WordPress maintenance
Auto-updates are how WordPress sites break on a Tuesday morning. Our maintenance plans apply core, theme, and plugin updates to a staging copy first, check the pages that matter, and only then push to production — with backups, uptime monitoring, and a real developer to call when something still goes sideways.
Maintenance plans have a reputation problem: vague deliverables, invisible work, and contracts that outlive the goodwill. Here's exactly what ours cover, what the retainers cost, and what they deliberately don't include.
Software and plugin updates applied on a schedule (not when something breaks), offsite backups we actually test restoring, uptime monitoring that pages us — not you — when the site goes dark, security patching, and small content changes: swap a photo, update hours, add a staff bio. And when something does break, you call a person who knows your site, not a ticket queue.
Care plans start at $149 a month with Harbor Watch — site care for a static site or WordPress, including updates, backups, and a real human to call. Setup is $495. Full Watch is $349 a month plus $795 setup, and adds lead response: every web inquiry answered in under a minute, plus one conversion improvement a month. Both are month to month, and the number is in writing before you commit.
Most of the rescue jobs that reach us — hacked WordPress installs, sites down for days, checkouts silently broken for weeks — are really just maintenance that never happened, discovered at the worst possible moment. Our website rescue case study shows what that costs to undo. A care plan is the cheaper, calmer version of the same work, done before the storm instead of after. If you're not sure what shape your site is in today, a speed and security audit is the honest place to start.
A maintenance plan isn't unlimited development in disguise: redesigns, new features, and new pages beyond small content changes are scoped and quoted separately, so the plan stays cheap and the big work stays deliberate. Plans are month-to-month — cancel whenever, no wind-down fees — and your hosting, domain, and code stay in your name the whole time. If you leave, you leave with everything. For sites running older PHP codebases past their update horizon, our PHP maintenance and legacy support service picks up where standard care plans stop.
Good maintenance is a rhythm, not a reaction. Here's how a typical month runs on every plan — the same four watches, every month, whether or not anything goes wrong.
Core software, themes, and plugins updated on a staging copy first, then applied live once nothing breaks. Security patches jump the queue and go out the day they matter.
Backups run continuously, but this is the week we prove one restores — because an untested backup is a rumor, not a plan.
A pass over performance — slow pages, bloated images, expiring certificates — plus your requested small content changes: hours, photos, staff, seasonal updates.
A short report of what was updated, what we caught, and anything on the horizon — written for a business owner, not a sysadmin. All month long, monitoring stands watch.
The point of a plan isn't the update button — it's that someone checks the site still works afterward.
Core, theme, and every plugin updated on a staging clone and verified against your key pages before production sees them.
Offsite, automated, and periodically test-restored — because an untested backup isn't a backup.
Alerts that reach a human. If something goes down or gets injected, you hear it from us first.
Small changes, plugin questions, and custom plugin upkeep included in plan hours.
Send us your site and your plugin list. We'll recommend a plan level honestly — including telling you if you don't need one.
No ransom required. Month-to-month, cancel anytime.
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