What a maintenance plan should include
Strip away the marketing and a plan comes down to a handful of recurring jobs: updating WordPress core, your theme and your plugins; watching for security problems; checking that the site is up, and knowing when it isn't; keeping backups and being able to restore from them; and telling you what happened. If a plan can't be described in those terms, ask what you're paying for.
Updates should be tested, not just clicked
Most "maintenance" is someone logging in and pressing update. That works until the day an update changes how a form, a menu or a checkout behaves, and nobody notices for a week. The better approach is to apply updates on a staging copy, compare it visually against production, check the things that make money, and only then release. It's slower and it's the reason a site stays stable. We explain the thinking in WordPress change management.
Maintenance versus support
These get lumped together and they're different jobs. Maintenance is preventive and scheduled: it's what keeps problems from happening. Support is reactive: something broke, fix it. A plan that only sells you hours of support leaves you paying for emergencies. A plan that only maintains still needs someone to answer when something unexpected happens.
If your site is already broken, our emergency support is for that, and our guide to common WordPress errors may get you moving faster.
What it costs
At CriticalWP, Starter is $149 per month and Managed Stability is $249 per month, with hosting included in both. Elsewhere you'll see maintenance-only plans for less, and they usually cover less: updates applied without testing, a monthly check-in and little else. Cheap plans often hide the cost in what they don't cover, such as restoring from backup or fixing a conflict after an update.
Compare plans by the list of tasks and the response when something breaks, not by the price.
Who is actually accountable?
The most common failure we see isn't a wrong plugin or a missing setting. It's that nobody owns the site. Marketing assumes IT has it, IT assumes the agency has it, and the agency finished the project two years ago. A maintenance plan is partly a way of naming one party who is responsible. We wrote more on that in WordPress needs someone accountable.
