Do I really need a website care plan?

Maybe. It depends on one thing: who's going to do the stuff the care plan does.

If the honest answer is "nobody," you need the care plan. If the honest answer is "my nephew who's really good with computers," you don't need the care plan — you need a better plan.

What the $50/month actually covers

The P27 care plan (it's on my web design page) is $50/month and includes:

• Hosting and SSL — the bill and the technical setup to keep the site accessible and encrypted.
• Daily backups — if something breaks, I roll it back.
• Monthly security updates — WordPress plugins, server patches, SSL renewals.
• Uptime monitoring — I get paged when the site goes down. You don't find out from a customer.
• Up to 30 minutes of content edits per month — changing a phone number, swapping a photo, fixing a typo, adding a sentence.

That's it. No surprises, no add-ons, no "we also charge for SSL renewal" nonsense. It's month to month, and you can cancel anytime.

Two of the clients on my work page show what this looks like. Riteway Ministries prepaid a year of hosting and maintenance, with up to 30 minutes of updates a month, and those updates include uploading their weekly YouTube videos. Kool Runnin's Heating and Air, a Jacksonville HVAC company, has its site on monthly hosting and maintenance.

Who actually needs one

You probably need a care plan if any of these are true:

• You'd panic if your website went down on a Saturday.
• You don't know what a plugin is.
• You've ever said "my nephew built it but he doesn't live here anymore."
• You've been burned before by a site that broke and nobody could fix it.
• You'd rather send me a quick email when you need a banner updated than learn a CMS.

If none of those describe you — if you've got someone technical on staff, or you're comfortable logging into your host and updating plugins yourself — you can skip it.

The uncomfortable alternative

The alternative to a care plan isn't "free." It's "you pay in a different currency."

Without a care plan, your website will eventually:

• Go down because SSL expired (and you didn't know SSL was a thing that expires).
• Get hacked through an unpatched plugin and start serving spam to your customers.
• Stop loading on mobile because a CDN change broke the fonts.
• Silently stop sending form submissions for three months before someone notices.

When one of those happens, you'll call me in a panic. I'll fix it, but without a care plan it's out-of-scope work at $125/hour, quoted in writing before I start (and I'll be annoyed, because the $50/month care plan would likely have prevented it).

For most small businesses, $600 a year is cheap next to a hacked site or three months of lost form submissions.

What it's not

The care plan is not unlimited edits. It's not a re-design. It's not SEO. It's not a marketing retainer. It's infrastructure — the electricity bill for your digital storefront, plus enough light bookkeeping that someone notices when the lights are out.

If you need more than 30 minutes of edits in a month, I'll quote the extra work before I do it. If you need SEO or ongoing content, that's a separate retainer. If you want a redesign, that's a project.

Skip it if…

• You're technical enough to handle hosting, SSL, backups, and plugin updates yourself — and you'll actually do it monthly, not when something breaks.
• Your site is literally a single static page that doesn't change and doesn't run on WordPress or any other CMS with a plugin ecosystem.
• You already pay someone else for this.

Otherwise: take the care plan. Future-you will thank past-you.

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Already have a website and want to move it onto a care plan? I'll take over sites I didn't build. Get in touch and I'll set it up.