A WordPress care plan is a recurring monthly service that bundles backups, updates, security monitoring, uptime checks, and a fixed allotment of support time into a single fee. The framework below gives you three copyable tiers, Basic, Standard, and Premium, with suggested pricing, response-time SLAs, and a clear list of what to automate so your margins hold as you add sites.
Most agencies lose money on care plans for one reason: the work scales linearly with the client count, but the price doesn’t. The fix isn’t charging more, it’s standardising what you deliver and automating the repeatable parts. This template is deliberately tier-based so you can quote in seconds, and deliberately specific about automation so the plan is profitable at 5 sites and at 200.
The three-tier framework
Three tiers covers almost every agency client without creating decision paralysis. Basic is for brochure sites that rarely change. Standard is the workhorse for active business sites. Premium is for revenue-critical sites, eCommerce, lead-gen, membership, where downtime costs real money.
| Feature | Basic | Standard | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suggested price (USD/mo) | $49–79 | $99–199 | $249–499+ |
| Cloud backups | Weekly | Daily | Real-time / hourly |
| Core, plugin & theme updates | Monthly | Weekly | Weekly + emergency patches |
| Uptime monitoring | Hourly | 5-minute | 1-minute |
| Security scanning | Monthly | Weekly | Daily + firewall |
| Performance checks | – | Quarterly | Monthly |
| Support time included | 30 min/mo | 1–2 hrs/mo | 4–5 hrs/mo |
| Monthly report | Automated | Automated + summary | Branded + call |
| Response SLA | 2 business days | 1 business day | 4 business hours |
Treat these prices as a floor, not a ceiling. Adjust for your market, your cost base, and the client’s revenue. A care plan protecting a $40k/month eCommerce store is cheap at $499; the same plan is a hard sell to a one-page tradesperson site, which is exactly why Basic exists.
Basic, “maintained”
The promise is simple: the site stays online, backed up, and current. Weekly backups, monthly updates applied in a batch, hourly uptime monitoring, and a small support allowance for tweaks. This tier should be almost entirely hands-off for you, if it isn’t, your automation is the problem, not the price.
Standard, “managed”
This is where most clients land. Daily backups, weekly updates with a visual or staging check, 5-minute uptime monitoring, weekly security scans, and 1–2 hours of included edits. The included time is the lever clients feel the value of, so log it and report it.
Premium, “managed + priority”
For sites where an hour of downtime is a measurable loss. Tighten every interval, add a real response-time SLA, and include enough support hours to feel like a retainer. Premium clients are paying for peace of mind and speed, sell the response time, not the task list.
SLA and response times
An SLA is a promise about response time, not necessarily resolution time, keep that distinction explicit in your contract so a third-party host outage doesn’t put you in breach. A workable structure:
- Critical (site down, checkout broken, security breach): Premium 4 business hours, Standard same business day, Basic next business day.
- High (key feature broken, plugin conflict): Premium same day, Standard 1 business day, Basic 2 business days.
- Routine (content edits, small changes): Within the included support window, scheduled in your normal queue.
Define “business hours” in writing and state whether emergencies outside them are billable or covered. The fastest way to keep these promises is to find out about problems before the client does, which is the entire point of automated monitoring.
What to automate (and what not to)
The difference between a profitable care plan and a treadmill is automation. Every task below should run without you touching it; your job is to handle the exceptions it surfaces, not to perform the checks manually across every site.
Automate these
- Uptime monitoring, checked from outside the site so a full outage is caught even when WordPress itself is down.
- Backups and backup verification, don’t just run them; confirm they actually completed and aren’t stale or failing.
- Update detection, surface pending core, plugin, and theme updates across the fleet in one view instead of logging into each site.
- Critical-error and cron-health detection, catch white-screen errors and broken scheduled tasks before they break a backup or a checkout.
- Monthly reporting, generate the client-facing report from monitoring data rather than assembling it by hand.
Keep human
- Applying major version updates to sites with custom code or complex plugins (test on staging first).
- Reviewing performance and security findings and deciding what’s actually worth acting on.
- The monthly call and the relationship, the part clients renew for.
This is where a multi-site dashboard earns its keep. A tool like Siteward pulls uptime, update counts, backup health, and critical-error flags from every site into one screen, so a single technician can run a hundred care-plan sites without logging into them one by one. Its critical-error detection names the culprit plugin or theme, which turns a vague “the site’s down” into a five-minute fix. Because it’s self-hosted with no per-site fee, the cost of the tooling doesn’t eat into the margin on each plan you add, see the full feature list for how the monitoring core maps onto the tiers above.
Pricing the plan profitably
Price on value and protected revenue, not on the hours of labour, automated labour should approach zero per site. A simple sanity check: your monthly fee should comfortably exceed your tooling cost per site plus the average support time you actually spend, with healthy margin on top.
The trap to avoid is per-site tooling fees. If your management platform charges per connected site, every care plan you sell quietly raises your cost base, and the maths gets worse the more you scale, the opposite of what you want. Flat-rate, unlimited-site tooling means your 200th care plan costs you the same in software as your first. Siteward’s free dashboard manages unlimited sites, with the Agency plan at $129/year (or a $399 lifetime licence) adding UpdraftPlus backup-health alerts, WP-Cron health alerts, and Zapier, features that map directly onto the automation column above. Compared with per-site platforms, that’s a fixed line item against unlimited recurring revenue.
Putting it into a contract
Once the tiers are set, the proposal writes itself. Lead with the tier table, attach your SLA grid, and spell out three things clients always ask about: what’s included in support time, what happens when they exceed it (hourly rate, rounded up), and what’s explicitly out of scope (new pages, redesigns, third-party host issues). Bill annually where you can, it improves cash flow and cuts churn. Then let the dashboard do the watching, and reserve your time for the exceptions and the relationship.
FAQ
What should a WordPress care plan include?
At minimum: regular backups with verification, core/plugin/theme updates, uptime monitoring, security scanning, and a defined allotment of support time with a stated response SLA. Higher tiers add tighter monitoring intervals, performance checks, emergency patching, and branded reporting. The exact frequencies are what separate your Basic, Standard, and Premium tiers.
How much should agencies charge for a WordPress care plan?
Common ranges are roughly $49–79/month for a basic maintained tier, $99–199 for a managed standard tier, and $249–499+ for premium plans on revenue-critical sites. Price on the value you protect, downtime cost, included support hours, response speed, rather than on labour, since most of the work should be automated.
How do I make care plans profitable at scale?
Automate everything repeatable, monitoring, backups, update detection, critical-error alerts, and reporting, and standardise delivery into fixed tiers so you’re not quoting bespoke each time. Critically, avoid per-site tooling fees; flat-rate, unlimited-site software keeps your cost base flat as recurring revenue grows.
What’s the difference between a care plan and a maintenance retainer?
A care plan is a productised, fixed-scope subscription (backups, updates, monitoring, a set number of support minutes) priced the same for every client on that tier. A retainer is open-ended billable time. Many agencies sell tiered care plans as the base and let clients buy extra hours at a retainer rate when they exceed the included support allowance.
What should I automate versus do manually?
Automate uptime monitoring, backups and backup verification, update detection, critical-error and cron-health checks, and monthly reporting. Keep humans on major-version updates for custom sites, judgement calls on security and performance findings, and the client relationship. A self-hosted multi-site dashboard handles the automated layer across every site from one screen.