This post will lose me a few prospects, and that’s fine. I’d rather be honest now than awkward in 11 months when your “finished” website is broken and you’re emailing me asking who can fix it cheap.
Here’s the rule at AJD: we don’t build a WordPress site for anyone who refuses a care plan. Not “strongly recommend.” Refuse. If that sounds like a sales tactic, stay with me — by the end I’ll show you the math, the failure pattern, and exactly what’s included, and you can decide whether the policy is greedy or just sane.
The nine-month rot timeline
I’ve watched this pattern play out maybe 40 times in six years. Day one: shiny new site, owner is thrilled. Month three: a plugin pushes a breaking update, the contact form silently stops sending. Nobody notices until a prospect calls asking why their submission was ignored. Month six: PHP version on the host bumps, two more plugins go yellow. Month nine: an SSL cert renewal fails or a Gutenberg update breaks the homepage hero. Now it’s an emergency. The original developer is “no longer taking on small jobs.” Quotes are coming in at $1,800 to $4,500 just to get stable again.
The math, plainly
A typical AJD care plan runs $149 to $399 a month depending on tier. Call it $250 average — over nine months, $2,250. The emergency fix-it-now invoice averages $2,800 in our market, before counting sales lost while the form was broken or the SEO ranking you bled during 11 days of 500 errors. Care plan total: $2,250. Reactive total: $2,800 plus lost revenue plus a panicked weekend. Maintenance isn’t an expense — it’s insurance with a guaranteed payout.
Why “we’ll handle it in-house” almost never works
Plenty of clients tell us they have a “tech person” who can manage the site. I believe them. The problem is that WordPress maintenance isn’t an event, it’s a discipline. It’s noticing that WooCommerce 8.4 deprecated a hook your checkout plugin depends on, before the update lands and the cart breaks. That muscle gets built over hundreds of sites, not on the side at lunchtime. When the in-house person leaves, the discipline leaves with them. We’ve inherited sites where the “maintenance” was three years of nothing.
What’s actually in a care plan
Marketing pages love to say “premium support” without telling you what that means. Here’s exactly what ours includes — no fluff items, every line is something we’d be embarrassed to charge for if we didn’t actually do it.
- Weekly core, theme, and plugin updates run on a staging clone first, with a rollback path if anything regresses. Not the dangerous “auto-update everything on production” approach.
- Daily off-site backups to a separate provider, with a tested restore drill once a quarter. Backups you’ve never restored aren’t backups, they’re hope.
- Monthly uptime, Core Web Vitals, and security scan report — 1 page, no jargon, what changed and what we did about it.
- A 4-hour response window for “site is down” emergencies. Most are resolved inside 90 minutes; the SLA is the ceiling, not the average.
- 30 to 90 minutes of content edits per month included — swap a headline, update team bios, add a new service page, refresh a hero image. The stuff that piles up otherwise.
- Annual PHP version review and a planned upgrade path, so you’re never the site that breaks when the host force-bumps the runtime.
The honest version of “no care plan, no build”
It’s not a money grab. It’s a reputation thing. When a B2B prospect in Bergen County clicks through to a site we built and finds it broken, they don’t know we haven’t touched it in 14 months — they just see a slow, half-broken page with our work-mark in the footer. We can’t control what the site looks like in year two unless we’re the ones tending it. So either we tend it together, or we don’t ship it. That’s the deal.
How AJD handles this
Every project quote includes the build cost and the care plan cost side by side, on the same page. We’ll walk through what each tier covers, recommend the one that fits your traffic and complexity, and tell you the truth if you’d be fine on the lowest tier. The care plan is month-to-month, cancel anytime — but if you cancel, we hand the site back clean and that’s where our relationship ends. Whether you work with us or not, find someone who’ll do real maintenance on a real schedule. The nine-month rot is a real thing and it’s a lot cheaper to prevent than to repair.
Want a straight quote with both the build and the care plan laid out clearly? Book Free Discovery Call →
