Faster response and regular minor work, billed monthly — from $1,800/mo.
From $1,800/mo · monthly billing, cancel any month · Operating sites with regular minor work and a faster response window than monthly check-ins allow.
The mid tier of the Maintenance ladder. Built for operating WordPress sites where the monthly check-in shape of Essential care is not enough — you need a faster response window, regular minor implementation work, and someone who already knows the site when something needs attention.
Book a 20-minute discovery call
What active care covers
- Everything in Essential care. Uptime monitoring, backup verification, security and plugin updates, monthly health check, broken-link scans, annual audit deep-pass.
- A faster response window. Within one business day for non-urgent issues, within four hours for site-down emergencies during the business week.
- A regular block of implementation hours each month — for content updates, minor template work, plugin reconfiguration, and the small but real work that comes up between bigger engagements.
- Active monitoring with thresholds set for the site’s actual traffic profile — not a generic uptime ping that misses the things that matter.
- A quarterly check-in conversation covering what the cadence has caught, what the analytics are showing, and what the next quarter should focus on.
- Priority routing on the email contact — active-care clients sit ahead of essential-care clients on the same day.
The audit cadence included at this tier
Active care includes an ongoing $1,000 mid-tier level of audit work distributed across the year — the monthly health-check shape, quarterly deeper-pass reviews, and an annual consolidation.
- The monthly health-check report covering uptime, backups, updates, security posture, broken-link scan, and Core Web Vitals.
- A quarterly mid-tier audit pass. Each quarter the rolling work consolidates into a $1,000-level mid-tier audit covering a specific surface in depth — technical SEO one quarter, plugin governance and security another, accessibility regression another, and performance the fourth. Over the year the full mid-tier audit shape is covered.
- An annual review summary consolidating the quarterly audit work into a single document that survives being passed to a partner or stakeholder.
When the audit cadence surfaces work that calls for a build engagement, maintenance hours spent scoping it credit against the build. The audit work pays forward.
How the relationship works
Active care is structured around a working relationship, not a service tier. The handover surface includes documented escalation procedures and a named contact on both sides.
- A single email contact for everything maintenance-related, with priority routing within the cadence.
- A documented escalation procedure for site-down emergencies covering how to reach me, what counts as an emergency, and what the response commitment is.
- A walkthrough at relationship start covering the cadence, the reports, the escalation procedure, and the request flow for the monthly implementation block.
- Quarterly check-in conversations — usually 30 to 60 minutes, scheduled in advance — covering what the cadence has caught and what the next quarter should focus on.
- Annual review on the relationship as a whole and the audit work that has consolidated across the year.
WordPress training classes delivered as part of this package
The training surface above is built around the WordPress training catalogue. The specific classes delivered as part of this engagement:
- WordPress Training 301 — available as an add-on at relationship start — the operations curriculum lines up with the cadence of work in this retainer.
Each course in the WordPress training catalogue has its own public-cohort schedule and pricing if your team wants the catalogue cohort outside an engagement. Within an engagement the delivery is tailored to your specific build — same curriculum, your context, your dashboard.
Scope flex and no lock-in
Who this is for
- ✅ Operating WordPress site with real traffic and regular minor work needed each month.
- ✅ Faster response than monthly check-ins allow — one-business-day for routine work, four-hour for site-down.
- ✅ You want a working relationship with someone who already knows the site, not a ticket portal.
- ✅ Quarterly check-in conversations would actually be useful, not a chore.
- ❌ Mission-critical site where downtime carries material business cost and you need a named contact with priority response — that is Concierge care.
- ❌ Site with predictable monthly upkeep needs and no implementation work between — Essential care fits better.
- ❌ A build project — that is the relevant tier of build engagements.
Considering a different Maintenance tier?
Site with predictable monthly upkeep needs and no implementation work between? Essential care at $650/mo. Mission-critical site where downtime carries material business cost? Concierge care at $4,000/mo. Different shape entirely? All services.
