What Does a WordPress Care Plan Include?

The short version

A care plan is a monthly fee for someone else to look after your WordPress site. The core of any plan is the same: keep the software updated, keep backups, watch for security problems and downtime, and fix what breaks. Higher tiers add extra help, like speed work, content edits and phone support.

Here is exactly what each of our plans includes. Each tier includes everything in the one before it.

Basic, $35 a month: what every plan includes

• Hosting: managed WordPress hosting on Kinsta's enterprise hosting, an SSL certificate renewed automatically, and domain and DNS management
• Updates: WordPress core updates, plus plugin and theme updates every week, checked on a staging copy first
• Backups: daily backups kept for 30 days, plus nightly off-site copies kept long-term
• Security: daily vulnerability scanning and nightly file checks against the original WordPress.org files
• Monitoring: uptime monitoring on your live site
• Support: unlimited break-fix support, form troubleshooting, email support, and a discounted rate for development work

Unlimited break-fix support covers problems caused by updates, hosting or security. If one of those breaks something, fixing it is part of your plan.

Standard, $89 a month

• A staging environment of your own (a private copy of your site for testing changes)
• Plugin compatibility testing
• Malware cleanup at no extra cost
• Speed optimization and performance monitoring
• A monthly performance report
• Priority email and chat support

Business, $179 a month

• On-demand backups, taken whenever you need one
• Advanced security hardening
• Core Web Vitals optimization (Google's measures of how your pages load and respond for visitors)
• Content edits, up to 2 hours a month
• Phone support
• A quarterly strategy review

Agency, $349 a month

• Content edits, up to 5 hours a month
• A dedicated account manager
• Custom development hours
• Priority emergency response
• Multi-site management
• A monthly strategy call

Paying yearly brings the monthly cost down to $28, $71, $143 or $279, from Basic to Agency. Plans are month-to-month, and moving your site onto the plan's hosting is free.

What a care plan doesn't include

Design changes, new feature development and content writing are separate services you can add to any plan, beyond the content edits and development hours the higher tiers include. If you're weighing the price, see how much WordPress maintenance costs and whether a care plan is worth it. Look after client sites as an agency? That works differently: see white-label WordPress maintenance.