintenance need.