You launched the site, the client was happy, and the final invoice was paid. Six months later they email: a form has stopped working, and could you “just have a quick look”. You fix it, feel awkward about billing for twenty minutes, and wonder how many more of these are coming. That cycle is usually the moment an agency decides to put together a proper maintenance offer.
Building one is not hard, but building one that clients understand, that your team can deliver without losing money, and that does not quietly turn into unlimited unpaid support takes some thought. This post walks through how to design the offer itself. It deliberately says nothing about what to charge; that depends on your market, your costs and your clients, and copying someone else’s numbers rarely works.
Start from the work, not the package names
Many agencies begin by inventing three tiers with names like Bronze, Silver and Gold, then work out what goes into each. It is easier the other way round. First list every recurring task a WordPress site might need. Then decide which tasks are essential for every client, and which only some need.
A typical list of recurring work looks like this:
- WordPress core, theme and plugin updates, with a check afterwards
- Backups, stored somewhere other than the site’s own server, with an occasional test restore
- Uptime monitoring and a response when the site goes down
- Security monitoring, login protection and malware scanning
- Renewal tracking for domains, SSL certificates and premium licences
- A small allowance of content edits each month
- Performance checks, such as page speed and database tidying
- Broken link and form checks
- A short monthly report to the client
- Store-specific tasks for WooCommerce sites: checkout tests, payment gateway checks, order email checks
Our maintenance checklist for small business sites is a useful cross-check if you want to make sure nothing obvious is missing.
Decide what is always included
Your base level should cover the work that protects the client’s site from harm, regardless of who they are. In practice that usually means updates with testing, backups, uptime monitoring and basic security. A client who refuses these is a client whose site will eventually break on your watch, and you should think about whether you want that responsibility.
Then decide what varies. Content edits, store checks, performance work and reporting depth are good candidates for higher levels or add-ons, because some clients need them and others do not.
Write a clear “not included” list
This is the part most agencies skip and most regret. A maintenance offer that does not say what it excludes will be read by clients as covering everything. Spell out what sits outside it:
- New features or new pages beyond the edit allowance
- Redesigns and layout changes
- Writing copy, as opposed to publishing copy the client supplies
- SEO campaigns and advertising
- Fixing problems caused by changes the client or another supplier made
- Recovering a site that was hacked before the plan started
- Third-party costs such as hosting, domains and premium licences, unless you resell them
Then say what happens when a client asks for one of these: you will quote it separately, and nothing starts until they approve. That one sentence prevents a lot of resentment on both sides. Our earlier post on what website support covers and what it leaves out explains the same boundary from the client’s point of view, and it can help to send clients there.
Set limits that people understand
An edit allowance needs a unit. The common choices are:
- Time. A set number of hours or minutes each month. Simple for you, but clients struggle to judge how long a change takes.
- Requests. A set number of small changes. Easier for clients, but you need to define “small”.
- Examples. A short list of what counts: replacing an image, changing a price, adding a team member. Clients understand this best.
Whichever you choose, decide what happens to unused allowance (most agencies do not roll it over), and what happens when a client goes over (usually a separate quote or billing at your standard rate).
Be careful with response promises
Clients will ask how quickly you respond when something breaks. It is tempting to put an impressive number in the offer. Before you do, check whether your team, or your partner, can actually meet it on a bad week, during holidays and outside your office hours.
Two distinctions help. First, a response is not a fix: acknowledging a problem quickly is very different from resolving it quickly. Second, an emergency is not the same as a request: a site that is down needs different handling from a new paragraph on the About page. Write both distinctions into the offer. If you want to set formal targets, read what an SLA should contain first.
Make the work visible
Maintenance has an awkward property: when it is done well, nothing happens. Clients who see nothing start to wonder what they are paying for. A short monthly report fixes that. It should say, in plain words, what was updated, what was checked, any issues found and dealt with, and anything the client should know about, such as a plugin that is no longer maintained.
Keep it short enough that clients actually read it. For guidance on what to include, see our post on what a client-facing maintenance report should tell them.
Plan how you will deliver it
An offer is only as good as the routine behind it. Before you sell it, decide:
- Tooling. How you will run updates, backups and monitoring across many sites without logging into each one by hand every time.
- Schedule. Which day each task happens, and who does it.
- Testing. How updates are checked: on staging for important sites, with a visual check and form test for simpler ones.
- Exceptions. What happens with a plugin that cannot be updated safely, or a client on a host that does not support what you need.
- Records. Where notes on each site live, so anyone on the team can pick it up.
- Who delivers. Your own team, a partner working under your name, or a mix.
If you plan to use a partner, check that they can work to your schedule, write notes you can turn into your report, and stay out of sight of the client. A partner’s notes should feed your report, not replace it.
Onboard every site before you take it on
Do not accept a site into a maintenance plan without looking at it first. A short audit tells you whether the site is in a state you can maintain: are plugins wildly out of date, is the theme abandoned, are there backups at all, is the PHP version current, are there admin users nobody recognises? Some sites need a one-off cleanup project before ongoing care makes sense. Charge for that separately and say so in the offer.
Write the terms, briefly
Every maintenance offer needs a short set of terms. At minimum: the start date, how billing works, the notice period to cancel, what is included and excluded, how extra work is approved, and what happens to access and backups when the arrangement ends. Our post on what goes into a maintenance contract is a good starting list. If you have clients in several countries, it is worth having a lawyer check the terms; that is general advice rather than legal guidance.
Name and present it simply
Only now should you think about names and tiers. Keep the number of levels small; two or three is usually enough. Describe each level by what the client gets, not by internal jargon. “We update and test your site every week, keep daily backups, and watch for downtime” means more to a café owner than “proactive core lifecycle management”.
Consider offering one level as the obvious default for most clients, and make the others clearly for sites with more traffic, a store, or frequent changes.
Test it on a few clients first
Before you roll the offer out to everyone, try it with a handful of existing clients you know well. Watch for:
- Questions they ask that the offer does not answer
- Tasks that take your team longer than expected
- Requests that fall into a grey area between included and excluded
- Whether they read the monthly report
Adjust before you scale. A maintenance offer that is slightly wrong for a few clients is easy to fix. One that is wrong for every client is a year of uncomfortable conversations.
A design checklist
- Full list of recurring tasks written first
- Base level covers updates, backups, monitoring and security
- Clear list of exclusions and how extra work is quoted
- Edit allowance with a unit clients understand
- Response and emergency wording your team can actually meet
- Monthly report in plain language
- Delivery routine, tooling and records decided
- Audit for every new site before it joins
- Short written terms, including how the arrangement ends
- Few levels, described by outcome
- Pilot with a small group of clients
Once your offer is built, the next step is explaining it, which we cover in how to explain maintenance value to clients. For how maintenance fits alongside other outsourced work, see our agency outsourcing overview.
If you would rather keep the offer and the client relationship but hand off the routine work, our page on delivering an agency’s own maintenance plan behind the scenes explains how we fit into that.
Next in this series: How Agencies Keep Clients After Launch With Maintenance
