WordPress care plans: what goes in one, and how to deliver it without losing your weekends
Updated October 30, 2026
Selling a WordPress care plan takes one email. Delivering 20 of them every month is where the margin goes.
Clients don't want to think about their site, and they'll happily pay a monthly fee so they don't have to. But delivery is where most care plans quietly lose money: logging into each site, updating, checking, writing the report, then doing the "small changes" that were "included".
What people charge
Prices vary a lot by region and what's included. One January 2026 breakdown from FatLab Web Support lays out the usual tiers in US dollars:
| Tier | Per month | Usually includes |
|---|---|---|
| Basic maintenance | $30–$100 | Plugin and theme updates, backups, light monitoring |
| Standard care | $100–$300 | The above, plus support, security work and some development time |
| Premium | $300–$500+ | Full support, a dedicated contact, development hours |
The jump from basic to standard is mostly about time: support, fixes and a few hours of changes. So the cheaper you can make that time, the better the standard tier pays.
What goes in a care plan
Here's a sensible list. You won't do every item at every tier.
- Updates. Core, plugins and themes, with a check that the site still works afterwards.
- Backups. Daily or weekly, kept off the server, tested now and then.
- Security. Login protection, user audits, removing old admin accounts.
- Health checks. Site Health warnings, PHP errors, overdue scheduled tasks, PHP version.
- Speed. A monthly PageSpeed check and fixing whatever regressed.
- SEO hygiene. Missing titles and meta descriptions, broken redirects, sitemap and robots.txt.
- Content edits. A capped number of small changes per month.
- A report. What you did, what changed, what needs a decision.
Number 1 and number 7 eat the most hours. Number 8 is the one clients actually look at.
Doing the monthly work with an AI assistant
The chores in that list are what an assistant with Kitepod handles across every client site (the WordPress MCP page explains how it works). It's free with unlimited sites, so it doesn't eat into the margin on a $49 plan. And because all your connected sites share one conversation, a month of chores becomes a handful of requests.
Updates, across every site
Update plugins, themes and core on all my client sites except the two WooCommerce stores, then check each homepage still loads.
Under the default policy, plugin and theme updates wait for a person's approval, and core updates always do. Once approved, Kitepod takes a checkpoint before each one, so a single bad plugin can be rolled back on its own. Then it loads each homepage as a logged-out visitor and screenshots it before and after. You read one summary instead of opening 20 tabs.
Health and speed checks
For each site, list Site Health warnings, the last fatal error, overdue cron jobs, and the mobile PageSpeed score.
Kitepod reads Site Health, the last fatal error, paused plugins, overdue cron and PHP limits, and runs Google PageSpeed (Lighthouse) audits with Core Web Vitals. That's items 4 and 5 in one request.
The "small changes"
Client emails asking for a new phone number, a swapped team photo or an updated opening-hours table become one sentence each. Design changes are staged on a preview by default, so you can send the client a link before anything goes live.
Let the client approve their own site
You can invite a client as an approver on just their site. They get an email, open the preview, and approve or decline. The AI can't approve its own work, so anything held for approval (a plugin update, a theme publish, a new user) waits for you or them.
Everyday edits are different. Content, media, menu and SEO changes run directly under the default policy, each one snapshotted so it can be undone for 90 days.
For the monthly report, your assistant can read each site's change history: what was touched, its status, and whether it can still be undone. That's the "what we did" section drafted. Who approved what sits in the hash-chained trail in your Kitepod dashboard, and an activity log plugin covers changes people make by hand in wp-admin.
What Kitepod doesn't do for a care plan
Three parts of a care plan need other tools:
- Backups. Kitepod isn't a backup service. Keep your host's backups or a backup plugin running on every site.
- Uptime monitoring. Kitepod doesn't watch your sites around the clock. Use a monitoring service.
- Down sites. If a site is completely down and the plugin can't answer, Kitepod can't reach it. That's your host or SFTP.
That's why plenty of agencies run a maintenance dashboard too. If you're weighing one, see how ManageWP or MainWP compare. They're a different kind of tool, and using both is a fair answer.
Finer points
What's the difference between a care plan and a maintenance plan?
Mostly marketing. "Maintenance plan" tends to mean updates and backups. "Care plan" usually adds support time and small content changes. Name it whatever your clients respond to.
How many sites can I manage this way?
Kitepod has no site limit and no tool-call cap, just a short per-site rate limit so a runaway agent can't hammer a server. Your AI plan's own usage limits still apply.
Do clients need a Kitepod account?
Only if you want them to approve changes. Today an approver is invited by email and signs in to approve or decline. They only see the site you invited them to.
Can Kitepod write the monthly report?
Part of it. The assistant can read each site's change history and turn it into a plain-English list of what changed. Approvals are in your Kitepod dashboard, and uptime and backup status come from your other tools.
Should I include unlimited small changes?
No. Cap them by count or time, even if the assistant makes them faster. "Unlimited" is how a $99 plan turns into a part-time job.
Price the plan for the hours it used to take. Deliver it in the hours it takes now.