
WordPress Maintenance & Care Plans — Secure, Fast, and Supported by a 25-Year Expert
Your WordPress site is never “done.” It needs updates, monitoring, backups, security patches, performance tuning, and the occasional “something just broke at 11pm on a Friday” response. Our Care Plans handle all of it — personally, by founder Tim Burkart, not a ticket queue.
Why WordPress Sites Need Ongoing Care
WordPress powers over 40% of the internet — which makes it the most targeted CMS in the world. Every week brings new plugin vulnerabilities, theme conflicts, performance regressions, and security threats. Sites that aren’t actively maintained don’t just stay the same — they decay.
Here’s what happens to a WordPress site without regular care:
- Security degrades. Outdated plugins are the #1 attack vector for WordPress sites. Every unpatched vulnerability is an open door.
- Performance erodes. Plugin bloat, image accumulation, and database growth slow sites down over time — usually in ways the owner doesn’t notice until traffic drops.
- Search rankings fall. Google penalizes slow, insecure, and broken sites. Core Web Vitals failures alone can drop rankings significantly.
- Backups go missing. When something does go wrong — and eventually, something always does — recent, restorable backups are the difference between a 15-minute fix and a multi-day rebuild.
- The bill comes due all at once. Sites that go years without maintenance often require expensive, multi-week remediation projects when they finally break.
A WordPress Care Plan prevents all of this — for a predictable monthly cost, handled by someone who actually knows your site.
What’s included in every care plan
Every dot832 Care Plan includes a core set of services that every active WordPress site needs. Higher-tier plans add deeper performance work, hosting, and priority support.
- Updates and Compatibility Management We handle WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates — but unlike automated update services, we test every update on a staging environment before deploying it to your live site. Updates only go live when we’ve verified nothing breaks.
- Daily Offsite Backups Full site backups (files and database) run daily and store offsite — not on the same server as your site. We retain 30 days of restorable backups, so we can roll back to any day in the past month if needed.
- Security Monitoring and Malware Scanning Continuous monitoring for malware, unauthorized changes, suspicious login attempts, and known vulnerability patterns. When something’s wrong, we know about it before you do.
- Uptime Monitoring Your site is checked every minute for downtime. If it goes down, we’re alerted and respond — without you having to notice or report it.
- Performance Monitoring and Optimization Ongoing monitoring of page speed, Core Web Vitals, and overall site performance. We tune caching, optimize images, clean up databases, and address performance regressions as they appear — not after they hurt your rankings.
- Monthly Health Reports A clear, plain-English monthly report covering what we did, what we found, and what’s coming. No jargon, no padded line items.
- Priority Support — Direct to Tim Email or call directly. No ticket queue, no account manager, no “let me check with the developer.” Same-day response on business days, with after-hours response for true emergencies.
Plan Tiers
Essential Starts at $150/month
For straightforward sites that need reliable foundational care.
Includes:
- All core inclusions above
- Up to 30 minutes of monthly content updates or small changes
- Standard support response (next business day)
- Suitable for: brochure sites, small business sites with low change volume
Standard Starts at $250/month
For active sites that need regular attention and faster response.
Includes:
- Everything in Essential, plus:
- Up to 2 hours of monthly content updates, small design changes, or troubleshooting
- Priority support response (same business day)
- Quarterly performance reviews with optimization recommendations
- Plugin license management
Premium Starts at $400/month
For business-critical sites that need the highest level of care.
Includes:
- Everything in Standard, plus:
- Up to 5 hours of monthly development, content, or optimization work
- Same-day priority support, including after-hours for emergencies
- Managed WordPress hosting included
- Monthly performance optimization deep-dives
- Quarterly strategy reviews
Need something custom? Sites with unusual traffic, complex functionality, or specific compliance requirements often need a tailored plan. Let’s Talk!
Performance optimization and core web vitals
A slow WordPress site costs you in three measurable ways: lower search rankings, higher bounce rates, and lost conversions. Google’s Core Web Vitals are now a confirmed ranking factor, and the gap between fast and slow sites in search results has widened every year.
We treat performance as an ongoing concern, not a one-time fix. Sites slow down naturally as plugins update, content grows, and traffic patterns change. Active monitoring and tuning keeps your site fast — not just at launch, but year over year.
What Our Performance Work Covers:
- Core Web Vitals monitoring — LCP, INP, and CLS tracked monthly with action when scores degrade
- Image optimization — automated and manual optimization, including next-gen formats (WebP, AVIF)
- Caching configuration — page caching, object caching, browser caching, CDN integration
- Database optimization — regular cleanup of revisions, transients, and orphaned data
- Plugin auditing — identifying and replacing plugins that hurt performance
- Theme and asset optimization — minification, lazy loading, render-blocking resource handling
- Hosting evaluation — recommending or upgrading hosting when it becomes the bottleneck
Performance is included in every Care Plan tier. Premium tier adds monthly deep-dives.
Security monitoring and response
WordPress’s popularity makes it a constant target. The good news: most successful attacks exploit known vulnerabilities in outdated plugins, weak passwords, or misconfigured permissions — all preventable with disciplined ongoing security work.
Our security approach covers four layers:
- Prevention. Plugins and themes are kept current. Unused plugins are removed. File permissions are correctly configured. Login URLs are hardened. Two-factor authentication is enforced where appropriate. Security headers are properly set.
- Monitoring. Continuous monitoring for malware signatures, unauthorized file changes, suspicious login activity, and known vulnerability patterns. Alerts are routed to us, not to you — we investigate and act.
- Response. If your site is compromised despite preventive measures, we handle full incident response: site isolation, malware removal, clean restoration from offsite backups, vulnerability patching, and Google Search Console reinstatement if needed. Premium plan clients get same-day emergency response, including after-hours.
- Documentation. After any security event, you get a clear written report: what happened, what we did, how we’re preventing it from recurring. No vague reassurances.
Why dot832 care plans are different
One expert, not a ticket queue. Most care plan services route your support requests to a rotating team of unfamiliar technicians. With dot832, you work directly with Tim — every time. He knows your site, your history, and your business.
Updates are tested, not blindly applied. Automated update services have caused more outages than they’ve prevented. We test every update on a staging environment before touching your live site.
Real performance work, not just monitoring. A lot of “care plans” charge to monitor performance but don’t actually fix anything when it degrades. We tune, optimize, and improve — not just report.
Plain-English communication. Monthly reports you can actually read. No jargon, no padded line items, no surprise upcharges. You’ll always know what we did and why.
Beyond the plans
Care Plan clients regularly engage us for work that’s outside the monthly scope. Common add-ons include:
- Design refreshes and redesigns — see WordPress Design & Development →
- Platform migrations — moving to WordPress from Squarespace, Wix, or other CMS platforms — see Migrations & Rescues →
- New feature development — custom functionality, integrations, plugin development
- Content development — new pages, landing pages, blog content
- SEO strategy — for ongoing SEO content and link-building work, we partner with a trusted independent specialist and can introduce you when that’s the right next step
Add-on work is quoted as-needed at preferred rates for active Care Plan clients.
Frequently Asked Questions
Stop worrying about your wordpress site
A Care Plan turns “is my site okay?” into a problem someone else handles for you. Pick a plan, or book a free consultation if you’re not sure which one fits — we’ll talk through your site, your usage, and what you actually need.
Not ready yet? Start with a free website audit, and we’ll tell you exactly what your current site needs.
