The maintenance plan that actually maintains something.
Most WordPress maintenance services are a monthly invoice for an update script that runs unattended. Nobody looks at the site before the updates run, and nobody looks after. You find out something broke when a customer emails you about it.
Mine is different in one important way: every update runs on a staging copy of your site before it touches production. Core, plugins, theme, all of it. After the staging run I actually look: front page, key landing pages, forms, checkout if you sell online. If an update breaks something, it breaks the copy, and you never hear about it. If production ever does break, I roll back to the backup taken minutes earlier and investigate before trying again.
What a month of Care actually looks like.
Care plans are easy to sell and easy to fake, so here is the literal work:
- Every day: an off-site backup of files and database, retained for 30 days. Uptime and SSL checks every minute, around the clock.
- Every week: staging refreshed, core and plugin and theme updates applied there, the site clicked through, then the same updates promoted to production. Security scan review. Never on a Friday afternoon.
- Every month: a Lighthouse performance run, a restore check on a recent backup, your content edits, and a plain-English report in your inbox: what got updated, what got fixed, and anything that needs a decision from you.
- Every quarter: a deeper look at PHP version, database bloat, and abandoned plugins that deserve removal.
Three sites that did not have a maintenance plan.
Composites, but every detail is something I have seen happen:
The restaurant with the broken menu. An automatic page-builder update quietly wrecked the menu layout on a Thursday night. Weekend visitors got overlapping text and a phone number they had to hunt for. Nobody at the restaurant looked at their own site for eleven days, because why would they? Uptime tools stayed green the whole time. The site was up. It just was not working.
The contractor with the hijacked contact form. A form plugin sat unpatched for over a year. A known exploit turned the site into a spam relay, the domain landed on blocklists, and quote requests started dying in spam folders. Leads did not stop coming in. They stopped arriving.
The shop with backups nobody had ever restored. The host technically had backups. After a bad database update, the newest restorable copy turned out to predate a redesign by two years. A backup you have never test-restored is a hope, not a plan. It is why restore checks are on my checklist.
Most maintenance plans vs. this one.
| What matters | DIY | Bulk plan | Hourly freelancer | Outerwave Care |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs updates | You, when you remember | A script, unattended | Whenever you book time | Me, weekly, on a schedule |
| Tested before live | No | Rarely | Sometimes | Every update, on staging |
| Backups | Whatever the host does | Daily, never test-restored | Ad hoc | Daily off-site, restore checks |
| Who notices downtime | Your customers | A dashboard | Nobody | Monitoring alerts me in minutes |
| Small edits | Your evenings | Ticket queue | Billed hourly | 30 minutes included monthly |
| When something breaks | You search forums | You file a ticket | You wait for a reply | Roll back first, then fix |
The short version: most plans are built to be cheap to deliver at scale. Mine is built so I never get the 9 PM “site is down” call. The incentives do most of the work.
Who this is for, and who it is not for.
It is for business owners with a WordPress site that needs to stay healthy while they run the business: brochure sites, lead-gen sites, WooCommerce stores, membership sites. I am based in Milwaukee, and plenty of my clients are not. The whole plan is remote by nature: staging, backups, monitoring, and reports work the same whether your site is down the street or three time zones away.
It is not for everything:
- Sites that need a rebuild, not maintenance. If the site is slow under a bloated theme and forty plugins, maintaining it just preserves the problem. I will say so honestly. A rebuild is usually cheaper than a year of fighting it.
- Ongoing feature development. New templates, custom functionality, integrations. That is project work, scoped and quoted separately.
- Marketing retainers. Care keeps the site healthy. It does not write your content or run SEO campaigns.
Sites I did not build are welcome.
Roughly half the sites on care plans like this were built by someone else who moved on, got too busy, or vanished. That is normal, and it is fine. Onboarding starts with a full audit: what is installed, what version everything is on, where the site lives, and what state the backups are actually in. If the site has deeper problems than maintenance can solve, I will tell you before you commit, not after.
What is NOT included.
The honest list: design changes, layout edits, new features, SEO campaigns, content writing, custom development, and host migrations. Those are project work, quoted separately. The care plan keeps the existing site healthy. It does not change what the site is.
Hosting is also separate, on purpose. Care only assumes your hosting stays exactly where it is. If you would rather have hosting and care on one bill, that is the Hosting + Care plan, which runs on Cloudways.