Open your calendar and scroll back six months. Look for the last time you, or anyone in your organisation, sat down and did something to your website that nobody asked for. Not a news post or a new event listing. A maintenance job: checking for updates, testing the contact form, looking at a backup.
If you found one, good. If you’re still scrolling, you’ve already answered the main question in this post, which is whether you need a WordPress support plan. (I call mine a care plan. It’s the same thing: someone else takes responsibility for the unglamorous side of your site, on a schedule, for a fixed monthly fee.)
Plenty of organisations don’t need one, and a few shouldn’t buy anything yet. Here are five questions that sort you into the right group. Grab a pen and write your answers down before you read what each one means.
1. Who looks after your website, by name?
Write down the person’s name. Then write their actual job title, and the three biggest things on their plate this month.
If the answer is “whoever has time”, or the volunteer or developer who built the site and has since moved on, that’s a real answer, just not a comfortable one. Maintenance rarely gets dropped on purpose. It gets dropped because every other job has a deadline and this one doesn’t, right up until the day something breaks.
2. What does your site actually do in a normal week?
Count the enquiries, bookings, registrations, donations or membership renewals that arrive through it. Then ask what a week of those going missing would cost you.
If the honest number is close to zero, because the site is an online brochure that nobody uses to do anything, you can relax a little. Self-managing a quiet site is reasonable. If it carries real work, a silent failure gets expensive fast, and silent is the key word. In an earlier post I showed how a contact form can stop delivering messages while looking perfectly healthy. Nobody gets an error. The enquiries just stop.
3. Could someone restore it tomorrow?
Ask the person you named in question 1 to explain, out loud and without looking anything up, where the latest backup is stored and how they’d bring the site back from it.
If they can, you’re ahead of most organisations I meet. If there’s a pause, you don’t have a recovery plan, you have a hope. A backup nobody has ever restored from is a guess about what will happen on the worst day, and that’s a bad time to run the experiment.
4. How much of your site depends on paid plugins?
Open your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins, and pick out anything that didn’t come from the free WordPress directory: a form builder, a page builder, an events calendar, a backup tool. Most of these need an annual licence to keep receiving updates. If you want a sense of the numbers, the paid tools I use on every site are listed, with what each costs a year, on my agency tools page.
Now write down each renewal date. If you can’t, or if the licences sit on the credit card of someone who left two years ago, there’s a fair chance one has already lapsed. The plugin keeps working, so nothing looks wrong. It just quietly stops being updated.
5. What is the job worth in time?
Do the six checks from What Does a WordPress Care Plan Actually Include? once, with a timer running. Write down how long they took, then multiply by two. Updates should be done every fortnight, so that’s your month.
Now put a dollar figure on your time. Say it’s worth $60 an hour, which is $1 a minute (swap in your own number). The Maintain tier costs $79 a month, so if your month came to more than about 80 minutes, paying for a plan is cheaper than doing it yourself. If it came to well under, it isn’t.
Count the questions you couldn’t answer confidently
If it’s zero or one, keep doing this yourself. Put a recurring fortnightly entry in the diary, use the website maintenance checklist, and revisit this test in six months.
If it’s two or three, a plan will probably pay for itself, most likely through time rather than through any disaster it prevents. The Maintain tier at $79 a month covers the baseline: daily backups, updates, monitoring, premium licences and a monthly report. That alone closes the gaps in questions 3 and 4.
If it’s four or five, I wouldn’t wait. Nothing is necessarily wrong with your site today. But you have no one watching it, and no way of knowing what changes while you’re not looking.
What a WordPress support plan costs against your own time
Plans on the website care plans page run from $79 a month (about $948 a year) for the baseline up to $1,497 a month for the Grow tier, where someone actively works on the site’s growth. Most of the organisations I work with sit in the middle: Protect at $99 a month adds a 30-minute small-task allowance, and Improve at $149 doubles it and adds a monthly strategy call.
Use the number from question 5 to decide. If a plan costs less than the hours it replaces, and the hours are ones your team would rather spend elsewhere, that’s your answer.
When a WordPress support plan isn’t the right move
Two situations come up often enough to name.
The first is a site that isn’t on WordPress. Wix and Squarespace handle their own updates and backups, so most of this post doesn’t apply to you.
The second is a site that needs rebuilding, or a site that does very little because nobody has decided what it should do. A care plan keeps a healthy site healthy. It doesn’t fix a confusing structure or an out-of-date message. If your answer to question 2 was “not much, and that’s the problem”, the right conversation is about strategy before maintenance. That’s what the Digital Strategy Workshop is for.
Send me your five answers
If you want a second opinion, email me what you wrote down and I’ll tell you which group you’re in and which gaps are worth worrying about. If the honest answer is that you don’t need a plan, I’ll say so. No pressure, and no sales pitch.
