WordPress maintenance FAQ, with straight answers

Honest WordPress care plans cost between $79 and $499 per month. Our Care plan starts at $99/mo for small business sites, Care Plus is $199/mo for lead generation sites, and Commerce is $349/mo for WooCommerce and high traffic sites. Anything under $79 is usually an unattended script, not a human.

Every WebCare Studios care plan includes tested plugin, theme, and core updates run on staging first, daily verified offsite backups, uptime and security monitoring, malware cleanup if you get hit, a monthly summary in plain language, and a human engineer to email. Care Plus and Commerce add a named engineer, faster emergency response, and content edits.

No. Every plan is month to month. Cancel anytime, no fee. If you cancel inside the first 30 days we refund the full month. We keep your offsite backups for 30 days after cancellation so you can migrate cleanly.

Yes. We run a free 15 minute site review where an engineer opens your site, checks hosting, plugins, backups, security, and Core Web Vitals, and tells you what is wrong and which plan fits. No credit card, no pitch.

Care responds inside 24 hours on weekdays. Care Plus responds inside 4 hours, 7 days a week. Commerce responds inside 1 hour, 24/7. Emergencies covered include site down, white screen of death, malware, hacked sites, and broken checkout.

Yes on the Commerce plan. Care Plus covers 7 days a week with a 4 hour window. For one off emergencies without a plan, we offer pay as you go emergency rescue starting at $249.

On Care Plus and Commerce you get a named engineer who knows your site. On Care you go into a shared queue staffed by the same engineers. No outsourced level 1 support, no chatbots.

We clean it. Malware removal, blacklist removal from Google Safe Browsing, file integrity restoration, and a post mortem are all included on every plan. No surprise invoice. The whole point of being on a plan is that emergencies are covered.

We harden wp-config, lock down file permissions, install a web application firewall, enforce 2FA on admin accounts, disable XML-RPC where safe, limit login attempts, and run daily malware scans with file integrity checks. We do not use a single plugin as the only line of defense.

Yes. New clients with infected sites get cleaned during onboarding at no extra cost on Care Plus and Commerce. On Care it is a flat $249 add on.

Care takes a daily backup retained 30 days. Care Plus takes daily backups retained 60 days. Commerce takes hourly backups retained 90 days. All backups are stored offsite in a separate provider, never only on the same server as the site, and restored to staging once a month to prove they actually work.

No. Auto updates are how most WordPress sites silently break. We run updates on a staging copy, check the homepage, contact form, checkout, and key URLs, then push to production. If something breaks on staging we fix it there, not in front of your customers.

Most full restores take 15 to 45 minutes from the offsite backup, depending on site size and hosting. We restore to a clean environment so whatever crashed the site does not come back with it.

Yes, the Commerce plan is built for it. We monitor the checkout flow every 5 minutes, watch payment gateway responses, and alert on order drop offs. We support WooCommerce Subscriptions, Bookings, Memberships, and the standard payment gateways.

Yes. LearnDash, Tutor LMS, MemberPress, Restrict Content Pro, Easy Digital Downloads, BuddyBoss, and WP Fusion are all on Commerce with login and enrollment flow monitoring.

Elementor, Bricks, Beaver Builder, Divi, Oxygen, GeneratePress, Astra, Kadence, Blocksy, and full site editing block themes. We do not refuse a site because of its builder.

Yes. WordPress migrations are included free on Care Plus and Commerce during onboarding. We move you from shared hosting (GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, Hostinger) to managed hosting (Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudways, Rocket.net) with zero downtime and verified DNS cutover.

No. We build the new site on the target host first, run it on a temporary domain, test every page, then cut over DNS during your lowest traffic window. Total visitor facing downtime is usually under 60 seconds.

Yes. Care Plus and Commerce include performance tuning. We profile the site with Query Monitor and PageSpeed Insights, swap slow plugins, set up object caching, optimize images, defer unused JavaScript, and chase LCP under 2.5s and CLS under 0.1.

We guarantee that we will show you exactly what is slowing the site, what we can fix, and what is a hosting limit. Most clients on Care Plus or Commerce go from a failing PageSpeed score to 90+ on desktop within 30 days.

Yes. Care Plus includes 30 minutes a month of content and small fix requests. Commerce includes 2 hours a month. Larger design or development work is billed at a flat $99/hour with no minimums for existing clients.

We do, but only for existing maintenance clients or as part of a migration. We are a maintenance and support shop first. If you need a brand new site we will refer you to two designers we trust and take over the maintenance once it ships.

Yes. Our white label program lets web design agencies resell WordPress care under their own brand at 40% margin. Branded reports, agency dashboard, NDA, and a dedicated account engineer. See the white label page for details.

We are a fully remote team with engineers across the US, UK, and EU time zones. That is how we cover 24/7 on the Commerce plan without outsourcing to a call center. All engineers are full time WebCare Studios staff, not contractors.

Always. We never hold your site hostage. You keep admin access, hosting access, domain ownership, and every credential. If you ever leave, we hand over the latest backup and walk your next provider through the setup.

If you are unhappy for any reason in the first 30 days of any plan, we refund the full month. No questions, no exit interview. We would rather give the money back than keep a client who is not getting value.

No. Ali Yasin Jatoi is the founder and lead engineer, and yes you will often speak to him directly. But the studio has on-call engineers across US, UK, and EU time zones, that is how the 11-minute median first response is real and not a marketing claim. We are happy to introduce the on-call engineer for your time zone on the discovery call.

We use an internal assistant called Hermes for four boring things: log triage, anomaly detection on uptime data, monthly report drafting, and update changelog summarisation. Every change that touches your production site is reviewed and pushed by a human engineer. We do not let AI write or commit code to client sites. Full breakdown is on the blog post 'How we use AI for WordPress maintenance'.

Two honest caveats. First, 11 minutes is the median across the last 90 days, half of responses are faster, half are slower, and a late-night ticket on Care (not Care Plus or Commerce) can still take up to 24 hours by contract. Second, 'response' means a human acknowledging the ticket and starting work, not 'site fixed'. The median time-to-fix for P1 incidents is 42 minutes.

A $29 plan is an unattended script running ManageWP or MainWP. It updates plugins automatically, takes a backup to the same server, and emails a green-tick PDF. If something breaks, you are on your own. We charge from $99 because a real human tests updates on staging, restores a backup to staging every month to prove it works, and picks up the phone when the site is down. If $29 covers what you need, take it, we will not try to talk you out of it.

Three things. (1) Net-new branding and visual design, we partner with two designers we trust and hand off. (2) Paid media management, we will fix your site's tracking, but we will not run your Google Ads account. (3) Enterprise multisite networks above 200 sites with bespoke compliance regimes (HIPAA, FedRAMP), we have done up to 150-site fleets, but anything larger should go to a specialist firm. We will say so on the first call.

Honest answer. The studio has documented runbooks, a shared 1Password vault scoped per client, a co-engineer with full production access, and an external escrow of every client's hosting credentials with a UK-based solicitor. If Ali is unavailable for 72+ hours, the co-engineer takes over named-engineer duties and we email every Care Plus and Commerce client within 24 hours. The plan is in section 9 of the master Ops Runbook, we will share it on a discovery call if you want to see it.