What's included in WordPress maintenance services?

A standard WordPress maintenance retainer includes weekly core and plugin updates applied on staging, daily off-site backups, 24/7 uptime monitoring, security patching within hours of a disclosed CVE, monthly performance and Core Web Vitals audits, and emergency response for downtime or hacks. Higher tiers add named on-call engineers, tighter SLAs, penetration testing, and included development hours.

How much do WordPress maintenance services cost?

US market rates in 2026 run $199 to $1,500+ per month. Entry retainers ($199–$300) cover updates, backups, and monitoring for low-traffic marketing sites. Mid-tier ($400–$800) adds Core Web Vitals work, priority SLAs, and a few included dev hours. Enterprise tiers ($1,000+) provide 24/7 on-call, 1-hour SLAs, and dedicated engineering capacity. DoodleWeb starts at $199 per month.

Do you handle Drupal support and maintenance too?

Yes. We run the same three-tier structure for Drupal sites — Essentials, Business, Priority — covering core and contrib module updates on staging, Composer dependency management, SA-CORE and SA-CONTRIB security patching, and emergency response. DoodleWeb is a Drupal Association Certified partner. Teams on Drupal 7 can also engage us for end-of-life migration planning.

How fast are security patches applied?

On the Essentials tier, security patches ship within 48 hours of the CVE. Business is 12 hours. Priority is within 4 hours of disclosure, including nights and weekends. Every patch is tested on a staging clone before production promotion — auto-updates in production are the leading cause of unplanned WordPress downtime.

Do you offer emergency WordPress support if my site is hacked or down?

Yes. On Business and Priority tiers, emergency response is included in the retainer with 4-hour and 1-hour SLAs respectively. Non-retainer emergency work is available at $250/hour with a 4-hour minimum. Bring us the site backup and hosting credentials and we'll triage inside the first hour.

Do you back up the site off-site?

Yes. Full site plus database is backed up daily to encrypted off-site storage — never on the same server as the live site, since a compromised server takes local backups with it. Retention is 30 days on Essentials, 90 days on Business and Priority. Restore procedures are tested quarterly on our end, not just when disaster hits.

Can we transfer our existing WordPress site to your maintenance plan?

Yes. Onboarding takes 5 to 10 business days: infrastructure audit, plugin surface review, backup verification, staging environment provisioning, monitoring setup, and a documented runbook. There is no onboarding fee for sites already on WP Engine, Kinsta, or Pantheon. Custom-hosted sites include a $500 audit fee credited against the first month.

DoodleWeb is a Seattle-headquartered digital agency (founded 2019) that designs, builds, and grows websites and digital platforms on Drupal, WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, BigCommerce, and React for higher education, government, aerospace, healthcare, nonprofit, and growing brands across the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU.

Where is DoodleWeb based?

DoodleWeb is headquartered in Seattle, WA at Columbia Tower, 701 5th Ave, 42nd Floor, with a Canadian office in Surrey, BC.

What services does DoodleWeb offer?

Custom web design and development, CMS builds and migrations (Drupal, WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, BigCommerce), eCommerce, headless commerce, React/Next.js engineering, React Native mobile apps, rebranding, accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA, AODA, Section 508), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and SLA-backed managed hosting and maintenance.

How much does a DoodleWeb website cost?

Marketing sites start around $12K, CMS rebuilds run $25K–$80K, and enterprise Drupal, headless commerce, and government platforms start at $80K and scale to $250K+. Every quote is fixed-fee with no hidden retainers and is returned within 48 hours of the discovery call.

How long does a website project take?

Marketing sites launch in 6–10 weeks, mid-market CMS platforms in 10–16 weeks, and enterprise Drupal, government, or commerce rebuilds in 4–6 months. Exact timeline, milestone dates, and acceptance criteria are written into the SOW before kickoff.

Can DoodleWeb get my brand cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude?

Yes. Our AEO/GEO program restructures content into Q&A patterns, ships FAQ / Organization / Article / BreadcrumbList JSON-LD schema, publishes /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, and runs weekly citation tests across all four major answer engines so engines extract and cite your brand. Initial citations typically appear within 30–60 days.

How do I contact DoodleWeb?

Email info@doodleweb.io, call +1-425-359-0168, or book a free 30-minute consultation at https://book.doodleweb.io. You will speak directly with a senior strategist, not a sales rep.

WORDPRESS MAINTENANCE

WordPress maintenance & support services

Senior-managed retainers for WordPress and Drupal — updates, backups, security, performance, and emergency response. From $199/month.

Start a maintenance plan Schedule a 30-min call

Definition

WordPress maintenance services are ongoing retainers that keep a WordPress site secure, current, fast, and online. A standard scope covers weekly core and plugin updates on a staging environment, daily off-site backups, 24/7 uptime and malware monitoring, monthly performance and Core Web Vitals audits, security patching within hours of a CVE, and emergency response for downtime or hacks. Retainers run $199–$1,500+ per month depending on traffic, plugin surface area, and response-time guarantees.

What's included in WordPress maintenance?

Security patching

WordPress core, plugins, and themes patched within hours of a disclosed vulnerability. Web-application firewall rules updated. Suspicious file changes flagged.

Core & plugin updates

Updates applied on a staging clone first, regression-tested against critical paths, then promoted. No auto-updates in production — that's how sites break at 2am.

Daily off-site backups

Full site + database backed up daily to encrypted off-site storage, retained 30–90 days. Restores tested quarterly, not just when disaster hits.

24/7 uptime monitoring

1-minute uptime checks from multiple regions. SSL expiry alerts. DNS drift alerts. Slack or email escalation with a named on-call engineer.

Performance & Core Web Vitals

Monthly Lighthouse audit, cache tuning, image and CDN optimization. LCP / INP / CLS tracked against Google's thresholds — not vanity Lighthouse scores.

Emergency response

Site down, hacked, or white-screened? Named senior engineer on the line within the SLA window — 4 hours on standard, 1 hour on priority tiers.

How much does WordPress maintenance cost?

Three tiers, priced by response-time guarantees and included engineering capacity. All tiers include the same core scope — updates, backups, monitoring, security. The differences are speed and depth.

Essentials

$199 / mo

Marketing sites, low-traffic WordPress installs

Weekly core + plugin updates
Daily off-site backups (30-day retention)
Uptime monitoring (5-min interval)
Security patching within 48 hours of CVE
Monthly health report
Email support, 1 business-day response

Business

$549 / mo

Lead-gen sites, ecommerce under 500 SKUs, WooCommerce

Everything in Essentials
Daily backups (90-day retention)
1-minute uptime monitoring, multi-region
Security patching within 12 hours of CVE
Monthly Core Web Vitals audit + fixes
Priority support, 4-hour SLA business hours
2 hours of dev work included / month

Priority

$1,499+ / mo

Enterprise, high-traffic, PII/PHI, government

Everything in Business
24/7 named on-call engineer
1-hour emergency SLA, all hours
Staging + production parity
Quarterly penetration test
WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility monitoring
8 hours of dev work included / month

Drupal support & maintenance

DoodleWeb is a Drupal Association Certified partner and has run production Drupal sites for higher education, government, and healthcare since 2019. Our Drupal maintenance retainers mirror the WordPress tiers above, adapted for Drupal's operational patterns:

Drupal core + contributed module updates on a staged environment.
Composer dependency management and lockfile discipline.
Security advisories (SA-CORE, SA-CONTRIB) patched within the same SLA windows.
Views, entity, and taxonomy audits when the editorial team's needs shift.
Drupal 7 end-of-life migration guidance for teams still on legacy versions.
Same three-tier pricing structure as WordPress ($199 / $549 / $1,499+).

Drupal services All maintenance plans WordPress development

Why senior-managed maintenance matters

Most maintenance retainers are handed to junior operators running canned update scripts. That works until a plugin update conflicts with a custom theme, a security patch changes an API signature, or a WooCommerce release breaks checkout on Friday afternoon. At that point you need someone who can read the stack trace, roll back cleanly, and ship a fix — not a ticket that escalates back to you.

Every DoodleWeb maintenance plan is run by senior engineers with 8+ years of WordPress or Drupal delivery experience. No juniors, no offshoring, no ticket queues that route to whoever is awake.

What to look for in a maintenance provider

A short checklist — use it on us, use it on anyone else you evaluate.

1
Does the retainer specify a named senior engineer, or route to a shared ticket queue?
2
Are updates applied on staging with regression testing, or auto-pushed to production?
3
Where are backups stored, how long are they retained, and when were restores last tested?
4
Is the SLA measured in hours-to-response, hours-to-resolution, or vague "best effort"?
5
Does the plan include included dev hours, or is every change billed at overage rates?
6
Do they monitor Core Web Vitals against real-user data (RUM), or only synthetic Lighthouse?
7
Do they handle security incidents (hacks, malware) inside the retainer, or bill hourly when it matters most?