September 2026 update: I’m not taking on new maintenance clients. If you are interested in a recommendation, I suggest you check out Codeable’s WordPress maintenance plans →. I can’t recommend any of the cheap maintenance plans where you simply get automatic updates done, but if something goes wrong, you’re left with a broken site and unresponsive support. I know because I was the person called to clean up after a popular WP support service.
If you’d like to understand more about what maintenance is (and isn’t), whether you actually need it and how to pick a good service, keep reading. And if you still have questions, feel free to drop me a message.
Your WordPress site doesn’t need you hovering over it every day.
But it does need someone to keep an eye on the things that can quickly (and quietly) turn into a problem: outdated software, failed backups, security issues, broken forms, plugin conflicts, a site that suddenly goes down.
And when something does break, it makes all the difference to have someone who knows how WordPress works and can fix it without you spending three days chatting with AI, trying out fixes that make things worse.
That’s basically what WordPress maintenance is for.
But whether you actually need a maintenance plan is a different question. And no, I’m not going to tell you that every business website needs one.
What does WordPress maintenance include? (Ideally)
People often think WordPress maintenance means:
Log in once a week → update everything → done.
That’s the easy part. Anyone can push an “Update” button. Unfortunately, that’s also what most services (at least those on the low end) on the market offer.
However, the more useful part is making sure those updates don’t break something, that you have a working backup, one you can actually restore (and not an incomplete or a corrupted one – things you might discover when it’s already too late), and that someone notices when something goes wrong.
Depending on the site, ongoing WordPress maintenance can include several of these items:
- WordPress core, plugin and theme updates
- backups stored somewhere other than the same server
- security checks and vulnerability monitoring
- uptime monitoring
- checking for PHP errors
- testing important forms
- checking that important emails are still being sent
- performance checks
- testing the site after updates
- fixing problems caused by updates or plugin conflicts
- small ongoing changes and improvements
Let me be clear: Not every website needs all of these.
A five-page brochure website and a WooCommerce store processing hundreds of orders a day or an online membership site with dozens of courses and hundreds or thousands of students have very different maintenance requirements.
That’s why I don’t particularly like the “one maintenance package fits everyone” approach.
Do you actually need a WordPress maintenance plan?
Maybe.
If you have a small website that doesn’t change much, your hosting provider makes reliable backups, you know your way around WordPress and you’re comfortable dealing with the occasional problem, you may be perfectly capable of maintaining it yourself.
You don’t need to pay someone every month just because your website runs on WordPress. And I know small business tend to be aversive to recurring costs and prefer to avoid them whenever possible.
On the other hand, I’d seriously consider ongoing maintenance if:
- your website generates leads or sales
- your business depends on the site being available
- you run WooCommerce or another system that processes transactions
- you have a lot of plugins or integrations
- you don’t have time or interest in dealing with WordPress
- you wouldn’t know what to do if an update broke the site
- a few hours of downtime would cost you more than the maintenance plan
The last point is usually the most useful way to think about it.
You’re not really paying someone to click the “Update” button.
You’re paying to reduce the chance that something important will quietly break – and to have someone who knows what they’re doing when it does.
WordPress maintenance vs WordPress support
These two terms are often used interchangeably, but they’re not quite the same thing.
Maintenance is mostly preventative
Things like:
- updates
- backups
- security checks
- monitoring
- testing
- keeping an eye on the site’s health
The goal is to catch problems before they become emergencies.
Support is what happens when you need something
For example:
“My contact form stopped sending emails.”
“I updated WooCommerce and now the checkout is broken.”
“Can you change something on this page?”
“I need to add a new feature.”
“Something is making the site incredibly slow.”
You may need one, the other, or both.
And if you only need help once or twice a year, paying for a monthly maintenance plan may not make much sense.
What I would pay attention to if you maintain WordPress yourself
If you decide to handle maintenance yourself, there are a few things I wouldn’t skip.
Keep WordPress, plugins and themes updated
Obviously. But don’t blindly update everything the moment an update appears.
For a business-critical site, I’d rather have a backup first and some way of checking that important functionality still works after the update.
That’s particularly important for WooCommerce. Because a plugin update that breaks a blog post is annoying, but a plugin update that breaks checkout is a business problem.
Also, I prefer to wait a couple of days to a week before I do a major core update of WordPress or WooCommerce – just to make sure they’ve had time to fix most of the bugs that come with any major update.
Make sure your backups are actually useful
Having a backup plugin installed doesn’t automatically mean you have a usable backup.
Where is the backup stored?
Is it somewhere separate from your hosting account?
How many copies do you keep? And, most importantly:
Have you ever tested restoring one?
A backup you have never successfully restored is a bit like a spare tire you’ve never checked. You hope it’s there when you need it – but you might discover, if you haven’t checked in years, the spare tire has a hole.
Keep an eye on security
You don’t need to obsess over security, but you should know if:
- a plugin you’re using has a known vulnerability
- someone is repeatedly trying to log in
- your site has suddenly started sending huge amounts of email
- you’re getting strange traffic or fake orders
- a plugin or theme hasn’t been maintained for years or has been abandoned or even removed from WP repository.
Security isn’t something you install once and then forget about.
Check the things that matter to your business
This one is surprisingly easy to forget.
Don’t just check that the homepage loads. Check all the things that matter for your business, the ones that are getting you clients and sals:
- contact forms
- booking forms
- newsletter signup
- login
- checkout
- payment
- confirmation emails
- important landing pages
If your website makes money, test the money-making parts.
What about a maintenance service?
If you don’t want to deal with any of this yourself, a maintenance service can make sense.
But there are quite a few different levels of service, and the differences aren’t always obvious from the sales page. Some services basically mean: “We’ll keep your plugins updated.”
Others include backups, monitoring and security checks.
And more comprehensive services add things like staging environments, regression testing and actual development time.
Those are very different things.
For example, there’s a big difference between updating a plugin and safely updating a plugin
The first one is: Click Update.
The second might be: Back up the site → update the plugin on staging → test the important functionality → check for errors → deploy → test again.
That’s why some professional maintenance services cost considerably more than the $50-100/month packages you’ll find advertised everywhere.
You’re not just paying for someone to run updates. You’re paying for the process around those updates.
If you want someone else to handle it
I used to offer my own WordPress maintenance plans, and the page you’re reading originally described those services.
I’m not currently trying to build a large maintenance business around them. One option I’d recommend looking at is Codeable.
Codeable is a WordPress-focused platform with vetted WordPress experts. Their maintenance plans are built around ongoing maintenance rather than simply selling you a block of support hours. There’s also a personal reason I’m comfortable recommending Codeable: I’ve been a Codeable Expert since 2014. So I know the platform, the kind of developers they work with, and what happens behind the scenes better than I would with a service I’d simply found through a Google search.
See Codeable’s WordPress maintenance plans →
Disclosure: this is an affiliate link. If you decide to use Codeable through this link, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
Is a more expensive maintenance plan always better?
No.
If your website is small and uncomplicated, you probably don’t need an elaborate maintenance process.
You may be perfectly happy with a simple backup + update service.
But if your website is responsible for leads, bookings, sales or customer accounts, I’d look beyond the monthly price.
Ask what actually happens when an update breaks something (sooner or later, it will!).
Ask where backups are stored (locally or externally?).
Ask whether updates are tested before they’re applied to the live site.
Ask whether they are monitoring the site.
Ask what happens when you use up the included support hours.
And ask who is actually going to fix the problem when the automated tools don’t.
Those answers tell you much more than “$99/month” on a pricing table.
What if you don’t need ongoing maintenance?
That’s perfectly fine too. You could simply have someone do a technical check once or twice a year.
Or hire a WordPress developer when you have a specific problem.
Or maintain the site yourself and bring in an expert when something gets beyond your comfort level.
You don’t need to turn every WordPress task into a monthly subscription.
In fact, for some websites, I’d recommend exactly the opposite.
The part of WordPress maintenance that gets neglected
I’ve been working with WordPress for more than 20 years, and I’ve spent a lot of that time fixing websites that were being “maintained.”
Usually the updates had been done. The problem was everything around them.
A backup plugin had been running for months, but nobody had checked whether the backups were usable.
A plugin had been throwing PHP errors for weeks, but the site still looked fine from the outside.
A form had stopped sending emails after an update, and nobody noticed because nobody had actually tested it.
A security plugin was installed, but nobody had looked at what was happening in the logs – ant those were full of security warnings.
That’s why I don’t think good WordPress maintenance is about doing more things.
It’s about paying attention to the things that matter.
So, what should you do?
If you have a small, simple website and you’re comfortable with WordPress, you may not need a maintenance plan at all.
If your website is important to your business but you don’t want to deal with the technical side, paying someone to look after it can be very worthwhile.
And if you’re somewhere in between, you don’t necessarily need a monthly plan. You can get help when you need it.
The right answer depends on the website.
Which is probably not the most exciting answer, but it’s the honest one.
And after more than 20 years of working with websites, I’ve found that “it depends” is often a much more useful answer than selling everyone the same package.
Need help figuring out what your site actually needs?
If you’re not sure whether you need ongoing WordPress maintenance, a one-off technical check, help fixing a specific problem, or something else entirely, you can get in touch.
I’ll tell you what I think makes sense – even if the answer is “you don’t need a maintenance plan.”