WordPress Maintenance & Care Plans
WordPress care plans keep your website secure, fast, backed up, and up to date, with a developer on call when you need one. Ours start at $1,500 per year for managed WP Engine hosting and protection, add developer time in 10-hour Flex Plan blocks from $1,000, and include one-time Performance and Accessibility Audits when a site needs a deeper look. Run by the team that builds custom WordPress sites, so problems get fixed in the code.
Our WordPress Care Plans
A WordPress care plan keeps your site secure, fast, backed up, and current, with a developer on call when something needs doing. Ours are built from four pieces you can combine: managed hosting and protection, a performance audit, an accessibility audit, and flexible blocks of developer time. Every plan is run by the same team that builds custom WordPress sites, so fixes happen in the code, not in a ticket queue.
WordPress Maintenance Plan Pricing
Straight answers on cost. Prices are starting points for a typical business site; larger sites, e-commerce, and multi-site networks are quoted after a short review.
Hosting & Protection Plan: from $1,500 / year
- Managed WP Engine hosting with CDN and global edge caching
- Daily automated backups with restore points
- Monthly WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates
- Let’s Encrypt SSL, auto-renewed, plus security headers
- Free clean-up and restoration if the site is ever hacked
- Migration of your existing site to our servers included
- Email support
Best for: any business site that needs to stay up, secure, and current without in-house attention.
Flex Plan: from $1,000 per 10-hour block
- Developer time you direct: content updates, new sections, bug fixes, integrations, design changes
- On-call support
- Hours tracked and reported
- Strategy, QA, and implementation all draw from the same block
Best for: sites that change often, or teams that want a developer a message away. Combine with Hosting & Protection for full coverage. Ad-hoc work outside a block is billed at $125 per hour.
WordPress Performance Audit: quoted per site
- Theme and plugin code review, WP user and permission review, error log review
- Core Web Vitals diagnosis from field data (LCP, INP, CLS)
- Image, CSS, and JavaScript optimization, lazy-loading review, caching configuration
- Plugin consolidation recommendations and analytics setup
- Fixes implemented, with before-and-after measurements
Best for: slow sites, sites failing Core Web Vitals, and any site we are taking over from another developer.
Accessibility Audit: quoted per site
- Manual review against WCAG 2.1 AA, beyond automated scanners
- Keyboard, screen reader, contrast, forms, and media checks
- Prioritized remediation report with code-level guidance
- Optional remediation through the Flex Plan
Best for: healthcare, finance, education, government contractors, and any business that wants to reduce ADA exposure. See our ADA compliance services.
AI Optimization: quoted per site
- Structured data and schema markup so AI systems can read your content accurately
- AI crawler access configuration (llms.txt, robots.txt) for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI crawlers
- Answer-ready content formatting for direct citation in AI-generated answers
- Monitoring in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity
Best for: businesses that want to show up when customers ask AI tools for a recommendation, not just when they search Google. See our AI Search Optimization services.
Hosting and Protection Plan
The Hosting and Protection Plan is the foundation. Your site runs on managed WP Engine hosting, which we use for our own site and every client site we host, with daily backups, staging environments, and an edge network that keeps pages fast worldwide. Each month we update WordPress core, your theme, and your plugins, and check the site after each round so a broken update is caught by us, not by your visitors. A Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate renews automatically every 90 days and we add security headers on top.
If your site is ever compromised, we restore it at no charge. Migrating your existing WordPress site onto our servers is included, and we handle DNS and SSL cutover so there is no downtime. From $1,500 per year.
WordPress Performance Audit
Most slow WordPress sites are slow for reasons a caching plugin cannot fix: heavy theme markup, plugins loading scripts on every page, oversized images, and database bloat. Our Performance Audit reviews the codebase, user permissions, and error logs, measures Core Web Vitals from real-user field data, and then implements the improvements: image optimization, CSS and JavaScript consolidation, correct lazy-loading and priority hints, caching configuration, and plugin clean-up. You get before-and-after numbers, not a PDF of recommendations.
When we rebuilt Hoppr.ai, Largest Contentful Paint fell from 15.2 seconds to 0.8; TBG Homes went from a mobile PageSpeed score of 31 to 86. The audit is how we find that headroom on a site we did not build. Quoted per site after a short review; see also our page speed optimization services.
Accessibility Audit
Automated scanners catch only a portion of accessibility problems. Our Accessibility Audit is a manual review against the WCAG 2.1 AA standard: keyboard navigation, screen reader behavior, color contrast, form labels and error handling, media alternatives, and focus management, on the templates your visitors actually use. You receive a prioritized report that explains each issue in plain language and tells your developer (or ours, through the Flex Plan) exactly what to change.
Accessibility is also good SEO and good AI readiness: semantic markup, descriptive alt text, and clear structure help search engines and AI systems read your site the same way they help assistive technology. Quoted per site.
Flex Plan
The Flex Plan is developer time on retainer, sold in 10-hour blocks from $1,000. Use it for content updates, new landing pages, plugin replacements, integrations, design refinements, or the accessibility and performance fixes an audit turns up. You send the request, we scope it against your hours, do the work, and report what was used.
Flex Plan clients get on-call support, which matters most on the day something breaks. Combined with the Hosting and Protection Plan, it is complete coverage: hosting, security, updates, backups, and a developer who already knows your site.
AI Optimization
Search is splitting in two. Some customers still type a query into Google. A growing share ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview for a recommendation and never see a list of links at all. AI Optimization makes sure your site can be read, understood, and cited by both. We add the structured data and schema markup that tells AI systems what your business actually does, configure crawler access (llms.txt, robots.txt) so AI tools can index your content in the first place, and format key pages so an answer can be lifted cleanly and attributed to you.
We monitor how your brand shows up across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, and adjust as the tools change. It is quoted per site, and pairs naturally with a Performance or Accessibility Audit, or with any existing plan.
Why a Maintenance Plan Costs Less Than No Plan
Almost every emergency we are called into follows the same pattern: a plugin was updated directly on the live site, there was no recent backup, and nobody noticed until a customer did. The clean-up costs more than a year of maintenance, and the downtime costs more than that.
A care plan turns those emergencies into routine. Updates are done by a developer who checks the result. Backups exist and have been restored before they are needed. Security patches land the month they are released. Performance is measured, so a slow creep is caught early. And when you do need a change, the person making it already knows how your site is built. That is what the line item buys: not a service, but the absence of surprises.
What Clients Say
WordPress Care Plan FAQs
What’s included in a WordPress care plan?
Our care plans are built from four offerings you can combine to fit your site. The Hosting and Protection Plan covers WP Engine hosting, daily backups, monthly plugin updates, a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate that auto-renews every 90 days, select security headers, and free restoration if your site is ever hacked. The WordPress Performance Audit reviews your codebase, Core Web Vitals, image optimization, and plugins. The Accessibility Audit checks your site against the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. And the Flex Plan adds 10-hour blocks for on-call support and direct updates to your website.
How much does WordPress maintenance cost?
Our Hosting and Protection Plan starts at $1,500 per year and covers managed WP Engine hosting, daily backups, monthly tested updates, SSL and security headers, and free restoration after a hack. Developer time is sold through the Flex Plan in 10-hour blocks from $1,000, and ad-hoc work outside a block is $125 per hour. Performance and Accessibility Audits are quoted per site. Larger sites, e-commerce, and multi-site networks are priced after a short review.
What’s the difference between a care plan and a maintenance plan?
Nothing, really. Care plans and maintenance plans are two names for the same service. At City of Oaks Marketing, that service spans our Hosting and Protection Plan (WP Engine hosting, daily backups, monthly updates, and security), WordPress Performance Audits, Accessibility Audits, and Flex Plan hours for on-call support. Whichever you call it, the goal is a website that stays fast, secure, and current without you having to think about it.
Do I need a care plan if my site rarely changes?
Yes, and it matters more now than ever. Even if your content never changes, the landscape around your site does. Plugin vulnerabilities are discovered every month, Google keeps raising its Core Web Vitals bar, and AI search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity continually re-crawl your site and re-evaluate whether it’s worth citing. A care plan keeps your site secure and AI optimized: monthly updates patch security holes, daily backups protect you from the unexpected, and ongoing performance work maintains the speed and clean structure that both Google and AI engines reward. A site that sits untouched gets slower, more vulnerable, and less visible every month.
Can you take over maintenance for a WordPress site you didn’t build?
In most cases, yes. Seamless migration of your WordPress site to our WP Engine servers is included in the Hosting and Protection Plan, and we usually recommend starting with a WordPress Performance Audit so we understand your codebase and can flag any issues before they become problems. From there your site folds into a care plan like any site we built ourselves.
What happens if my site goes down or gets hacked?
On the Hosting and Protection Plan, we restore your site from a clean backup at no charge, remove the compromise, patch the entry point, and tell you what happened in plain language. Daily restore points on WP Engine mean we can roll back to a known-good copy quickly rather than rebuilding from scratch.
Do I still own my site on a care plan?
Yes. Your site, its code, its content, and your domain remain yours on every plan. The Hosting and Protection Plan is billed annually and Flex Plan blocks are prepaid, so you always know what you have committed to, and nothing about a care plan locks your site to us.
Ready to stop worrying about your website?
Tell us about your site and we will recommend the right combination of hosting, audits, and developer time, with a price, in one conversation.