Website maintenance services: what care plans cover
Short version. A website maintenance service, sometimes sold as a care plan, is a monthly retainer covering six things: security patching, platform and dependency updates, backups with a tested restore, uptime and error monitoring, small content changes, and performance regression checks. Published Canadian plans run from $79 a month at the entry end to $2,400 a month at the top, and the price tracks included support hours far more than it tracks the list of features. Sites built the way we build them, hand-coded builds with no plugin surface, need a smaller plan than a WordPress site does.
Below: the six work types and the one almost nobody actually performs, a table of real published Canadian prices with sources, what a plan deliberately does not cover, what degrades on an unmaintained site, why hand-coded and WordPress plans differ, when doing it yourself is the right call, and five checks to run on any quote.
What a website maintenance service actually covers
Six work types. Every provider on this market lists the first five. The sixth is the one that separates a plan from a subscription.
Security patching. Core, theme, plugin, and dependency vulnerabilities as they are disclosed. On WordPress this is most of the job. On a hand-coded site it is mostly the server and the certificate.
Platform and dependency updates. Version bumps, applied on a schedule, with the site checked afterwards. Applied blind at 2am, updates are how sites break.
Backups. Daily or weekly, offsite, with a retention window you can name.
Uptime and error monitoring. A check every few minutes, plus somebody who is actually paged when it fails. Monitoring without an on-call human is a log file.
Content changes. A pool of hours for copy edits, new images, price updates, a seasonal banner. This is the line item clients actually use.
A tested restore. Here is the one. Restoring the most recent backup into a staging environment, on a schedule, and confirming the site comes back. Of the three Canadian maintenance pages we read line by line for this piece, all three publish backups and none publishes a tested restore. A backup nobody has restored is a claim, not a safety net. Ask when the last restore test ran and what it produced.
What a care plan costs, tier by tier
Meridian15 does not publish a care-plan price ladder, so this table is not ours. It is what three Canadian providers publish on their own pages, read and verified on 2026-07-24. Prices are CAD per month as displayed by each provider.
| Plan | CAD / month | Included support hours | Response commitment | Published exclusions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eggs Media, Care | $79 | None, discounted hourly rate for extra support | Not published | 30-day rolling contract, 30 days notice to cancel |
| Virtual Assistant Canada, entry plan | From $99 | Not published | Not published | None published |
| Eggs Media, Grow | $199 | 3 hours | Same-day response | Extra support does not roll over |
| Instalogic, Economy | $250 | Not published | Not published | None published |
| Eggs Media, Thrive | $299 | 5 hours | Same-day response | Extra support does not roll over |
| Eggs Media, Scale | $499 | 10 hours | Same-day response | Extra support does not roll over |
| Instalogic, Business | $500 | Not published | Not published | None published |
| Instalogic, Elite | $1,250 | Not published | Not published | None published |
| Instalogic, Enterprise | $2,400 | Not published | Not published | None published |
Sources, all fetched 2026-07-24: eggsmedia.com website maintenance page, instalogic.ca Calgary website maintenance page, virtualassistantcanada.ca website maintenance services page. Read the live pages before quoting these numbers back at anyone, because published prices move.
Two things fall out of that table. The price ladder is a support-hours ladder: $199 buys 3 hours, $299 buys 5, $499 buys 10, and the feature list barely changes between them. And of the nine published plans, one publishes what it excludes. That gap is the argument you will have in month four, and it is avoidable by asking one question before you sign.
What is not in a care plan, said plainly
A maintenance plan keeps a site working. It does not make the site do more. Five things are outside every plan we have read, and each has an owner elsewhere.
New pages and new features. Content hours cover editing what exists. A new service section, a new template, or a booking integration is project work.
A redesign. If the structure is the problem, hours will not fix it. That is a full redesign instead, priced as a project.
SEO and AEO. Keeping plugins current is not search work. Content production, schema strategy, authority, and answer-engine visibility sit in our SEO and AEO retainer, and local ranking work has its own playbook in how a Calgary site ranks locally.
Ad management. Different discipline, different retainer, different reporting.
Hosting. Sometimes bundled, often not. Confirm which, in writing, because it is the most common invisible add-on.
What actually breaks on an unmaintained site
Not a scare story. These are the failure states our own audits keep surfacing across Calgary, with what it takes to undo each one.
| Stage | What degrades | What fixing it later takes |
|---|---|---|
| Month 6 | Third-party scripts accumulate. Chat widgets, heatmaps, pixels, and a page builder each add weight nobody removes. The median Calgary small business homepage now ships 33 script tags and a 736ms time to first byte, and 71% land in the Slow or Painful tiers. | An audit and a removal pass. Cheap if done at month 6, structural once the theme depends on them. |
| Month 12 | Structured data drifts out of sync with the page. Hours change, the address changes, a plugin update rewrites the markup. Across 403 Calgary homepages, 72% ship structured data but only 61% declared a business type and 91% skip FAQPage with a populated mainEntity. | Rewriting the JSON-LD to match the visible page. A day of work, and worse than useless if it is left describing content the page no longer has. |
| Month 24 | The contact path rots. A form endpoint dies quietly, a phone number stops being a tap target, a booking widget is deprecated by its vendor. 41% of Calgary businesses cannot be phoned in one tap and only 3.4% ship a booking widget at all. | Re-plumbing forms, tel: links, and booking. Small work, except that every enquiry lost in the meantime is gone. |
The full datasets sit behind those numbers: 71% of Calgary small business sites are slow, 72% ship structured data and only 61% declared a business type, and 41% of Calgary businesses cannot be phoned in one tap. None of those samples separates maintained sites from unmaintained ones, so read them as the shape of what goes wrong, not as a decay curve.
Hand-coded sites versus WordPress, and why the plans differ
A WordPress site carries a plugin surface. Every plugin is a dependency, a vulnerability path, and an update that can break a template. That surface is most of what a WordPress care plan is buying, and it is why WordPress plans are priced where they are.
A hand-coded static site has no plugin surface. There is no admin login to brute force, no database to inject, and no monthly compatibility roulette. What is left is the certificate, the host, the forms, the third-party scripts, and content changes. That is a smaller plan and it should cost less.
Saying this loses us margin on our own builds, which is the only reason to believe it. The platform comparison, including the running costs that never appear in the sales page, is in what each website builder costs you.
Doing it yourself, and when that is the right answer
If you have one site, a technical person on staff, and updates are the only real risk, a care plan is optional. Set up automated offsite backups, restore one into a staging copy this month so you know the restore works, put uptime monitoring on a schedule that pages a human, patch on a fixed day every month rather than when something breaks, and check page weight quarterly.
You can also run the structural half of the diagnosis for free. Our free AEO audit is 13 checks worth 66 points and it will tell you whether the schema, metadata, headings, and sitemap on a page are still intact. It is the same rubric we run on client sites and on our own.
The ceiling on doing it yourself is not skill, it is attention. Maintenance is the work that is never urgent until it is the only thing that matters.
How to read a maintenance quote
- Response time or resolution time? "Same-day response" is a promise to reply, not a promise to fix. Ask what happens when the site is down at 7pm on a Saturday.
- Do hours roll over? Eggs Media publishes that extra support does not roll over. Most providers publish nothing either way, which means the answer is no.
- Who owns the backups? If they live only in the agency's account, you have a dependency, not a backup.
- What happens when you leave? Notice period, final backup, DNS and registrar access, and who holds the admin credentials. Get it in writing at the start, when everybody is still friendly.
- Is there a tested restore? Ask when the last one ran. The answer tells you whether the plan is operated or merely subscribed to.
Calgary is worth naming here, because Google already has: the directory result on this search is titled around Calgary maintenance companies and a Calgary-specific page ranks on the national term. If you are here, that is your market whether or not you asked for it.
Frequently asked questions
What do website maintenance services include?
Six work types: security patching, platform and dependency updates, offsite backups, uptime and error monitoring, a pool of hours for content changes, and performance regression checks. A seventh, restoring a backup into staging on a schedule to prove it works, is the one almost no provider publishes. Ask for it by name.
How much do website maintenance services cost per month?
Published Canadian plans run from $79 a month to $2,400 a month. Verified on 2026-07-24, Eggs Media publishes $79, $199 with 3 support hours, $299 with 5 hours and $499 with 10 hours, Instalogic publishes $250, $500, $1,250 and $2,400, and Virtual Assistant Canada publishes plans from $99. The price ladder tracks included support hours, not the feature list. Meridian15 does not publish a care-plan ladder and quotes upkeep against the build it covers.
Do I need a maintenance plan for a hand-coded website?
You need a smaller one. A hand-coded static site has no plugin surface, no admin login to attack, and no monthly compatibility risk, so the work reduces to the certificate, the host, the forms, third-party scripts, and content changes. A WordPress site carries the plugin surface, and that surface is most of what a WordPress care plan is buying.
What happens if I do not maintain my website?
Three failure states show up in our Calgary audits. Third-party scripts accumulate until the site is slow, and 71% of the 152 Calgary small business homepages we tested landed in the Slow or Painful tiers. Structured data drifts out of sync with the page. And the contact path rots quietly, which matters because 41% of Calgary businesses already cannot be phoned in one tap. None of those announce themselves.
Can I cancel a website maintenance plan?
It depends on the contract and you should read that clause before the feature list. Eggs Media publishes a 30-day rolling contract with 30 days notice to cancel. The other providers we checked publish no cancellation terms at all. Ask about the notice period, the final backup, and who holds registrar, DNS, and admin access on the way out.
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