Build · Maintenance
The site stays fast, patched and current.
Nothing tells you the site went down at 2am, or that a plugin has had a known hole in it since March. The Care Plan is $99 a month, and it is the boring half of owning a website.
The short answer
What website maintenance services actually cover: upkeep, not search.
Website maintenance is the ongoing upkeep that keeps a site online, patched, backed up and fast. Hosting, software updates, uptime monitoring, a speed budget, plus the small edits you keep meaning to make. It is not SEO, and buying it expecting rankings means somebody mis-sold you.
The positioning matters more than the price here. The Care Plan is build-side upkeep. It sits on the build ladder rather than the search ladder, and on its own it will not move you a single ranking position.
What it buys is the absence of bad days. A backup you can restore. A site patched before an exploit gets automated. A certificate that renews before a browser starts warning your customers away from your own address.
Page speed lives here too, deliberately. We set a page-weight budget and hold the site against it, measured on a mid-range phone rather than a desktop in an office. Sites do not get slow in one day. They get slow across eleven months.
The honest limit: $99 a month is upkeep plus up to 2 small content edits a month, not an unlimited development retainer. A new page set or a rebuild gets quoted as build work, and we will say which one you are asking for rather than absorb it quietly and resent it later.
What arrives
What the Care Plan covers: 6 lines for $99 a month.
- 01
Hosting that we manage
The site lives somewhere we watch, on an account in your name. When it goes down at 2am the alert comes to us, rather than reaching you through a customer who could not book you.
- 02
Core and plugin updates
Applied on a schedule, then checked afterwards to confirm nothing broke. Most sites that get hacked were never targeted. They were running a known hole with a patch that had been available for months.
- 03
Backups you can actually restore
Taken automatically, stored off the server, then proven by restoring one. A backup nobody has ever restored is a theory, and you find out which it was on the worst possible morning.
- 04
Uptime monitoring with alerts
Checked around the clock. Downtime you hear about from a customer is downtime that already cost you a job, and most operators find out days after the outage ended.
- 05
A page-speed budget held
We set a page-weight target at build and re-measure it monthly on a mid-range phone. Speed slides quietly: a gallery here, a tracking script there. Holding a budget is what stops the slide.
- 06
Small edits, actually done
Price changes, new photos, a phone number, one more service on the list. The changes that sit on a note for a year because raising a quote for twenty minutes of work feels absurd to everyone involved.
Fit
Who this fits: 4 signs it is you.
The Care Plan earns its $99 when nobody in the business wants to own the technical upkeep and nobody has the time to notice the site is broken.
This is you if:
- Nobody in your business wants to run software updates on a schedule.
- You cannot say when the site was last backed up, or whether it restores.
- Small edits pile up until the site is a year out of date.
- You are on WordPress, which needs patching whether or not you patch it.
This is not you if:
- You want rankings. This is upkeep. The search ladder starts at $1,500 a month and it is a different product entirely.
- You want unlimited development for $99. New page sets and rebuilds are quoted as build work.
- You already have an in-house developer doing this. Paying twice for the same job is not a service.
- You want us to maintain a site we cannot get proper access to, in which case the free Snapshot has to come first.
How the work runs
How it runs: 4 steps, then a monthly rhythm.
- 01
Audit the current state
A free Snapshot first, back in a few business days: what versions things are running, whether backups exist, how fast it loads on a phone, what is already broken. The fuller 300+ point Deep Audit is there if the site needs the deeper read.
- 02
Clear the backlog
Whatever the audit found gets fixed before the monthly plan starts, so you are not paying an upkeep fee to maintain a problem that predates us.
- 03
Set the budgets
A page-weight target, an update cadence, a backup schedule with a restore test against it. Written down, so the plan stays checkable rather than becoming a promise.
- 04
Run it monthly
Updates applied, backups verified, speed re-measured, edits done as they arrive. One short note each month on what happened, including the months where nothing did.
Proof, not a pitch
Built by people who ran the truck first.
We put real money through the major ad platforms in our own service business, which teaches you quickly what an hour of downtime costs when every click landing on that page has already been paid for.
- 300+
- Points in the Deep Audit, worked by hand
- 36
- Hyperlocal pages shipped in one build
- 14
- Categories in the Deep Audit, worked by hand
- 2
- Service businesses run from the back of a truck
Every point listed in the report appendix
6 service areas × 6 services, same engagement
300+ points, $1,500
Nobody there was patching a website at 11pm
Build
What it costs: published, not quoted.
The Care Plan is $99 a month flat, and it attaches to a build rather than to the search ladder. Nothing inside it scales with your traffic or your rankings, which is exactly why it is published as one figure instead of a range.
Every build price, on one page| Tier | Price | What moves the number |
|---|---|---|
| Starter site The core site a local operator actually needs: services, service area, proof, plus a phone number that is never more than a thumb away. | $1,500 one-time | Page count, and how much of the content we write for you. Not included. Per-city page sets and published pricing pages are the Growth site. Ongoing search work is a separate monthly engagement. |
| Growth site The Starter site plus the pages that earn search traffic on their own: per-service and per-city pages, published pricing, and the proof library. | $2,500 one-time | How many service areas you need covered, and how many services get their own page. Not included. Custom application work sits in the Custom tier. Moving off an old site that already ranks? Rank-safe migration attaches to any build as a $400 line item. |
| Custom builds Larger builds and custom work, plus migrations where an existing site has rankings that have to survive the move. | from $3,000 one-time | Whether there are rankings to carry across, and how much of the build is bespoke rather than assembled. Not included. Rank-safe migration off an existing site attaches as a $400 line item where there are rankings to carry across. |
| Care Plan Hosting managed, updates applied, backups taken, uptime watched, a held page-speed budget, plus up to 2 small content edits a month. Site upkeep, not marketing, and we will not pretend otherwise. Anything bigger is quoted first. | $99 per month | Page count and how often you need edits made. |
Objections and questions
Questions we get asked: 6 answers.
The first two questions here are versions of the same one: what am I actually buying? The honest answer includes a clear statement of what you are not.
Ask us something else How much do website maintenance services cost?
Ours is $99 a month, flat, and that is the whole figure. It covers hosting managed, core and plugin updates, backups with a restore test, uptime monitoring, a held page-speed budget, plus up to 2 small content edits a month. The cap on edits is published on purpose: an uncapped edits line is how an upkeep fee quietly turns into an unbilled content retainer. Anything bigger than a small edit is quoted before we touch it, a new page set or a rebuild is quoted on the build ladder at $1,500 to $3,000+ one-time, and search work is a separate monthly ladder starting at $1,500.
Does website maintenance include SEO?
No, and this is the point we are most direct about. Maintenance is build-side upkeep: the site stays online, patched, backed up, fast. None of that ranks you. Search is a separate engagement on a separate ladder, from $1,500 a month for the Local Engine, covering the profile, the pages, the citations, the reviews. Plenty of agencies blur the two so an upkeep fee can be presented as an SEO retainer. A client who buys the Care Plan expecting rankings has been mis-sold, and we would rather lose that sale than make it.
What happens if my website goes down?
Monitoring checks the site around the clock and the alert comes to us. Most outages turn out to be a host problem, an expired certificate, or an update that disagreed with a plugin, and all three are quick to fix once somebody knows about them. The value is not really in the fixing, it is in the finding out. Without monitoring, the normal discovery route is a customer mentioning it days later, and by then you have no idea how many customers did not mention it.
Do you handle website speed optimization?
Yes, as part of the plan rather than as a separate product. We set a page-weight budget when the site is built, then re-measure monthly on a mid-range phone on a normal connection instead of a desktop in an office. Sites get slow gradually: an uncompressed gallery, a third tracking script, a plugin loading on every page whether or not that page uses it. Speed is a maintenance discipline far more than a one-off project, which is why we sell it as one.
Can you maintain a website you did not build?
Usually yes, and it starts with the free Snapshot so both sides know what is being taken on. What we need is proper access: hosting, the CMS, the domain registrar. What sometimes stops it is a locked proprietary builder we cannot get into, or a plugin stack so tangled that the honest quote is a rebuild rather than an upkeep fee. You get that answer in a few business days, and it is free whether or not you hire us.
Can I cancel the Care Plan?
Yes, and you keep everything. The domain, the hosting account, the site files, the content sit in your name from the day we hand over, so leaving means changing who holds a login rather than starting again somewhere else. We do not hold a site hostage to an upkeep fee. If you take maintenance in-house or hire somebody closer to you, we hand over the update schedule and the backup setup so the next person is not starting from nothing.
Related services
What this pairs with: the rest of the stack.
Every one of these is sold on its own, and none of them needs the others to work. Website Maintenance sits inside Small Business Web Design, which is where the whole line is laid out side by side.
- 01 Small Business Web Design A site built around how customers actually find and choose you, handed over in full when it ships. Read more
- 02 WordPress Web Design We work in your CMS if you already have one you like. Read more
- 03 Website Redesign Rebuilt on modern architecture without losing what already ranks. Read more
- 04 Technical SEO Crawl, index, speed, schema. The plumbing under the rankings. Read more
- 05 Conversion Rate Optimization Find where the traffic you already have quietly leaks away. Read more
- 06 Tracking & Analytics Setup You cannot prove any of this works without measurement. Read more
Trades
Who we do this for: named by trade.
An emergency trade loses money the hour a site is down. A contractor loses it slowly, through a gallery nobody has touched in two years. Both of those are maintenance problems.
- 01 Plumber Marketing Emergency intent converts in seconds. Most plumbing sites lose it. Read more
- 02 HVAC Marketing Emergency calls, maintenance plans, and the seasons that pay for the year. Read more
- 03 Marketing for Electricians Panel upgrades and EV chargers are the pages almost nobody has built. Read more
- 04 SEO for Roofers Storm-season demand is won in the map pack, not the phone book. Read more
- 05 Garage Door Marketing Same-day repair intent, plus the install job worth ten of it. Read more
- 06 Contractor Website Design A site that reads like a firm homeowners trust with a six-figure job. Read more
Free snapshot · paid teardown
Send us your site: 300+ points, worked by hand.
A short, sharp look: the top handful of findings, scored, delivered by email. What's broken, in plain English.
Want the full punch list? The Deep Audit is $1,500: the same crawler and link indexes the top-tier agencies run, plus live map-pack checks town by town and AI-assistant citation checks almost nobody local does. 300+ points across all 14 categories, plus a prioritized 90-day plan. Credited in full toward your first month if you hire us within 60 days.
Snapshot delivered in a few business days
It's yours either way. Hand it to your own developer, or your own AI, and it still pays for itself. If you hire us, it costs you nothing.
Site & search audit · what we check
300+ points
- Crawl, indexation and site security 30 pts
- Duplicate signals, structure and internal links 39 pts
- Speed and Core Web Vitals 28 pts
- The experience on a phone 14 pts
- Money pages: content, depth and freshness 24 pts
- Structured data and the trust surface 20 pts
- Search demand and the keyword map 20 pts
- Google Business Profile 20 pts
- Reviews and reputation 16 pts
- Local presence: map results and directories 20 pts
- AI search and assistant citation 22 pts
- Link profile and authority 20 pts
- The operators beating you 22 pts
- Turning visits into calls, and counting them 24 pts
The Snapshot is the top handful of these, free. The Deep Audit is all 14 categories, 300+ points, scored, with a 90-day plan and the full point-by-point appendix. No account, no card either way.
Ready to stop losing customers to the guy with a better site?
Fifteen minutes, no discovery deck. We'll tell you what we'd build, what we'd rank, and what it costs. And if we're not the right fit, we'll say that too.