What is a WordPress maintenance contract? Scope, pricing and examples
A maintenance contract is not a promise to be available. It is a written list of what you do, how fast you respond, and what falls outside the fee.
Robin
Ask ten agencies what their maintenance contract covers and you will get ten different answers, most of them verbal. That is where the trouble starts: the client assumes everything is included, and you discover at 22:00 on a Friday that they were right by default.
A maintenance contract is a written agreement covering the recurring technical care of a website: updates, backups, monitoring, security and reporting, for a fixed fee per month or per year. Everything that changes the site itself is project work.
Scope in. The clearest contracts list this explicitly: core, plugin and theme updates with a rollback path; automated backups with a tested restore; uptime monitoring with a defined check interval; malware and integrity scanning; a monthly report; and a fixed amount of small content or support time, for example thirty minutes per month.
Scope out. Equally explicit: redesigns, new pages and templates, new functionality, custom development, SEO work, content production, premium plugin licences, hosting upgrades, and recovery after a client-caused incident such as a deleted database or an installed nulled plugin.
Response times make the contract real. Distinguish between a site being offline, a security incident, and a normal request. Something like: outage responded to within one hour during office hours, security incident within four hours, normal request within two working days. Only promise what you can actually staff.
Three tiers that work in practice. Basic: monthly updates, daily backups, uptime monitoring, quarterly report, response within two working days. Standard: weekly updates, malware scanning, monthly report, thirty minutes of support, response within one working day. Premium: continuous monitoring, priority response, staging tests before updates, performance reviews and a named contact.
Price the tiers on risk and response, not on hours. A webshop with daily orders and a fifteen-minute outage tolerance is a different product from a brochure site, even if the technical tasks are identical.
Include a term and a notice period, monthly or annual, with a modest discount for paying yearly. Include a clause that lets you decline updates that you consider unsafe, and one that covers what happens if the client makes changes outside your process.
The clause most agencies forget is the exit. Say what the client gets when the contract ends: a final backup, access credentials, and a handover document. Being generous here is cheap and it is the reason clients come back.
Finally, make the value visible every single month. A report showing uptime, updates applied, vulnerabilities closed and backups verified turns an abstract fee into something the client can see they paid for.