WordPress care and security retainers for small businesses and nonprofits that need the site — and the lead path — to stay trustworthy every week.
Most “maintenance” plans are plugin updates and a backup checkbox. Useful, until a form stops writing to the CRM, a security plugin conflicts with checkout, or nobody notices the site has been serving a phishing page for three days. Care here means ownership: updates, hardening, uptime, and the unsexy glue between WordPress and the tools that actually make money.
Monthly updates: core, plugins, and PHP
WordPress core, themes, and plugins get updated on a schedule, tested first where it matters, with a rollback path if something misbehaves. PHP is part of that list too. Most sites drift onto an old PHP version because nobody owns the upgrade; on a retainer, someone does.
Emergency patching
When critical issues like this month’s php2shell PHP vulnerabilities hit, retainer clients get patched first, with no scrambling. That means checking the PHP version on every site, pushing the host (or updating the server) the same day, and keeping firewall rules in place until the fix is confirmed.
Backups, uptime, and security monitoring
- Backups you can actually restore, with a restore tested before you need it
- Uptime monitoring, so outages are noticed in minutes, not when a customer emails
- Hardening, malware checks, and least-privilege access for every login
- Watching for the quiet signs of a compromise: unknown admins, changed files, odd redirects
Form and spam protection
Your contact form is the most valuable page on the site and the one bots love most. Care includes keeping spam out without adding friction that costs real leads, and checking that submissions still reach your inbox and CRM. The approach is laid out in How to Stop WordPress Form Spam (Without Losing Leads).
Lead tracking and integrations
When CallRail, Pipedrive, Zapier, or Google Ads offline conversions are in the mix, a “healthy” WordPress site is not enough. The retainer can include keeping those seams honest — the same work covered in depth on systems & integrations.
A small monthly dev-hours bucket
Every retainer includes a few development hours a month for the small things that otherwise sit in a backlog: a new landing page, a form tweak, a plugin swap, a broken layout on mobile. You get a short note each month on what changed, what is risky, and what is next.
Who it’s for
Small businesses and nonprofits whose WordPress site brings in leads, donations, or sales, but who do not have a developer on staff. If the site matters and nobody currently owns it, this is the fit. If you are planning a host move first, start with WordPress migrations.
How it starts
Every retainer begins with a short audit: PHP and WordPress versions, plugins that are abandoned or overlapping, backups, access, and whether your forms and tracking actually work. You get a plain-English list of what is risky and what to fix first. Then the monthly routine takes over.
Want to know where your site stands? I’ll review your WordPress, PHP, and hosting setup and tell you what needs doing. Get in touch.