What website maintenance includes
Website maintenance is recurring technical work rather than an occasional tidy-up. On a WordPress site that normally means keeping the core software, plugins and theme current, maintaining usable backups, monitoring availability and watching for security or performance problems.
Our Essential Care plan costs £59 a month or £590 a year and includes weekly core, plugin and theme updates, daily off-server backups, 24/7 uptime monitoring, security scanning and hardening, a monthly health report and email support by the next business day.
Professional Care costs £119 a month or £1,190 a year. It adds 60 minutes of development time each month, fixes within 24 to 48 hours, speed and Core Web Vitals monitoring, a monthly accessibility scan, and phone and email support seven days a week. Premium Care is £249 a month or £2,490 a year and adds three hours of monthly development time, a priority two-hour emergency response, WooCommerce and payment testing, a quarterly SEO and conversion review, and a direct line to your engineer.
You can compare the plans on our pricing page.
Why WordPress maintenance is more than pressing Update
WordPress advises site owners to keep plugins and themes up to date, but applying an update is only part of the job. Plugins can depend on a particular PHP version, theme code can interact with page builders, and an update that completes successfully can still alter a layout or interfere with a form, checkout or JavaScript component.
A sensible maintenance process therefore considers what changed and whether the important parts of the site still behave correctly. Before higher-risk work, a current backup provides a recovery route if the change introduces a fault. WordPress itself advises making sure a current backup exists before updating plugins.
This is particularly important on sites with payments or other transactional functions. Premium Care includes WooCommerce and payment testing because a working home page does not prove that a customer can complete a purchase. For more focused platform support, see WordPress maintenance or WooCommerce support.
Backups, monitoring and website security maintenance
A backup is only useful if it is available after the live website or hosting account has a problem. Our care plans therefore use daily off-server backups rather than relying solely on a copy held alongside the live site.
The National Cyber Security Centre advises organisations to protect backups from the systems and credentials that could also be compromised, retain suitable backup history and test restoration regularly. That principle matters with websites because malware, accidental deletion, a failed update or a hosting problem can all create a need to restore data.
Monitoring serves a different purpose. It helps identify that a site has become unavailable rather than waiting for a customer or member of staff to notice. Essential Care includes 24/7 uptime monitoring alongside security scanning and hardening. Businesses that only need monitoring can also use the separate Uptime and Security Monitoring service from £29 a month.
Maintenance also means watching the technology underneath
A website can look unchanged while the technology beneath it moves towards obsolescence. PHP is a good example. Each PHP release branch has a defined support lifecycle, after which that branch reaches end of life and no longer receives support from the PHP project.
As of October 2026, PHP 8.1 is already end of life and PHP 8.2 is scheduled to reach the end of security support on 31 December 2026 according to PHP's official supported-versions schedule. Moving to a newer branch can require compatibility work, particularly on older themes, plugins or custom applications.
Maintenance should therefore identify ageing dependencies before a forced hosting change turns them into an urgent problem. Where an upgrade needs dedicated testing and code changes, our PHP upgrade service uses a staging test first and keeps a rollback plan available.
What to look for in a website maintenance plan
The cheapest maintenance arrangement is not necessarily the one with the lowest monthly fee. Check what is actually maintained, how often updates happen, where backups are stored, what happens when an update causes a problem and whether technical work beyond routine updates is included.
Development allowance is another useful distinction. Essential Care is suited to brochure sites that mainly need routine upkeep. Professional Care includes one hour of development time each month, while Premium Care includes three hours. That allows small technical changes to be handled within the plan rather than treating every adjustment as a separate project.
It is also worth separating maintenance from hosting. You can keep your existing provider and still have the site maintained. If server configuration, SSL, DNS or mail settings are the main concern, see hosting support. If you want the broader technical relationship rather than maintenance alone, see website support.