This is a fair question to ask. A monthly care plan is an ongoing cost, and if your site seems to be running fine, it can be tempting to wonder whether you are paying for something you actually need.
Here is an honest way to think about it.
What happens when you do not have a care plan
Without a care plan, your site is essentially self-managing. Updates are applied when you remember or when something breaks. Backups may or may not exist. Security scanning is not happening. No one is watching your uptime.
For a while, this often seems fine. WordPress sites can run without attention for months before an obvious problem appears.
The issue is what happens when something does go wrong. Without a care plan, you are dealing with it alone, or paying someone to fix it at an hourly rate, under pressure, without an existing backup to fall back on.
What does a hacked or broken site actually cost?
The cost varies, but consider the realistic components:
- Professional cleanup of a hacked site: typically £300 to £800 depending on the severity
- Lost trading time: if your site is your main source of enquiries and it is down for a day or two, what does that cost you?
- Reputational impact: visitors who land on a broken, hacked, or slow-loading site often do not come back
- Google blacklisting: if malware is detected, your site can be flagged in search results. Recovering that ranking takes time
Even one of these scenarios in a year is likely to cost more than twelve months of a care plan.
What about the risk of it not happening?
It is possible to go years without a serious problem, particularly if your site is relatively simple and you are careful with your own access. Some sites do.
But the risk is not zero, and it is not random. Sites running outdated plugins and software are genuinely more likely to be compromised. Sites without backups have no safety net when something does go wrong.
The care plan is not just paying for incidents that might happen. You are also paying for updates, security monitoring, uptime monitoring, and monthly reporting, things that improve your site and keep it running well on an ongoing basis.
How to evaluate the value honestly
Ask yourself a few questions:
- Does your website generate business? If yes, downtime directly costs you.
- Do you have a recent, tested backup? If not, any problem is more expensive to recover from.
- When did you last update your plugins, theme, and WordPress core? If you cannot remember, the risk is already building.
- Do you know immediately if your site goes down? Without monitoring, you might not find out for hours.
Our care plan pricing
Our Essential Care plan is £34.99 per month. It includes hosting, daily backups, security monitoring, uptime monitoring, all updates applied, and we fix anything that updates break.
Advanced Care at £59.99 adds change requests so you can make small updates to your site without raising a project.
Complete Care at £89.99 adds a quarterly strategy call, a Termageddon privacy policy, CleanTalk spam protection, and ShortPixel image optimisation.
If your website matters to your business, the Essential plan alone is almost certainly worth it. Get in touch and we can talk through which option makes sense for you.
