WordPress Maintenance vs Rebuild: What a Care Plan Never Fixes

• A WordPress care plan is a subscription that keeps the plugins patched. Published UK tiers we have recorded sit at £30, £55 and £65 a month excluding VAT, and only apply while the site stays on the provider's own hosting.
• Maintenance is custodial: it does not reduce plugin and theme debt, make a heavy site fast, undo a hack, or redesign anything.
• Over 24 months a free managed rebuild on our LIVE ladder costs £690 — free build, free first month, then 23 payments of £30, hosting and support included.
• Brambla has no WordPress offering and never has. We build in Next.js and Shopify, and what we sell is the exit: your content rebuilt, and a 301 redirect from every old URL.

A WordPress care plan is a monthly fee for keeping a site patched — core, theme and plugin updates, a backup, some monitoring, and a route back when something breaks. Most providers publish three tiers, or no price at all.

In our own competitor research from August 2026, a Devon agency publishes care plans at £30, £55 and £65 a month, all excluding VAT, on a three-month minimum with a 30-day notice period. The £30 tier covers WordPress, theme and core plugin updates, monthly reports, a vulnerability checker, and hacked-site recovery by restoring a backup. The £55 tier adds premium plugin updates, ecommerce updates, broken-link monitoring, PHP version updates, and upgrades recovery from a restore to a cleanse. The £65 tier adds two-factor login hardening, daily malware scans, security headers and managed vulnerability protection. Those plans can only be added to sites hosted on that agency's own platform.

A larger Exeter agency publishes no maintenance figure at all. Its website support is sold as annual packages of development time — 30 minutes to four hours a month, with 24/7 ticket access — alongside a monthly maintenance package covering CMS and plugin updates, a security review, protection and recovery, and a functionality review. You cannot compare that to anything without asking.

Two things follow. The sticker price is rarely the whole price — hosting, domain and premium plugin licences sit on separate lines, either bundled into a platform you must stay on or not published at all. And the cheapest tier does the least: at £30 a month, "hacked-site recovery" means restoring the site to an earlier date, which puts it back along with whatever let the attacker in.

Strip the tier names away and almost every plan is the same five jobs:

• Updates — WordPress core, the theme, the plugins.
• Backups — usually daily, usually on the same host as the site.
• Monitoring — uptime, a vulnerability scanner, sometimes malware scans.
• Recovery — restore a backup, or on higher tiers clean the site properly.
• Reporting — a monthly summary of what was updated.

That is genuine work with a genuine cost. It is also, precisely, custodial: it keeps the site in the condition it is already in. None of those five jobs makes a website faster, better designed, easier to edit, or likelier to produce an enquiry.

Which is why maintenance and marketing should be two products. Our own WebsiteCare covers hosting, SSL, security monitoring, backups, updates and support minutes — nothing else; SEO Care is priced separately. If the problem is "nobody finds us", no maintenance plan will move it.

Plugin and theme debt

Every plugin is somebody else's code running inside your website. Each one can be abandoned, sold, moved behind a paywall, or updated in a way that quietly breaks the plugin next to it. A care plan applies those updates; it does not reduce how many there are. Two years in, you typically have more plugins than you started with, on an older theme, on a PHP version somebody keeps bumping. That is debt, and the monthly fee services the interest rather than paying anything off. Notice where the published tiers draw the line: premium plugin and PHP updates are a paid upgrade, not part of the base plan.

Speed

A slow WordPress site is usually slow because of what it is made of. A page builder, a theme and a stack of plugins each add their own CSS and JavaScript to every page, whether it uses them or not. Updating them does not remove them, and caching only hides some of the weight. You can tune for months and still ship a heavy page, because the problem is structural — and structure sits outside every care plan we have read.

A site that has already been hacked

If your site is compromised while on a plan, what you get depends on the tier. On the cheapest published tier, recovery means rolling back to an earlier date: a restore, not a clean-up. Higher tiers cleanse the malware out. What comes afterwards is yours either way — the spam pages Google has already indexed, the browser warnings, and the rankings that went with them.

The design, the content, and the enquiry path

Maintenance keeps a five-year-old website running as a five-year-old website. It does not restructure pages, rewrite copy that no longer matches what you sell, fix an ageing mobile layout, or add a decent enquiry path. Our own WebsiteCare FAQs draw the same boundary: new page designs, new features, rebranding, full redesigns, SEO strategy and copywriting are quoted as their own work.

In practice, yes — "website maintenance", "website care plan" and "WordPress support" name the same bundle. What differs is worth a checklist:

• Is hosting included, or must the site stay on their platform for the plan to apply?
• Is support time included, and how much — minutes a month, or hours a year?
• Does recovery mean restoring a backup, or cleaning the site?
• Are premium plugin licences and PHP upgrades in the base tier or an upgrade?
• Can the plan move with the site if you leave?

Ask the last one first. Where a plan only works while the site sits on the provider's hosting — as the published Devon tiers state — the fee buys care, and also fixes where your website lives.

Brambla figures are VAT-inclusive. Third-party figures are quoted as published and exclude VAT where the source says so, so add VAT before comparing. "Varies" means the source publishes no number, not that the cost is zero.

Two years of a mid-tier care plan costs £1,320 excluding VAT and buys maintenance on the website you already have. Two years on LIVE30 costs £690 including VAT and buys a new one-page site, the hosting, the maintenance and the support, with no plugins to patch. That gap is the argument.

The second row catches people out: a 7 Day Website plus WebsiteCare Essential comes to £2,760 over 24 months, more than every care plan here. If your WordPress site is genuinely healthy, keeping it and paying for maintenance is cheaper — and we would rather say so than sell you a rebuild.

A rebuild wins on two-year cost when at least two of these are true:

• You pay for maintenance and still pay separately for hosting, licences or fixes.
• Speed work appears on a quote every year and the site is still slow.
• It has been hacked, or your plan's recovery tier is "restore a backup".
• You cannot make a simple content change without ringing somebody.
• The design is old enough that you would not send a prospect the link.

If none is true, keep the site. If three or four are, you are paying rent on a problem.

Content travels. Pages, copy, images, blog posts and product data all come across. We rebuild the pages rather than importing a theme, so what you get is designed rather than converted.

Redirects travel. Every old URL gets a permanent 301 to its new home. This decides whether a rebuild keeps your rankings or resets them, and it is the step cheap migrations skip.

Plugins do not travel. That is the point. Forms, galleries, booking links and cookie banners get built into the site instead of bolted on, so there is nothing left to patch and no update waiting to break something next spring.

Expect to spend a couple of hours handing over content. A 7 Day Website runs to seven working days from brief to live; a Custom Website takes longer. Unsure whether your site is worth saving? Our free mini audit will tell you either way.

• Your site is fine and you just want it looked after. Keep it and pay a care plan — ours will not help, because WebsiteCare covers websites we build, not WordPress installs.
• You want to stop paying maintenance on something that never improves. A free LIVE build from £30 a month: LIVE30 at £30 for one page, LIVE50 at £50 for five or more, LIVE70 at £70 for nine or more plus a managed blog. Free build, free first month, rolling 30 days, no contract — see pay monthly website.
• You need a proper multi-page site quickly. 7 Day Website at £1,200 simple, £1,500 standard or £1,800 complex, then WebsiteCare from £65 a month.
• You have something complicated. Custom Website from £2,500 to £8,000+. Ecommerce goes on Shopify, not WordPress.
• You like the site but it has aged badly. Start with a website redesign.

One thing to be clear on: LIVE and 7 Day sites are managed. We host, maintain and run them, and if you cancel, the site comes down. That is the trade for a free build and a low monthly fee, and you should know it now rather than in eighteen months.

Because maintaining a platform we do not build on would make us the caretaker of somebody else's decisions — patching a theme we did not choose and plugins we would not have installed.

Our brochure sites are hand-coded in Next.js and our ecommerce work goes on Shopify. No themes, no plugins, so no patching, no theme conflicts, no PHP version to chase. WebsiteCare covers our own builds at £65, £125 and £245 a month, VAT included, with 30 support minutes on Growth and 90 on Premium. SEO Care is separate, at £95, £175 or £295 a month.

So if you came here looking for WordPress support in the UK, we are the wrong agency for that and the right one for the other thing. We are the exit, not the caretaker. The fuller argument is in our comparison of DIY WordPress and professional web design, or tell us what your site is doing.

How much does a WordPress care plan cost in the UK?

Published UK care plans we have recorded run at £30, £55 and £65 a month excluding VAT, on a three-month minimum with 30 days' notice. The lowest tier covers core, theme and plugin updates, monthly reporting, a vulnerability check and recovery by restoring a backup. Higher tiers add premium plugin and PHP updates, broken-link monitoring, daily malware scans and login hardening. Hosting normally has to be on the provider's own platform, and the build cost is separate. Some agencies publish no price and sell development time instead, typically 30 minutes to four hours a month.

Does a WordPress care plan stop my site being hacked?

It reduces the risk; it does not remove it. Applying updates closes known holes, which is the most useful thing a plan does. But the site still runs a theme and third-party plugins, and a plugin can be exploited before its author ships a fix. What matters most is your recovery tier: on entry tiers it usually means restoring an earlier backup, which puts the site back along with whatever let the attacker in. Higher tiers cleanse the site properly.

Is website maintenance the same as SEO?

No, and confusing the two is expensive. Maintenance is custodial: hosting, security, backups, updates, support. SEO is ongoing work to get you found — content, on-page changes, local listings, reporting. We keep them as two services at two prices: WebsiteCare from £65 a month, SEO Care from £95. A maintenance plan will not improve rankings on its own, whatever it is called.

When is rebuilding cheaper than maintaining a WordPress site?

Over two years our LIVE30 works out at £690 — a free build, a free first month, then 23 payments of £30, with hosting, security, backups, updates and support included. Two years of a mid-tier care plan costs £1,320 excluding VAT and covers maintenance only, with hosting, licences and the build paid separately. A rebuild is cheaper when you pay for maintenance and still pay for fixes, when speed work appears on a quote every year, or when the site has been hacked.

Can you take over maintenance of my existing WordPress site?

No. We do not offer WordPress maintenance, hosting or support, and we never have — it is not a platform we build on. What we can do is move you off it: your pages and content rebuilt in Next.js, and a permanent 301 redirect from every old URL so search engines follow you across. Ecommerce goes on Shopify. Ask us for a free mini audit if you want an honest read first.

What happens to my Google rankings if I move off WordPress?

The risk in any rebuild is broken URLs, not the platform. Handled properly, every old address gets a permanent 301 redirect to the matching new page, titles and headings are carried across or improved, and the new site loads faster than the one it replaced. Rankings typically settle within a few weeks. Migrations do real damage in two ways: dropping pages without redirecting them, and rebuilding with thinner content than before. Both are avoidable.

• DIY WordPress vs professional web design — the fuller cost-of-ownership comparison.
• WebsiteCare plans — our own maintenance, at £65, £125 and £245 a month.
• Free website build from £30 a month — how the free LIVE build works.
• Pay monthly website plans — the LIVE30, LIVE50 and LIVE70 ladder.
• Website redesign — when a rebuild suits a site you like.
• Website hosting and maintenance guide — platform-independent.
• CMS comparison guide — how the main systems compare.