There’s the cheap maintenance plan and there’s the real one. Sometimes they look the same on paper. They’re not. Here’s what’s actually different.
What a cheap plan gets you
Cheap maintenance plans are usually automated plugin updaters with no human in the loop. You get:
- Automatic plugin updates (often happens at 2am without testing)
- Basic uptime monitoring
- Possibly a backup (often only on the same server as your site, which doesn’t help if the server fails)
- No human attention
- When something breaks: steep emergency rates
The pricing makes sense for the value. It’s not bad — it’s just minimal.
What real maintenance includes
Real WordPress maintenance includes humans who actually look at your site. You get:
- Staged updates. Plugin/core updates tested on staging before production. We catch the 5% of updates that would break your site before they do.
- Off-site backups. Daily, encrypted, retained 30 days, separate from hosting. If the hosting account is compromised, the backups are still safe.
- Security monitoring. Real security scanning, vulnerability alerts, response when something happens.
- Same-day urgent fixes. Site down? Form broken? You get human attention same business day, no emergency surcharge.
- Performance monitoring. Core Web Vitals tracked, alerts when scores drop, fixes when needed.
- Content updates within plan hours. 1-4 hours per month of content/maintenance updates included.
- Quarterly performance review. Where the site stands, what to improve, what to watch.
Why the price difference
A cheap plan is about five minutes of automated processing per site per month. Real maintenance is an hour of human attention per site per month, plus standby capacity for urgent fixes. Different products.
The hidden cost of cheap maintenance
Cheap maintenance often works fine — until it doesn’t. The 5% of cases where an automated update breaks your site costs you:
- Hours or days of downtime
- Emergency fix charges from whoever you can find quickly
- Lost revenue from the downtime
- Stress + lost time
Many businesses run a cheap plan for a year and a half, then have one bad month where they spend far more fixing what auto-broke than they ever saved. They’d have come out ahead with real maintenance and zero outages.
What to ask before signing up
Before paying for any WordPress maintenance plan:
- Where are backups stored? (Should be off-server)
- Do updates happen on staging first?
- What’s the response time for urgent issues?
- Are content updates included? How many hours?
- What happens if WordPress breaks during an update?
- Is there a real human attached to my site?
If the answers are ‘we don’t know,’ ‘no,’ or ‘whenever,’ the plan isn’t worth it. See our Maintenance service page for what we include in our plans.