Care plans are the quietest good business in WordPress: predictable recurring revenue for you, genuine protection for the client. But “we keep your site updated” is not a plan — it’s a hope. Here’s what a resellable, white-label WordPress maintenance plan should actually include.
The non-negotiables
- Weekly core, theme and plugin updates — staged first on sites that matter, with visual regression checks so updates never become outages.
- Daily off-site backups with tested restores. A backup you’ve never restored is a rumour, not a backup.
- Security monitoring: malware scanning, firewall rules, login hardening, and a documented incident response — who does what within an hour of something looking wrong.
- Uptime monitoring with alerting that reaches a human, not an unread inbox.
What separates premium plans
- Monthly performance check: Core Web Vitals field data reviewed, regressions fixed before rankings feel them.
- Small-change allowance: 30–60 minutes of content tweaks monthly — the single biggest driver of client-perceived value.
- A monthly report humans read: what was updated, what was blocked, what improved — three bullet points beat ten pages.
Pricing in the UK market
Typical resale bands: essentials £50–£75/month, business £95–£150, premium (with changes and performance work) £175–£300. Agencies commonly pay a white-label partner 40–60% of that to deliver everything invisibly — margin for owning the relationship, delivery without the payroll.
The pitch that sells it
Don’t sell updates; sell consequences avoided: “the average hacked-site cleanup costs more than three years of this plan.” Attach a care plan to every launch as the default, opt-out rather than opt-in, and watch recurring revenue become the most stable line on your P&L.
I run white-label care plans for agency portfolios — get in touch if you’d rather sell them than staff them.
