The right website maintenance plan is determined by four things: your website’s complexity (e-commerce, memberships, and integrations need more oversight than informational pages), your industry’s specific requirements, how often the site changes, and how much of the work your own team can do.
At Emily Journey & Associates, those factors sort websites into three tiers: Basic, starting at $299 per month for evergreen, informational websites; Premium, starting at $599 per month for e-commerce, membership, and sites with advanced functionality; and Custom plans, starting at $900 per month for higher-need clients with more complex websites.
This guide explains the factors we weigh and which plan your website is eligible for. If you’re still comparing providers rather than plans, start with our guide to choosing a website maintenance provider.
Office: (844) 972-6224 Contact Us
The four website maintenance plan eligibility factors
Complexity
Count the moving parts. A website that presents your organization and collects inquiries needs less attention. Add a checkout, a membership login, an event calendar, or a set of integrations, and every update has more things to disagree with, and higher stakes when they do. Complexity matters more than any other factor here, which is why it leads the tier definitions.
Rate of change
Look at how often the website needs attention, scheduled or not. A site that changes weekly needs more content support and more of someone’s time than one that changes quarterly. But in our experience, what makes an informational website eligible for Premium is usually not a publishing calendar. It’s one of three things: a preference for more frequent communication, a steady stream of edit requests that don’t follow any calendar, or an older theme or custom plugin that makes the site fragile every time security updates are applied. An informational website with evergreen content and none of those pressures is typically eligible for Basic.
Internal capacity
If someone on your team has the time, skills, and interest to do part of this work, that matters, though not always the way you might expect. WordPress is only easy if you know how to use it. Changes made while learning on a live website cause many of the problems a maintenance plan exists to prevent, so an untrained helper often adds to the attention a website needs.
What changes that is training. A team member who knows what they’re doing can keep real work in-house, and our WordPress training exists for exactly that. The test is consistency: capacity means the work happens every month, including the months when everything else demands the team’s attention.
Industry
Some industries impose requirements your service plan has to be built around.
- Healthcare providers carry compliance and patient-data stakes; a missed security update is an exposure, so security and update discipline are the core of the plan.
- Nonprofits live on donation forms, event calendars, and volunteer signups, which the plan has to treat as critical functionality rather than content. Our fuller answer for this audience is at website support services for nonprofits.
- E-commerce businesses need update testing against the checkout, which is why online stores are eligible starting at the Premium level; see e-commerce website maintenance for what changes task by task.
- Educational institutions depend on calendars, registration, and directories staying accurate; a broken registration page undermines trust faster than a dated design does.
- Real estate and financial services hinge on listings, portals, and logins that must simply work; a security warning or a failed login costs client confidence immediately.
When you compare website maintenance plans, ask whether the provider knows what usually goes wrong for websites like yours. A generalist covers the basics; the right plan covers the problems your kind of website has.
Which tier your website is eligible for
Our monthly website maintenance plans come in three tiers. Informational websites with evergreen content are typically eligible for our Basic plan, starting at $299 per month. E-commerce, membership, multi-site, and event-calendar websites are eligible for our Premium plan, starting at $599 per month, and some need more than a Premium plan provides. Organizations with multiple websites or extended SEO needs are eligible for a Custom plan, starting at $900 per month.
Every tier includes a dedicated website manager, responses within 24 hours during the workweek, and no minimum term; the full comparison is on our monthly website maintenance plans page.
Sometimes the right answer is the cheaper tier. When a website is eligible for Basic, that’s the plan we recommend, because the plan that fits builds a relationship that lasts, and our 96% client retention rate is worth more to us than one upsold plan. If you’re still deciding whether a maintenance subscription is worth paying for at all, is website maintenance worth it takes that question on directly.
Frequently asked questions about website maintenance plans
Which maintenance plan does a small business website need?
Company size doesn’t set the plan; your goals and the website’s needs set it. Informational business websites with evergreen content are typically eligible for the Basic plan, starting at $299 per month. E-commerce or membership functionality are eligible for Premium plan pricing starting at $599, whatever the size of the business behind it.
Which plan does an e-commerce website need?
Premium, starting at $599, or a WooCommerce maintenance plan for stores built on WooCommerce. E-commerce stores are not eligible for the Basic plan because they need testing and integration support that Basic doesn’t include.
What if my needs change?
Plans change with the website and your needs. When it takes on new functionality or starts needing more attention, changing tiers is a conversation with your website manager, and there’s no minimum term holding you in place.
The full tier comparison is on our monthly website maintenance plans page; if you’re still comparing providers first, start with our guide to choosing a website maintenance provider.
Office: (844) 972-6224 Contact Us
