WORDPRESS MAINTENANCE

WordPress maintenance & support services

Senior-managed WordPress retainers — updates, backups, security, performance, and emergency response. Drupal support is scoped separately.

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Definition

WordPress maintenance services are ongoing retainers that keep a WordPress site secure, current, fast, and online. A standard scope covers core and plugin updates tested on a staging environment, daily off-site backups, uptime and malware monitoring, performance and Core Web Vitals work, security patching, and emergency response for downtime or hacks. DoodleWeb plans run $500 to $1,200 per month depending on site complexity, SLA, outage coverage, and how proactive the plan is, with custom quotes for multisite and high-traffic platforms.

What's included in WordPress maintenance?

Security patching

WordPress core, plugins, and themes patched within hours of a disclosed vulnerability. Web-application firewall rules updated. Suspicious file changes flagged.

Core & plugin updates

Updates applied on a staging clone first, regression-tested against critical paths, then promoted. No auto-updates in production — that's how sites break at 2am.

Daily off-site backups

Full site + database backed up daily to encrypted off-site storage, retained 30–90 days. Restores tested quarterly, not just when disaster hits.

24/7 uptime monitoring

1-minute uptime checks from multiple regions. SSL expiry alerts. DNS drift alerts. Slack or email escalation with a named on-call engineer.

Performance & Core Web Vitals

Monthly Lighthouse audit, cache tuning, image and CDN optimization. LCP / INP / CLS tracked against Google's thresholds — not vanity Lighthouse scores.

Emergency response

Site down, hacked, or white-screened? Named senior engineer on the line within the SLA window — same-day outage coverage on Professional, 24/7 coverage on Premium.

How much does WordPress maintenance cost?

Four published tiers plus Custom, priced by site complexity, SLA, outage coverage, and how proactive the plan is. Higher tiers add Slack notifications, performance and SEO optimization, PHP and CMS upgrade planning, and larger included development blocks.

Essential

$500 / mo

Small marketing sites and blogs with low complexity

Monthly core, plugin & theme updates, tested before release
Weekly off-site backups
Uptime monitoring with email alerts
Ticket-based support, 2 business-day response
Monthly list of every update applied
Bug fixes billed from a small included block

Standard

$600 / mo

Business and lead-generation sites

Everything in Essential
Weekly updates tested on staging first
Daily off-site backups
Monthly performance check and bug fixes included
Written monthly report
1 business-day ticket response

Professional

$800 / mo

WooCommerce, membership, and higher-traffic sites

Everything in Standard
Proactive monitoring — we catch issues before you do
Performance optimization and Core Web Vitals work
Outage coverage with same-day response
Slack notifications for incidents and releases
5 hours of development work included / month

Premium

$1,200 / mo

Complex, high-traffic, or revenue-critical sites

Everything in Professional
24/7 outage coverage with a defined SLA
PHP version and CMS major-upgrade planning
Ongoing SEO optimization checks
Dedicated Slack channel and priority communications
10 hours of development work included / month

Custom

Let's talk

Multisite, agencies with several sites, compliance needs

Custom SLA and outage coverage
Scoped reporting, communications, and update cadence
Security, accessibility, and SEO audit options
Quoted after a short discovery call

Drupal support & maintenance

Drupal maintenance has its own packages and response windows, rather than using the WordPress tiers above. Review our managed Drupal support and maintenance packages for the current scope and pricing:

Drupal core + contributed module updates on a staged environment.
Composer dependency management and lockfile discipline.
Security advisory response (SA-CORE, SA-CONTRIB) according to the selected Drupal support plan.
Views, entity, and taxonomy audits when the editorial team's needs shift.
Drupal 7 end-of-life migration guidance for teams still on legacy versions.
Separate Drupal support packages; WordPress prices and response windows do not apply to Drupal.

Drupal services All maintenance plans WordPress development

Why senior-managed maintenance matters

Most maintenance retainers are handed to junior operators running canned update scripts. That works until a plugin update conflicts with a custom theme, a security patch changes an API signature, or a WooCommerce release breaks checkout on Friday afternoon. At that point you need someone who can read the stack trace, roll back cleanly, and ship a fix — not a ticket that escalates back to you.

Every DoodleWeb maintenance plan is run by senior engineers with 8+ years of WordPress or Drupal delivery experience. No juniors, no offshoring, no ticket queues that route to whoever is awake.

What to look for in a maintenance provider

A short checklist — use it on us, use it on anyone else you evaluate.

1
Does the retainer specify a named senior engineer, or route to a shared ticket queue?
2
Are updates applied on staging with regression testing, or auto-pushed to production?
3
Where are backups stored, how long are they retained, and when were restores last tested?
4
Is the SLA measured in hours-to-response, hours-to-resolution, or vague "best effort"?
5
Does the plan include included dev hours, or is every change billed at overage rates?
6
Do they monitor Core Web Vitals against real-user data (RUM), or only synthetic Lighthouse?
7
Do they handle security incidents (hacks, malware) inside the retainer, or bill hourly when it matters most?

MAINTENANCE FAQ

Common questions

A standard WordPress maintenance retainer includes core and plugin updates tested on staging, off-site backups, uptime monitoring, security patching, bug fixes, and a written list of every update applied. Higher tiers add proactive monitoring, performance and SEO optimization, Slack notifications, outage coverage with a defined SLA, PHP and CMS upgrade planning, and larger included development blocks.

DoodleWeb WordPress maintenance plans run $500, $600, $800, or $1,200 per month, with a Custom tier quoted after a discovery call. The right tier depends on your site's complexity, the SLA you need, outage coverage, ticketing and Slack notifications, how proactive the monitoring is, PHP and CMS upgrade planning, reporting, included bug fixes, and performance and SEO optimization. Multisite and high-traffic platforms are quoted as Custom.

Yes. Drupal support is a separate program covering core and contributed module updates on staging, Composer dependency management and security advisory response. See our managed Drupal support and maintenance packages for Drupal-specific tiers, pricing and response windows. WordPress plan prices do not apply to Drupal.

Security patches ship within one business day on every plan, and faster on Professional and Premium where proactive monitoring and outage coverage are included. Every patch is tested on a staging clone before production promotion — auto-updates in production are the leading cause of unplanned WordPress downtime.

Yes. Professional includes same-day outage coverage, and Premium includes 24/7 outage coverage with a defined SLA. Non-retainer emergency work is quoted per incident. Bring us the site backup and hosting credentials and we'll triage inside the first hour.

Yes. Full site plus database is backed up to encrypted off-site storage — never on the same server as the live site, since a compromised server takes local backups with it. Backups run weekly on Essential and daily from Standard up. Restore procedures are tested on our end, not just when disaster hits.

Yes. Onboarding takes 5 to 10 business days: infrastructure audit, plugin surface review, backup verification, staging environment provisioning, monitoring setup, and a documented runbook. There is no onboarding fee for sites already on WP Engine, Kinsta, or Pantheon. Custom-hosted sites include a $500 audit fee credited against the first month.