Website Maintenance Plans: What to Include, What to Charge

A website maintenance plan (also called a care plan) is a monthly fee for the work a live website keeps needing: small content changes, checks on links and forms, domain and certificate renewals and a report, plus core, plugin and theme updates with a backup first if the site runs on WordPress. Price it from your own numbers rather than someone else's average: the hours each tier really takes times your hourly rate, plus your costs per site, plus a margin for the months that run over. Below: what to include for a static site and for WordPress, three tiers to start from, a worked example and a plan template to copy.

Disclosure: this guide is published by Statpio, whose hosting appears in it as an example. We link every outside fact to its official source.

What does website maintenance include?

It depends on how the site is built. A WordPress site runs software on its server that has to be kept up to date; a static site is a folder of finished files, so the server work disappears, but the rest of the list doesn't.

Source: WordPress's Updating WordPress guide, its Advanced Administration Handbook and its plugin and theme auto-updates page, which says "To keep your WordPress site secure, you should always update your plugins and themes to the latest version"; Statpio's from the product. Checked 9 November 2026.

Do static websites need maintenance?

Less, but yes. Nothing on a static site goes out of date by itself, yet five jobs still need someone:

• Content. Prices, opening hours, team pages, the year in the footer.
• Links. Pages you link to move or disappear. On Statpio, the website check that an AI assistant runs through the connector (on every plan) finds links between the site's own pages and files that lead nowhere, and on Solo Pro and up the missing page finder lists the missing pages visitors actually reach and the pages that sent them there. Links to other websites you still check yourself.
• Forms. A test message each month shows the form still sends, the message still reaches the inbox and the notification still arrives.
• Renewals. The domain renews at the registrar. Under ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy, registrars send the registered name holder a reminder about a month and again about a week before a generic domain such as .com expires (as of November 2026), so check whose inbox those reach. On Statpio the SSL certificate renews on its own as long as the _acme-challenge validation record stays in DNS.
• Reporting. What happened this month, in words the client can act on.

What should each tier of a maintenance plan include?

Three tiers are a simple place to start: one that keeps the site healthy, one that adds leads and reporting, and one that adds growth work. Sell only what your tools actually do, and say which parts you do by hand. On Statpio, the portal, reports, alerts and change requests below come with Agency Pro, which also includes everything in Solo Pro.

Tier 1: Hosting and care

• Hosting on the client's own domain with SSL.
• Monthly checks: a test message through each form, the website check for broken links, the missing page finder and the domain's renewal date.
• Rollback if a change goes wrong: Agency Pro keeps the last 50 versions, and one click in Deployments puts an earlier one live again.
• A set number of small edits a month, which you do.
• Bigger changes reviewed before they go live. Upload the new version to the website's staging address, send the client the link, and once they approve, publish it to live in one click. The staging address comes with Solo Pro and Agency Pro and uses none of the plan's website slots.

Tier 2: Leads and reporting

Everything in Tier 1, plus:

• The client's leads in their branded portal, with spam protection on every form, browser notifications for everyone who can see the messages, and a CSV export when they ask for one (you run it; nothing exports on its own).
• Visitor statistics in the same portal, or through a share link with an optional password for clients who'd rather not log in.
• A weekly or monthly analytics report emailed under your brand to up to 10 people at the client, plus a short summary you write yourself.
• Traffic alerts when a site's visits drop sharply, spike or stop, so you can look into it before the client asks.

Tier 3: Growth partner

Everything in Tier 2, plus:

• Change requests through the portal, with an agreed number of hours a month.
• Campaign landing pages. Each separate site is its own website on the plan, so past 30 websites each extra one is $3 a month.
• Blog posts on the site's own /blog, written by you, or by the client if you give them permission to write.
• A waitlist sign-up widget for launches, with CSV export.
• A quarterly review of campaigns (UTM tags), referrers, Google Search Console keywords and Core Web Vitals. Paid plans keep 90 days of visits, so download the reports as CSV each quarter if the client wants a longer record.

Leave out what Statpio doesn't do, so the plan never promises it: zero downtime, unlimited previews, automatic lead exports, or backups the client restores themselves (rollbacks cover the website's versions, not its messages).

How much should you charge for website maintenance?

Build the price from four numbers of your own:

1. Hours a month the tier really takes: edits, checks, the report, replies. Track a few months of real work if you can.
2. Your hourly rate.
3. Your costs per site: hosting, any tool you pay for per client, and the domain if you pay for it (or bill it at cost once a year).
4. A margin for the months that run over and the work nobody bills, such as renewals, invoices and the odd urgent fix.

On Statpio the hosting cost per site falls as you add clients, because Agency Pro is one flat $99 a month for up to 30 client sites. Each site's share is that price divided by the number of sites on the plan, and each site past 30 adds $3 a month. Here is the method worked through with made-up figures:

Source: Statpio's pricing page for the plan price, which renders from the live plans. The hours, the $60 rate, the 20% margin and the 20 sites are an illustration of the method, not a benchmark or a market rate.

Round each result to a price you're comfortable quoting, then check the whole portfolio. Say 20 clients take Tier 2 at $150 a month (still an illustration): that brings in $3,000 a month against $99 for the platform, and the rest pays for 40 hours of your time and the margin. The hosting is the small part of the bill; your hours set the price.

What does a website maintenance plan template look like?

Put each plan in writing, so the client knows what the fee covers and what it doesn't. Copy and adapt this:

WEBSITE MAINTENANCE PLAN
Client:                      Website:
Plan: [tier name]            Price: [amount] a month, billed [monthly/yearly]
Start date:                  Minimum term: [none / number of months]

INCLUDED EACH MONTH
- Hosting on [domain], with SSL
- Up to [hours] of changes (unused hours [do / don't] roll over)
- Checks: a test message through every form, broken links,
  missing pages, the domain's renewal date, the certificate
- Rollback to an earlier version if a change goes wrong
- [Weekly / monthly] analytics report to [names]
- Leads and visitor statistics in the client portal
- [Tier 3 only] Change requests, landing pages, blog posts,
  quarterly review of campaigns and search keywords

HOW TO ASK FOR A CHANGE
- Through [the portal's change requests / your channel]
- We reply within [time] on working days

NOT INCLUDED (quoted separately)
- Redesigns, and new pages beyond the hours above
- Work on other services (email accounts, ads, social media)
- Domain registration fees, billed at cost

RENEWALS
- The domain renews on [date] at [registrar], paid by [who]
- This plan renews [monthly / yearly]; price changes need [notice]

ENDING THE PLAN
- Either side gives [notice] notice
- We hand over [source / built files / repository / CSV exports]
- The site stays live until [date]

Signed (client):             Date:
Signed (agency):             Date:

What does Statpio do for you, and what stays manual?

On Agency Pro, the platform takes care of the routine part:

• Rollbacks: every publish is kept as a version, and one click puts an earlier one live again.
• Reports: weekly or monthly analytics reports under your brand, to up to 10 people per website.
• Traffic alerts: when visits drop sharply, spike or stop, for the alerts you switch on.
• The forms inbox: the messages from all the site's forms in one place, with spam protection, search and CSV export, and a warning when a website passes 80% of its 100,000 submissions a month.
• Browser notifications: for new messages and change requests, for everyone who can see them, on each device where they're turned on.
• Certificates and domain checks: SSL issued and renewed automatically, and each domain's status checked every night.
• An activity log of publishes, domain, password and team changes for each website, kept for 2 years.

What stays with you:

• Every content change, and checking it after it goes live.
• Links to other websites: the website check only follows the site's own links.
• Domain renewals at the registrar, and paying for them.
• Exports: messages, sign-ups and statistics leave Statpio when someone downloads the CSV, and nothing flows into a CRM on its own (there are no webhooks or Zapier).
• Reading the report and writing the summary the client will actually read.
• Anything that needs a server: Statpio hosts static sites only, so WordPress and other PHP sites stay with a WordPress host.

The white-label side of this, what the client sees in the portal and how to move existing client sites over, is in our guide to white-label website hosting for agencies, and the website handover checklist covers what to hand over when a plan starts or ends.

If your client sites are static, you can try Agency Pro free for 7 days, no card needed, and set up one client's plan for real: the portal, the report and the alerts. The trial covers up to 5 websites and everything except custom domains (the portal's own domain included), which start when you choose a plan, and nothing is charged when it ends.