What a Website Care Plan
Should Include

"Website maintenance" is one of the vaguest things a small business pays for. The invoice comes every month, and what it buys is anyone's guess. Sometimes it is a genuine service that keeps the site secure, fast, and producing leads. Sometimes it is an automatic plugin update and a hosting bill with a markup.

We have written before about why a small business needs a maintenance plan at all. This post is about what should be in one. If you already pay for a plan, use it to check what you are getting. If you are shopping for one, use it to compare offers that all describe themselves the same way.

What "maintenance" usually means

The typical plan sold to a small business covers three things: the site is hosted somewhere, software updates are applied (often automatically), and there is a number to call if something breaks. That is not nothing. But it is reactive. Nobody looks at the site unless you report a problem, and by the time you notice that the contact form has not delivered an email in two months, the leads are gone.

The other common version is the agency retainer that bundles "maintenance" with a block of hours you may or may not use. You pay the same whether the site needed attention or not, and there is no defined list of what gets checked.

What a care plan should actually include

A care plan is different from maintenance in one way: someone is responsible for the site working and producing, every month, whether or not you call. Here is what that covers.

• Hosting that is fast and monitored. Not the cheapest shared plan. Something with a content delivery network in front of it, uptime monitoring that alerts a person, and a server that responds in well under a second. If the site goes down at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, the provider should know before you do.
• Security. A valid SSL certificate that renews itself, a firewall in front of the site, spam protection on forms, and someone watching for the kind of compromise that turns a plumber's site into a pharmacy ad farm. On platforms with plugins, this also means removing abandoned ones before they become the way in.
• Backups you can actually restore. Daily, stored somewhere other than the server itself, kept for at least thirty days, and tested. A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a backup. Ask when the last test restore was.
• Updates, with someone checking afterward. Platform, theme, plugin, and dependency updates applied on a schedule, and then a human looks at the site to confirm nothing broke. Automatic updates with no check are how a form silently stops working.
• Forms and email tested every month. Submit the contact form, the quote form, the careers form. Confirm the email arrives in the right inbox and not spam. Confirm the notification goes to a person who still works there. This is the single check that most often catches a real, expensive problem.
• Speed checked and kept. A monthly run of PageSpeed Insights on the key pages, with someone fixing what drifted: the new oversized photo, the plugin that got added, the script that started loading slowly. Our post on website speed and SEO explains what the numbers mean.
• Monthly SEO work. This is what separates a care plan from a hosting plan. Someone looks at Search Console for errors and for searches you are almost ranking for. Someone updates your Google Business Profile, adds photos, responds to reviews. Someone improves or adds a page based on what the data shows. Small, steady work every month compounds; a burst once a year does not.
• A report you can read in five minutes. What was done, what changed, what the site produced (visits, calls, form submissions), and what is planned next. If the report is a 40-page export of analytics screenshots, nobody is reading it, including the provider.

Beyond the standing items, a good plan also covers small content changes without a ticket and an invoice: new hours, a new team member, a price list update, a seasonal banner. If every ten-minute change costs money, you will stop making them and the site will go stale.

Questions to ask a provider

These are fair questions and a good provider will have quick answers. Vague answers are their own kind of answer.

• What exactly gets checked each month, and can I see last month's checklist for another client?
• Where are backups stored, how long are they kept, and when did you last restore one?
• If the site goes down on a weekend, how do you find out, and how fast does someone respond?
• Do I own the domain, the hosting account, and the site files? If I leave, what do I take with me and how long does that take?
• What SEO work is included, specifically? "We monitor your SEO" is not an answer. "We review Search Console, update your Google profile, and improve one page a month" is.
• What counts as a small change I can just ask for, and what becomes a separate project?
• Who is actually doing the work? A person I can talk to, or a ticket queue?

Red flags

• You do not own your domain. If the domain is registered in the provider's name, leaving means negotiating for your own business name. Fix this before anything else, with any provider.
• Long contracts with a cancellation fee. A plan that is delivering value does not need to lock you in. Month to month is the norm for honest providers.
• No report, or a report that never changes. If you cannot tell from the report what was done last month, nothing may have been.
• Guaranteed rankings. Nobody can promise a position on Google. A provider who does is either inexperienced or planning to measure something meaningless.
• The site was built to need them. Some builds are deliberately tangled so that only the original agency can change anything. Ask a second developer to look at the site and tell you honestly whether they could work on it.

How to judge value without a price list

Prices for care plans vary widely, and the number by itself tells you little. A cheap plan that does nothing is expensive; a fuller plan that catches one broken form a year has probably paid for itself. Here is how to think about it.

Start with what a lost month costs you. If your website brings in even a handful of jobs a month, a form that silently fails for six weeks, or a site that is down for a weekend, or a hack that gets you flagged in search results, costs more than most plans do in a year. The plan is insurance against the things you would not notice until it was late.

Then count what is actually in it. Go down the eight items above and mark which ones the plan covers with a specific, named activity. Hosting and updates alone is a hosting plan. Hosting, security, backups, updates, form tests, speed, monthly SEO, and a report is a care plan. Two offers at the same price can be wildly different.

Then ask what it replaces. A real plan replaces the separate hosting bill, the SSL renewal, the backup service, the occasional emergency fix at an hourly rate, and some or all of a separate SEO retainer. Add those up before deciding whether the monthly number is high.

And weigh the relationship. The most valuable part of a care plan is often that someone who knows your site and your business is paying attention to it every month. When you want to add a page, launch a new service, or figure out why calls dropped, you are not starting from scratch with a stranger.

This is the thinking behind our own Website + SEO Care Plan: hosting, security, updates, and monthly SEO work under one roof, with a report you can read over coffee. If you are weighing it against building something new instead, our breakdown of what custom work really costs is a fair place to start. Either way, ask the questions above of anyone you are considering, including us.