What is a “Website Care Plan” and What’s Included?

If you run a web agency, offering website management (or ‘care plans’) is not only a great way to build up your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), but it also provides essential services for anyone running a WordPress based website.

But what is a care plan and what’s included?

It’s a question we’ve gotten dozens (if not hundreds) of times inside our community, and everyone seems to do it a little bit different.

So, in this article, I’m going to combine my personal experience from running an agency since 2017, things I’ve picked up from our community members, and hours of research I did visiting over 100 agency websites.

What is a website care plan?

A Website Care Plan — often referred to as a “website management plan” or “website maintenance plan” — is a recurring service that’s offered by web agencies to help their clients keep their websites secure, updated, and performing its best after it’s launched.

This type of work isn’t particularly difficult (in most cases), but it does require technical knowledge, experience, tools/software, and — most importantly — time.

Though most business owners could learn to manage their websites, very few have the time (or make it a priority) to do so. And without proper upkeep, websites (especially WordPress sites), can fall into disrepair surprisingly quickly.

If you’ve ever hired a crew to mow your lawn all spring and summer, it’s the same idea… Someone’s gotta mow the lawn before things get out of control. And while you could go fill up the fuel can and lose a gallon of sweat, but do you really want to?

I certainly don’t — and most clients don’t want the responsibility and commitment of keeping their website looking great and functioning properly either.

What’s included in a care plan?

The concept of a care plan is pretty commonly agreed upon — but what’s included in a care plan can range pretty dramatically based on who you ask.

For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to break this into two categories: Essentials and Optionals.

Every deliverable comes with its own pros and cons (which we’ll touch on briefly), but what you include in your care plan depends on your expertise, comfort level, client expectations, tech stack, and capacity.

Care plan essentials

There’s no way we can have 100% agreement on this list, but based on experience and reviewing gigabytes of agency websites, here are the things that seem to be included more often than not:

• Backups. Backups provide a bit of a “get out of jail free” card when an update goes wrong, the site is compromised, or someone makes a publication mistake. Automated systems make this something you can set up once and will operate on autopilot.
• Software Updates. WordPress requires constant updates. Whether it’s the core platform itself or plugins and themes, anytime you log in, you’re likely to have something to update. Updates can include new functionality, but often patch security vulnerabilities or address compatibility issues.
• Security. It means something different to everyone you ask, but just about every care plan out there comes with some kind of security — whether it’s firewalls, malware scanning, brute-force protection, and/or virtual patches. Other care plan essentials — like updates and backups — as well as optional deliverables — like great hosting — also play a role in website security.
• Uptime Monitoring. Every website will have some downtime, but a website being down isn’t good for anyone. Uptime monitoring ensures anytime the site isn’t online someone is notified so they can investigate the issue.

Optional care plan deliverables

Beyond the essentials, there are dozens of services you could bundle into your care plan. Here are a few of the most popular:

• Hosting. Your client needs it, and chances are, you know more about hosting than they do. By offering hosting, you’re making your offer stickier (and keeping clients around longer), and it will be easier to manage any hosting-related issues (since you hand-picked the hosting provider). But, some agencies avoid hosting because they don’t want to be responsible for problems at 2am.
• Support Time. Maintenance is great, but what a lot of clients need is someone to make changes to their website. Whether it’s simple content tweaks, or a new page, some agencies offer time-blocks or a specific number of requests every month. This is another option that helps boost the value of your plans, but it can quickly reduce your profitability since salaries (you or your employee’s) are likely your biggest expense.
• Plugin Licenses. If you buy your software licenses in bulk, you could likely offer to sub-lease those licenses to clients for less than they could pay for them directly (assuming the software allows such an arrangement). Again, this makes for a stickier and higher-value offer, but it can be challenging to manage with client churn.
• Reporting. Chances are, your clients will never read them, but providing some kind of reporting on what work you completed each month goes a long way in transparency and staying top-of-mind with your clients.
• Optimizations. This is a bit of a catch-all, but many agencies offer image optimization, performance monitoring/optimization, and basic on-site SEO. All of these are valuable additions, but are ripe for unclear expectations and scope creep if you’re not careful about what you promise.
• Testing. For mission-critical websites, manual tests — like testing forms and other important functionality — could be something that your client is willing to pay for. This can range dramatically in complexity and time-consumption from site-to-site, which makes it harder to package, but can offer unparalleled peace-of-mind.

There are plenty of ideas I left off this list, and if you’re looking for more ideas, I would suggest focusing on the things that can be fully or partially automated. If you have a subscription to software that will check for broken links, for example, that can make a great addition, as you only have to address issues as they arise.

However, just because it can be done, doesn’t mean it belongs in a care plan…

A few services I (personally) would not include

The rest of these items are ones I’ve seen agencies offer — and to each their own, but I wouldn’t bundle these into a care plan:

• Search Engine Optimization. Talk about a broad term — SEO is an industry of it’s own, not something that can be easily included. Including SEO services also increases the client canceling their care plan (which is essential for the site’s health) when their rankings or traffic aren’t meeting their expectations — not understanding those are two different functions (even though they do have some aspects that overlap).
• Accessibility. Like SEO, accessibility is its own discipline. An uninformed developer could push an update or a client could mis-tag a headline, and now you’re responsible. Offering accessibility services — especially recurring ones — is a great idea if you have the skills and knowledge, but I would strongly suggest decoupling that from your care plan offering.
• Email. A lot of agencies will offer email hosting early on in their career (because clients ask, and we like money) — but there’s nothing more time-consuming and headache-inducing than managing email problems. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend my days explaining how to set up Outlook over the phone.
• Policies. Termageddon has made it easy and convenient to offer policies (like Privacy Policies, Terms of Service, and even cookie consent solutions) as a white-label service for your client. I think it’s a great idea to help you clients in these areas, but like SEO, I don’t want a client cancelling backups to their site because they think they’re too small to get sued (they’re not 😅) — so I keep this as a standalone offering, not something bundled in my care plans.

How much should an agency charge for a care plan?

Talk about an impossible question to answer 😅. How much should you charge for a care plan? Well, how long is a piece of string?

It depends.

So, rather that irresponsibly throwing out numbers not knowing your costs, local economy, services offered, experience, and customer base, here are a few things to consider as you come up with your pricing:

• Looking at 100+ sites, it was rare to see anything under $75, with the majority being between $100 – $150, and the top end around $250 (excluding those that were bundling in the cost of the website, SEO, or other services).
• Consider how much you’re going to spend in order to offer care services. Sounds obvious, but when I’ve asked agency owners, very few could tell me exactly how much it costs them to provide care plans. Knowing your hard costs is a good place to start, then you can add your profit margin (and a bit of wiggle room!).
• Offering multiple plans allows you to separate fixed costs (like software, hosting, etc.) from variable costs (like your time debugging issues if you offer support).

Personally, and especially for cash flow, I prefer to sell care plans as monthly recurring (vs. annual). Though I do have a contract in place (highly recommended), it’s month-to-month, which I’ve found makes the sales process easier as clients don’t feel like they are overcommitting. This way, I can earn my keep and clients want the service rather than feeling obligated.

One mistake I wish I would have avoided was not building in regular price increases. Once clients are paying consistently, it’s scary to raise your prices. The last thing you want to do is lose that reliable income.

But, prices eventually have to change. Inflation alone will affect your profits every year.

Building in annual price increases — even if it’s just to cover the cost of living — sets an expectation of price increases and makes those notices a little easier to send.

Selling & positioning care plans

One of the biggest mistakes I made when starting my agency was positioning my care plans like an extended warranty. “Pay me monthly or your site will die!” only makes sense in oddly specific hostage situations — not if you’re trying to nurture a long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationship.

Here’s what’s worked well for me:

1. Make sure you talk about the need for ongoing maintenance early on in your conversations (long before you build the site). Setting these expectations upfront is an important step in closing later down the road.
2. Educate your client on the importance of proper upkeep. Chances are they have no idea what any of the deliverables are, so you’ll have to use analogies (car maintenance is a common one) and do your best to de-jargon all the technical bits.
3. Give them the option to say “no”. Some agencies require care plans — and I get it. The maintenance is mandatory. But I’ve found clients to be a lot more receptive when I present all the work that goes into it (the education), and then offer to handle it for them, rather than tell them they have to hire me. No one likes being told what they have to do.

Ever since creating The Website Owner’s Manual — a document, strategy, and scripts for selling care plans — my conversion rate has been near perfect. Truth is, some clients can manage the site on their own — but its rarer than they’d like to think and many who decline end up coming back when something goes wrong.

Tools and services to help you execute care plans

The WordPress ecosystem is filled with companies who’ve build products around hepling agencies offer care plans, including; bulk plugin updates, security, backups, uptime monitoring — all the way to done-for-you services that mean you never touch anything!

I’ve already put together a complete list of everything I use an recommend in my Care Plan Toolkit (free), so rather than rehash that in this post, I suggest you pick up a copy and browse through it for yourself.

Most of these services feel expensive if you only have a handful of care plan clients, but scale incredibly well. With over 70 clients myself, I pay only a few dollars a month in hard costs (excluding hosting) for the tools that help me automate most care plan tasks.

Care Plan Inspiration Gallery

Instead of Googling “WordPress Care Plans” and combing through the results (oh yeah, I’ve done that a bunch), I thought I’d do the tedious work for you and put together a collection of 75+ care plan pages from members of our community.

I hope you’ll use these as inspiration for ideas and refrain from copying anyone’s exact plans, copywriting, or images 🙏

First, a few of my favorites

After combing through hundreds of websites to put together this blog post, a few stood out to me as great examples (in alphabetical order):

More care plan inspiration:

But if you want to dive in the deep end, I’ve compiled a list of 75+ care plan pages for agencies in our community, which you can view in this Airtable base:

Care Plans help avoid the sales rollercoaster

Running any service-based business is hard. One month you’re busy selling, and if you’re successful, the next month you busy delivering and have little time for sales.

This creates a rollercoaster of income, where things are up and down and completely unpredictable from one month to the next.

Care Plans help stablilize things by providing reliable income every month that you don’t have to go out and hunt for.

Thanks to their stickiness and relative low expense of operating, they can scale to be the foundation that ensures all your bills are paid and every project you sell is just icing on the cake (a wonderful milestone for any agency!).