WordPress Care Plans for New England Small Businesses — What's Included, What It Costs

If someone built your WordPress site and handed you the keys, you already know the uncomfortable part: the site keeps needing attention after launch. Updates pile up, a plugin breaks something on a Tuesday, a form quietly stops sending. A care plan is the ongoing looking-after — the difference between a site that was built once and a site that's actually maintained.

We're Site Schema, a small managed-WordPress team in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Here's what a care plan is, what a good one has to include, what they usually cost around here, and where our own numbers land.

What a care plan is (and isn't)

A care plan is a monthly service that keeps a finished website healthy: software current, backups restorable, security watched, speed maintained, someone answering when it goes wrong.

It is not a build or a redesign. If a proposal calls itself a "care plan" but most of the line items are design and development hours, it's a retainer with a friendlier name. Both are legitimate — they solve different problems and shouldn't be priced the same.

What a good care plan must include

Here's the checklist we'd hold any plan to, including our own.

Updates — with testing. WordPress core, plugins and themes, applied on a schedule, and checked afterward. "We click update" isn't maintenance. Someone should notice when an update breaks checkout or the contact form, and roll it back.

Backups you can actually restore. Nightly at minimum, kept for a reasonable window (we keep 30 days; stores can get hourly), stored somewhere other than the server the site lives on. Ask how a restore works and how long it takes. If the answer is vague, the backup is theoretical.

Security hardening and malware protection. Firewall rules, login protection, file-change monitoring, and a real answer to "what happens if we get hacked."

Speed and caching. Server-level caching and a sane performance baseline. A care plan that ignores speed is ignoring the thing your visitors notice first.

Uptime monitoring, around the clock. If your site goes down at 2 a.m., somebody should know before your first customer does.

A human to call. Email is fine; a ticket queue is fine. But you should be able to reach a person who knows your site, not a chatbot and a knowledge base.

Plain reports. A weekly note that says what happened — updates applied, uptime, backups confirmed — in language you don't have to decode.

What's commonly sold as a care plan but is mostly padding

Some line items look substantial and aren't:

• "Unlimited security scans" — scanning is cheap and automated. The question is who acts on the results.
• "Monthly SEO report" — usually a PDF export from a tool, with no work behind it.
• "Priority support" — meaningless unless the standard response time is stated too.
• "Free plugin licenses" — sometimes real value, sometimes a bundled license you'd never have chosen. Ask which plugins, specifically.

None of these are dishonest. They just shouldn't be the reason you pick a plan.

What care plans cost in New England

Prices vary widely, and honest ranges are the best we can do. From what we see across Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut, typical small-business care plans run roughly $50–$150 per month on top of hosting, with hosting itself usually another $20–$50. Agency retainers that fold in design and development hours run higher — a few hundred a month is common.

Two things drive the spread: whether hosting is included, and whether the plan is doing the work or just watching for problems.

What Site Schema charges

Our plans include hosting. There's no separate hosting bill.

• Solo — $25/month. One site, everything on the checklist above.
• Studio — $35/month. One site, more headroom for busier or larger sites.
• Growth — $50/month. One site, sized for stores and higher-traffic businesses.

Every plan includes free migration, nightly backups with 30-day retention (hourly available for stores), free SSL, security hardening and malware protection, core/plugin/theme updates, server-level caching, 24/7 uptime monitoring, plain-English weekly reports, and real human support. Current details are on our pricing page.

If you'd rather compare on hosting first, we've written up what that looks like in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

What's not included

We'd rather say this up front than in a surprise invoice.

• Custom design and development. New pages, layout changes, feature builds and theme customization are quoted separately.
• Content writing. We don't write your blog posts or product descriptions.
• Advertising and marketing management. No Google Ads, social, or email campaigns.
• Emergency work beyond the plan. If a third-party developer's custom code breaks, or you need something rebuilt after a change you made, that's hourly work — we'll tell you before we start.
• Third-party services. Domain registration, premium plugin licenses you already own, and outside tools are billed by whoever provides them.

Fixing something we broke, restoring from a backup, and cleaning up a hack are covered. Building something new is not.

How to compare two care plans

Put both proposals side by side and check:

1. Is hosting included, or added on top?
2. How often are backups taken, how long are they kept, and has anyone ever restored one?
3. Are updates tested afterward, or just applied?
4. Is uptime monitored 24/7, and who gets alerted?
5. What's the actual response time for support, in hours?
6. What kind of report do you get, and how often?
7. What specifically is excluded — and is it written down?
8. Can you cancel monthly, or is there a term?

If a plan can't answer those in a sentence each, that tells you something too.

Where we work

We're based in East Greenwich, RI, and work with small businesses and the agencies that serve them across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. In-person meetings are available in Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut; everything else happens by email, phone or video call.