Website care plans
Once your site is live it needs hosting, updates, backups and the occasional change. You can handle that yourself or we can, from R350 a month. It is optional, and it always will be.
What actually needs maintaining
A website is not a printed brochure. Left completely alone for two years, a typical WordPress site will have out-of-date core software and plugins with known vulnerabilities, an expired or auto-renewed-at-a-worse-rate domain, broken links to pages and businesses that no longer exist, and contact details that stopped being true.
The security half matters more than most small business owners think. Compromised small business sites are rarely targeted personally — they are found by automated scanners, and then used to host spam or malware. The first you usually know about it is Google flagging your site in search results.
The two plans
Essential — R350 a month. Hosting and domain renewal, SSL kept valid, software and plugin updates, weekly off-site backups, uptime monitoring, security scanning, and up to 30 minutes of small text or image changes each month.
Active — R750 a month. Everything in Essential, plus up to two hours of changes a month, a quarterly speed and Core Web Vitals check, a monthly Search Console summary in plain English, and priority turnaround on requests.
Both are month-to-month. No contract, no notice period, and you can stop whenever you like — we will hand over the site and the domain without an argument.
You do not have to take one
We would rather say this clearly than have you find out later. If you are comfortable renewing hosting yourself, running updates and taking backups, do that — a static site of the kind we build for smaller briefs genuinely needs very little attention.
A care plan is worth it when you do not want to think about it at all, or when the site is bringing in enough work that a fortnight of downtime would cost you more than a year of the plan. For a lot of Starter clients, neither is true, and we will say so.
Common questions
Is a care plan compulsory?
No. It never has been and never will be. Hosting and domain renewal are required — roughly R150 to R250 a month — but you can pay those directly and manage the site yourself.
What is not covered by a care plan?
New pages, redesigns, new functionality and content writing beyond the included change time. Those are quoted separately — an extra page is R450.
What happens if my site gets hacked?
On a care plan we restore from backup and clean it at no extra charge. Without one we can still help, quoted on the damage. This is the single strongest argument for taking a plan on a WordPress site.
Can I cancel?
Any time, with no notice period. We hand over the site files and transfer the domain to whoever you nominate.
Tell us what you need
We will come back with a fixed price, usually the same working day.
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