Website care plan: price the upkeep, cap the edits.

A website care plan is a flat monthly fee an agency charges to keep a client's site updated, backed up, secure and working after launch, usually with a small allowance of edits on top. Price it from the hours the upkeep actually takes at your normal rate, add the edit allowance and any software you pass through, and then write down two limits: how big a single edit can be, and what happens to a request that adds something the site doesn't have yet. Those two lines are what let the fee stay flat from one month to the next.

Most care plans we read describe the upkeep in careful detail and leave the edit line vague, and that vague line is where a $545 plan quietly turns into a job paying under $40 an hour.

What is a website care plan?

A website care plan is ongoing upkeep for a site you built or took over, sold per site at a fixed monthly price. The name comes from WordPress agencies, but the idea fits any site that runs on software needing updates: the agency installs updates safely, keeps backups it has actually tested, watches for downtime and security problems, fixes whatever breaks, and makes small changes when the client asks for them.

It sits between two things clients often mix it up with. Hosting is the server the site lives on, and a plan may include it or leave it out. A retainer sells a bank of agency hours for whatever the client needs, and our piece on the monthly retainer works through one for a small museum at $4,200 a month. A care plan is smaller than either, and its upkeep looks roughly the same every month, so it can carry a flat price as long as the edits stay small.

What should a website care plan include?

A care plan has to promise that the site keeps working and say plainly where that promise stops, so the upkeep, the edit allowance and the boundary between them all need to be written into it. The upkeep part is the easiest to agree on:

• Updates to WordPress, the theme and every plugin, tried on a staging copy first
• Backups kept off the server, with one restored each month to prove it works
• Uptime and security monitoring, with a stated response time for outages
• Fixes for anything the plan's own upkeep breaks, at no extra charge
• A short monthly report the client can read in a couple of minutes

The edit allowance and its limits are where plans differ, and they're the part most often left blank. Local Website Design's checklist, written for small business owners comparing plans, tells buyers to ask where routine edits stop and separate development begins, which is sound advice for a buyer and also a fair sign that plenty of plans don't say. InstaWP's article for agencies covers updates, speed and security at length, and doesn't say where a small change ends and new work begins.

Write the exclusions down as well, in plain words. WP Umbrella's article puts new features, redesigns, content writing and SEO work outside a care plan and bills them separately as projects, which is the right default, and a line the client reads before signing beats an explanation on the day someone asks.

How much should you charge for a website care plan?

Charge the hours the upkeep takes at your normal rate, add the edit allowance and any software you pay for on the client's behalf, and quote the total as one monthly price per site. Hollins Ridge Outfitters sells camping and climbing gear from two stores in Bend, Oregon, and through a WooCommerce shop with around 400 products. The agency that built the shop charges $120 an hour, and a store takes more looking after than a brochure site, because every round of updates has to end with a test order to make sure customers can still pay.

Three of the four hours are upkeep, and that figure isn't pulled from the air. TopSyde's pricing article, citing a MainWP survey of WordPress professionals, puts maintenance at 3.2 hours per client per month, though an agency should time its own work for two or three months before trusting anybody's average, that one included. The $65 of software sits on its own line, so a vendor's price rise shows up as exactly that.

Over a year the plan comes to $6,540, which belongs in the proposal beside the build fee rather than inside it, for the reasons our piece on how much to charge for a website gives for quoting the build and the care after launch as separate prices.

What do other agencies charge for website care plans?

Published care plan prices mostly fall between about $90 and $500 a month, and the spread comes far more from what each plan counts as an edit than from the upkeep. WP Buffs, which sells care plans directly to site owners, charges $89 a month for its Maintain plan with updates, backups and monitoring but no edits, and $179 for Protect, which adds what it calls unlimited website edits. WP Umbrella, which sells software to agencies that run care plans, gives $100 to $500 a month as the usual range, with $50 to $100 for a small brochure site and $250 to $500 or more for a WooCommerce store.

TopSyde puts the typical agency range at $150 to $400 a month, and Superpress starts its own plans at $97. Hollins Ridge's $545 sits inside WP Umbrella's band for stores and above TopSyde's typical range, which is about where a shop that takes payments ought to land. Use these figures to check a price you've already built rather than to pick one, because an $89 plan with no edits and a $179 plan with unlimited ones are different products that happen to share a name.

Should a care plan include unlimited edits?

Only if you've written down exactly what counts as an edit, because unlimited edits are affordable for the seller only when the definition does the limiting. WP Buffs shows how that works in practice: its unlimited edits leave out custom development, updating custom code, graphic design, building full pages to match a design, creating content and rebuilding a site, and work in those categories is billed by the hour. That list is the real product, and the word unlimited is only its packaging.

A plan that promises unlimited edits without such a list hands the client the right to call a new page an edit, and leaves the agency arguing otherwise every time it happens. A small agency is usually better off with a time allowance and a size limit. WP Umbrella suggests 30 to 60 minutes of support time a month for small tasks, with anything beyond that quoted before the work starts, and the care terms in our web design contract template price maintenance at $340 a month with up to one hour of small edits.

Hollins Ridge gets 60 minutes a month, used in 15-minute steps, and any single request that would take longer than 30 minutes gets quoted on its own. Unused minutes don't roll over, because a bank of edit time that grows every quiet month eventually turns into a small project the plan never priced.

How do you tell an edit from new work?

Ask whether the request changes something the site already has or adds something it doesn't, and then check how long it would take. If something the plan looks after has stopped working, like a form that no longer sends or a checkout broken by an update, fixing it is the plan's job and it never touches the edit minutes, since that's precisely what the client is paying for.

If the request changes something the site already has, like opening hours, a banner, a price or a product photo, it's an edit, and it comes out of the allowance as long as it fits under the 30-minute limit. If it adds something the site doesn't have, like a new page template, a plugin, a feature or a connection to another system, it's new work, and it gets a written quote at $120 an hour before anybody starts, however small it sounds in the email.

The size limit catches the requests that look like edits and aren't. Adding six products to the shop changes nothing about how the site works, but at ten minutes a product it's an hour of data entry, which is twice the limit for one request and the whole month's allowance. Our explanation of in scope vs out of scope covers the same sorting on projects, where the question is what the signed scope names rather than what the site already has.

What happens in a month when requests outrun the plan?

The plan covers whatever fits inside it, everything else gets quoted and approved before work starts, and the client's bill goes up for that month only. In November, Hollins Ridge sends five requests in the run-up to its holiday sale. Changing the holiday store hours on two pages takes 15 minutes and swapping the homepage banner takes 30, so 45 of the 60 edit minutes get used and the other 15 lapse at the end of the month.

A contact form stops sending after a plugin update, and the 30 minutes it takes to fix come out of the plan rather than the allowance. The six new jackets add up to an hour of product entry, so the agency quotes $120 and the store approves it the same afternoon. The big request is gift cards before Black Friday, which means a new plugin the client buys on its own account, setting it up and testing it through checkout: 7 hours, quoted at $840 on November 3 and approved on November 4.

November bills $1,505, which is the $545 plan plus $960 of approved work. Without the size limit and the new-work line, the same plan would have absorbed all 12.25 hours for the $480 left once the software is paid, which works out to $39.18 an hour against a $120 rate. With them written down, the plan's $480 covers the 4.25 hours of upkeep, edits and the form fix, or $112.94 an hour, and the 8 hours of new work are paid at the full rate.

One busy November is what a holiday sale should look like, but three months in a row of quoted extra edits means the client wants an agency on call rather than a site looked after, and that's the point to sell them hours as a retainer, with the care plan kept underneath so the upkeep never competes with their requests.

The thirty-minute line is what keeps the price flat

Hollins Ridge's plan can cost $545 every month because 30 minutes is written next to the word edit, and most of the rest of the document follows from that one number. It lets the agency say yes to banners and opening hours without a conversation, and it turns the gift card request into an $840 quote instead of unpaid work the client assumed was included. A care plan without it puts a price on the upkeep and no price on anything else, which is how a good monthly product turns into the agency's least profitable client.

Docket is built for the moment a request crosses that line: the agency sends the price and the hours, the client approves in one click, and the approval sits in the project log with its date before any work starts. Our notes on handling scope creep without losing the client cover the habit of answering those requests fast enough that the client never feels they've been turned down.

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