What a website care plan should include: the checklist

A website care plan should include hosting, software updates, security scanning, tested off-site backups, uptime monitoring, SSL renewal, an allowance of small changes and a named person who replies. Maintenance only is worth £15-£50 a month. If marketing is in there too, it is a different product at a different price.

The word “care plan” is the problem. Three providers can use it for three completely different things, and the invoice looks similar in all three cases.

The eight items a maintenance plan must cover

Work down this list against whatever you are paying for now.

1. Hosting, with the specification named. Where the site lives, on what, and whether it is shared with four hundred other sites. £5-£30 a month is the real cost of decent hosting.
2. Software and plugin updates, applied monthly. WordPress, themes, plugins, PHP version. This is the single most common reason small sites get hacked.
3. Security scanning and a firewall. Something actively watching, not just an SSL padlock.
4. Off-site backups, taken daily, kept for at least 30 days. Off-site matters. A backup on the same server dies with the server.
5. A restore test, at least twice a year. See the warning below. This is the item everyone lists and nobody performs.
6. Uptime monitoring with an alert to them, not you. You should not be the person who discovers the site is down.
7. SSL certificate renewal. Usually free, but it expires, and an expired certificate throws a red warning screen at every visitor.
8. A monthly allowance for small changes. Text edits, new photos, updated opening hours. Thirty to sixty minutes is normal. Without this every tiny edit becomes a £50-£80 hourly invoice.

Plus one item that is not technical: a named person, with an email address, who answers within a working day. A support portal that swallows tickets is not the same thing.

Maintenance versus managed: know which you are buying

Here is where most of the confusion and most of the overpaying lives.

A £150 plan that only does the left-hand column is poorer value than a £49 plan doing the right-hand one. Price alone tells you nothing. The column tells you everything.

The one question that sorts good plans from bad

Ask this: “What will you change on my site in month three?”

Not month one. Month one always has activity, because they are setting things up. Month three is where the difference shows.

A maintenance provider will answer honestly: nothing, unless you send us something. That is a fine answer for £25 a month, and worth paying for.

A managed provider should name things. A new service page. Photos added to the Google profile. Two review requests sent. Opening hours corrected for the bank holiday.

A provider charging £300 who cannot answer at all is the one to worry about.

Things a care plan should not quietly charge you for

A gym owner showed me an invoice where the domain renewal appeared as a £95 “annual administration item”. The domain costs £10-£15 a year.

Watch for these:

• Domain renewal marked up. £10-£15 a year is the real figure.
• SSL sold as a premium extra. Standard certificates are free.
• “Emergency” fixes for problems caused by missed updates. If they skipped the patching, the fix is not billable.
• Every text edit billed hourly on a plan you thought included changes.
• A monthly report presented as the deliverable. A PDF of graphs is not work done on your website.

None of these are illegal. They are just the places where a plan quietly gets worse value than the number suggested.

What to do with the checklist

Do not send your provider a list of eight demands. That rarely goes well.

Send one email instead. Ask what happens each month, roughly how many hours it represents, and when the backup was last tested. Good providers answer that in ten minutes and are pleased you asked. Vague answers are themselves the finding.

Then decide whether you are on the right tier. Plenty of businesses are on a marketing-priced plan getting maintenance-level work, and some are the opposite: paying £20 and wondering why nobody is doing SEO. Neither is a scandal. Both are worth fixing.

If you want a plain comparison of what the tiers cost, website maintenance service cost breaks the numbers down further, and the hidden costs of a cheap website covers what turns up when there is no plan at all.

Our own plans run £49, £99 and £199 a month with no contract, and the pricing page itemises which of the eight items sits at which tier so you can hold us to this same checklist. If your current plan already ticks the boxes at a fair price, stay where you are. That is a genuinely good outcome and you do not need us to tell you otherwise.