Website Maintenance: What a Care Plan Should Include
"Maintenance" is one of the vaguest words in the website business. One company charges a monthly fee and does nothing unless something breaks. Another charges a similar amount and updates your prices, adds pages and sends you a monthly report. Before you pay for a website maintenance plan, it helps to know what a good one should include, and what to ask so you can compare plans fairly.
Website maintenance is really two different jobs:
Many plans cover only the first job. Most business owners actually need the second one more, because a site with last year's prices and an old phone number quietly loses customers.
The basics should be in the plan, not billed separately. If the domain expires because nobody renewed it, the website and often the email stop working. Ask directly: "If I am on this plan, do I pay anything else for hosting or the domain?"
Regular automatic backups, kept somewhere other than the live site, and a clear answer to "how fast can you restore it if something goes wrong?"
On WordPress this means updating the core, theme and every plugin, then checking nothing broke. That last step is where many plans fall short: updates are run automatically and nobody notices the contact form has stopped working. On a managed platform without plugins, this work largely disappears, which is one reason maintenance can cost less.
The plan should say how many changes per month are included and what counts as "one change". A fair definition is one edit request on one page that takes up to about half an hour: a text change, a new photo, a price update, a new form field. Bigger requests count as several changes or are quoted separately.
"We will get back to you" is not a response time. A good plan says 48 hours, 24 hours or same day, depending on the tier, and says which channel to use. For most local businesses that channel is WhatsApp.
Even a short one: what was changed, whether the site was up all month, and how many people visited or contacted you. It shows the plan is doing something.
Checking Google Search Console for errors, making sure new pages have proper titles and descriptions, and fixing broken links. This is not the same as a full SEO campaign, but it prevents slow decline.
A good plan is clear about its limits. These are commonly excluded, and that is reasonable:
If a plan promises "unlimited everything" for a low fee, ask what happens when you actually use it.
Care is our own maintenance plan for sites on the Passive Coder platform. It includes the platform itself, so hosting, SSL, backups and domain renewal are covered for as long as Care runs. In USD the tiers are:
Paying yearly costs the same as eight months. Unused changes do not roll over, and Google Business Profile management is not part of any tier. Local prices for each country are on the Care plans page and the pricing page.
If you cancel Care, your site does not disappear. It simply moves to the yearly platform renewal, which keeps it online.
Care covers sites on our platform only. If your site is on WordPress today, we move it across free with any build package, and after that there are no plugins to keep updated. Details are on the move from WordPress page.
If you are comfortable editing your own site and your hosting and domain are paid, you may not. Most owners take one because they do not have time to make changes themselves.
It varies widely by country and by what is included. Compare plans on what they cover, especially the number of changes, response time and whether hosting is included, rather than on the monthly fee alone.
With us, yes. Many owners start monthly and move to yearly once they see how often they use it.
No. Care covers our platform only. We offer a free move from WordPress with any build package instead.
Tell us how often you change your site and what you would like help with on WhatsApp, and we will suggest the right tier. Or start a free 7-day trial and see the dashboard first.
