EAGLE SOLUTIONS
In short: My WordPress maintenance plans cost 250 RON a month for brochure sites, 600 RON for active business sites, and 1,200 RON for online stores. The cheapest 50-100 RON offers elsewhere usually skip testing updates on a copy first, restoring backups, and actually checking that forms and payments work.
If you search for how much WordPress maintenance costs, you will find offers from 50 to 1,500 RON a month. At first glance they all promise the same thing: updates, backups, security. The difference shows in what happens when something breaks.
In this article I describe what a fair monthly plan contains, what is missing from the cheap offers, and when you do not need to pay for one at all. My plans cost 250, 600 and 1,200 RON a month, and at the end I explain who each one is for.
The minimum it has to include
A WordPress site has three layers, and all three go out of date on their own: WordPress itself, the plugins and the theme. The first half of maintenance is keeping them updated. The second half is making sure that if an update (or anything else) breaks something, you can go back.
So the minimum is:
- Regular updates, not once a year. Security fixes for plugins come out every week (see WordPress's security advisories).
- A backup that can actually be restored. It should hold the database as well as the files, going back at least a few weeks.
- Monitoring: if the site goes down, you should not hear it from a visitor.
- Someone you can reach, and you know in advance how quickly they answer.
If any of these is missing from an offer, what you are paying for is someone pressing the update button.
What the cheapest offers leave out
Most services at 50-100 RON a month are fair for what they cost; that price simply does not cover more. Three things are usually missing, and all three only come to light when there is a problem.
1. Testing the updates
The cheap way is to let updates run automatically on the live site, and find out afterwards if something broke. Most of the time nothing breaks. When it does, your site is broken for hours or days, and you notice it first, not the person maintaining it.
I run every update on a copy first, and only then on the live site. This is the bigger part of the work, and it is why a monthly plan is worth more than a click.
2. A test restore of the backup
Many hosting providers advertise daily backups, and that is true, except they only go back a few days, or cover only the files, or come in a form where restoring is a separate paid service. You only know a backup works once you have tried restoring it.
3. Whether things actually work
A site can be updated, fast and secure while its contact form has not delivered a message in weeks. No automated tool reports this, because technically there is no error: the button works, the email is sent, it just never arrives. I ran into this on my own site: until email sending was properly authenticated, anyone could send email in my company's name.
That is why in my Business plan I test the forms by hand every month, and in the Online store plan the payment, the cart and the courier integration as well.
What WordPress maintenance cost depends on
The number of pages matters little. Four things do:
- How much money depends on it. A few hours of downtime on a brochure site is unpleasant. On an online store on a Saturday it is lost revenue. That is why the Online store plan responds within 4 working hours, and immediately for payment errors.
- How many plugins run on it, and what kind. A site with ten plugins is updated differently from one with thirty, including WooCommerce, a payment gateway and an invoicing integration.
- How many changes you ask for along the way. Replacing a text or an image is a small thing, but it adds up every month. The Basic plan includes 30 minutes a month for this, Business 2 hours, Online store 4 hours.
- The state the site is in right now. If it has not been updated for three years, the first month is repair work. I say this separately, up front.
The three plans, in short
- Basic, 250 RON/month: for brochure sites where the content rarely changes. Tested updates, daily backups kept for 30 days, uptime monitoring, a monthly report, a reply within 2 working days.
- Business, 600 RON/month: for active company sites that actually bring in enquiries. It adds a monthly form test, quarterly speed optimisation and a review of Search Console errors, with a reply within 1 working day.
- Online store, 1,200 RON/month: for online stores. Payment, cart and courier tested every month, backups twice a day including order data, a reply within 4 working hours.
All three are billed monthly and can be cancelled at the end of any month. I do not need to have built your site. I also take over existing sites, after a written health check.
When you do not need to pay for it
Sometimes it is not worth it. If your website is a one-page business card with no form, no shop, and few visitors, a manual update every quarter plus your host's own backup may be enough. You can do that yourself, once someone shows you what to watch out for.
Maintenance is worth it when one outage or one lost enquiry costs more than the monthly fee. For a site that brings in even one client a month, that is almost always the case.
If you are not sure which category you are in, tell me what kind of site you have and I will tell you, even if the answer is that you do not need me. The plan details are on the maintenance page, and I wrote earlier about the general question of why maintenance is needed at all.
