Grab a pen, or open a blank note, and write down the answer to six questions about your website. No looking anything up yet. Just write what you think the answer is.
Where is your most recent backup, and how old is it? Are your plugins up to date? If the site went down at 2am on a Saturday, who would find out first? What did anyone actually do to your site last month? Who do you contact for a small change, and what happens next? And if the person who looks after your website vanished tomorrow, could you still get in?
Now go and check each answer. The gap between what you wrote and what’s true is the real shape of your website’s maintenance, whoever is meant to be doing it. It’s also the quickest way to understand what a WordPress care plan actually includes, because those six questions are the six things a good plan exists to answer.
Here’s how to check each one, what a plan should be doing behind it, and where the honest limits are.
1. Backups: where is the latest one, and is it somewhere else?
Log into your hosting account, or the backup plugin on your site, and find the date of the newest backup. Then find out where it’s stored.
If the backup lives on the same server as the website, it only protects you against small accidents. A server failure or a compromised hosting account takes the site and its backup out together.
On our care plans, backups run every day and are stored separately from the website itself. We also keep a rolling 90-day history. That second part matters more than it sounds. Malware can sit quietly on a site for weeks before anyone notices, which means yesterday’s backup might already contain the problem. A 90-day window gives you a clean version to go back to.
And a backup is taken before any change to your site, every time, so an update that goes wrong can be undone in minutes rather than becoming a crisis.
2. Updates: what’s waiting, and are your premium plugins still licensed?
In your WordPress dashboard, click Updates and count what’s waiting. The number matters less than how long each item has been sitting there. Last week’s post covers why plugins are where the real risk lives.
Here’s the part almost nobody checks. Open your Plugins page and pick out any that didn’t come from the free WordPress directory: a form builder, a page builder, a calendar, a backup tool. These usually need an annual licence to receive updates. When the licence lapses, the plugin carries on working, so nothing looks wrong. It just stops updating. The update notice never appears, and the site drifts out of date with no warning on any screen you’d normally look at.
A care plan covers this in two ways. Updates are applied at least once a fortnight, and the premium licences are kept current so the updates keep arriving in the first place.
3. Monitoring: who finds out first when it goes down?
Honest answer for most sites: a visitor, eventually. Someone tries to reach you, gets an error, and either gives up or mentions it to a friend.
You can fix that tonight for nothing. Free uptime monitors will check your site every few minutes and email you the moment it stops responding. Whichever you pick, put the alert somewhere you’ll actually see it, not an inbox nobody opens.
On a care plan, uptime and security monitoring run in the background, with a firewall in front of the site. If something trips, I’m alerted straight away rather than finding out from you.
4. Proof: what did anyone actually do last month?
Search your inbox for the last message from whoever looks after your site that says what was done. If you can’t find one, you can’t tell the difference between “nothing needed doing” and “nobody looked.”
This is why every care plan tier includes a detailed monthly report. It’s the receipt. It lists what was updated, what was checked and what was found, in plain English. It’s also how you take the site’s health to a board or committee without having to say “I think it’s fine.”
5. Changes: what counts as a small task, and what doesn’t?
Think of the last time you needed something small changed: a new staff photo, a PDF uploaded, an event page added. Who did you contact, and how long did you wait?
Small tasks are generally anything under about 30 minutes: adding a page or a post, updating text and images, uploading a PDF, fixing formatting, adding a link or a button, changing a menu. On the Protect, Improve and Grow tiers, these come out of a monthly allowance, often within one business day. Anything bigger is a project and gets quoted separately. A redesign, a new booking system or a new section of the site isn’t maintenance, and a care plan doesn’t pretend it is.
6. Access: could you still get in tomorrow?
Log into your domain registrar, the account where your web address is registered. Whose email address is on it? Then check your hosting account the same way.
If the answer is a previous web developer, a former staff member or a personal Gmail belonging to someone who left the board in 2022, that’s a problem waiting for a bad day. The domain is the one thing on this list you can’t rebuild from a backup. Whoever manages your website, you should be the owner of the accounts.
What a WordPress care plan costs, and what each tier adds
Every tier covers the same baseline: daily backups, WordPress and plugin updates, security and uptime monitoring, premium software licences and the monthly report. The tiers differ in how much hands-on help sits on top.
Maintain, $79 a month is the baseline and nothing else. Protect, $99 adds a 30-minute small-task allowance and access to 80+ video tutorials, for organisations that want to make some changes themselves. Improve, $149 doubles the task allowance to 60 minutes and adds a 30-minute strategy call each month. Grow, $1,497 is a different animal: unlimited small tasks and a 60-minute strategy call, for organisations that want someone actively working on the site’s growth. You can compare them side by side on the website care plans page.
For context, I looked at the published prices of four Australian WordPress care plan providers in October 2026. Their entry plans ran from $50 to $199 a month, with most sitting around $100, and the ones that include support time mostly offered 15 minutes a month. Protect at $99 includes 30. The comparison isn’t perfect, because every provider bundles things differently (one includes hosting, another backs up weekly rather than daily), which is exactly why the six checks above are more useful than any price comparison. Get a quote from anyone, including me, and ask them to answer those six questions in writing.
When you don’t need a WordPress care plan
If your site is small, rarely changes, and someone in your organisation is genuinely going to run through those six checks every month, you can do all of this yourself. The website maintenance checklist walks through the full routine.
The plan earns its price when that someone doesn’t exist, or exists but is also running the events, the books and the volunteer roster. Most organisations I work with are in that second group, and it’s rarely a failing. Maintenance is simply never the urgent job.
Do the six checks first
Take your six answers and compare them to what you found. If two or three didn’t match, that’s normal, and it’s fixable. If you’d like a second opinion on what the gaps mean, email me what you found and I’ll tell you which ones are worth worrying about and which aren’t. No pressure, and no sales pitch.
