WordPress Maintenance

Most WordPress sites break quietly, then all at once

We keep WordPress sites patched, backed up, monitored, and fast, with real developer hours attached instead of a plugin that emails you when something already went wrong. Every plan includes a restore test, because a backup nobody has restored is a guess.

Replies within one business day. Cancel any month, no exit fee, and you keep every backup.

“Our site went down and nobody noticed for a day.”

Uptime checks run every minute and a human is paged, not just a dashboard. See what’s monitored

“We’re scared to run updates.”

Updates get applied on a staging clone and visually diffed before they touch production. See how updates run

“We have backups but have never tested one.”

Every plan includes a quarterly restore drill to a scratch environment. See the plans

“We just need someone for small fixes.”

The Standard plan carries two developer hours a month for exactly that. Compare plans

Track record

18
Years building for the web
850+
Clients served
90+
Notable brands
2,000+
Projects delivered
104%
Year-over-year growth

These figures cover every Gatilab service, not this one alone. We’d rather say that plainly than imply a per-service record we haven’t published.

Brands we’ve delivered work for

  • IBM
  • Adobe
  • HubSpot
  • Canva
  • Monday.com
  • IATA
  • FreshBooks
  • Acer
  • Asus
Three care plans

Pick by how much developer time you actually need

Every plan covers the same monitoring and backup baseline. What changes is response time and how many developer hours come with it. Hours don’t roll over, and we’ll tell you when you’re on the wrong plan.

Baseline

You want the site kept safe and current

For brochure sites, blogs, and small business sites that need someone watching but rarely change.

$149 per month

One site · 48-hour response

  • Core, theme, and plugin updates on a staging clone
  • Daily offsite backups with a quarterly restore drill
  • Uptime monitoring every 60 seconds with human escalation
  • Malware scanning and firewall rule upkeep
  • Monthly one-page health report
Start Baseline

If an update breaks the site, we roll it back and fix it at no extra cost.

Priority

Downtime costs you money by the hour

For ecommerce, membership, and lead-generation sites where an hour offline is measurable revenue.

$749 per month

One site · same-day response · 8 dev hours

  • Everything in Standard
  • Eight developer hours a month
  • Same-business-day response, with an emergency path
  • Quarterly performance and security audit with a written plan
  • Database and query optimisation as needed
Talk about Priority

We cap Priority accounts per engineer, so we’ll say if we’re full rather than stretch.

How it runs

What the plan actually does each month

Maintenance is easy to sell and hard to verify, so every item here produces something you can see in your inbox or your staging site.

  1. 01

    Onboarding audit

    Week 1

    We inventory plugins, PHP and WordPress versions, existing backups, and whatever is already installed and abandoned. Most sites we take over are running at least one plugin nobody can explain.

    You leave with: A written inventory and a list of what we recommend removing.

  2. 02

    Baseline hardening

    Week 1 to 2

    Backups get configured offsite and restore-tested, file permissions and admin accounts get reviewed, and monitoring goes live before we touch anything cosmetic.

    You leave with: A tested restore and monitoring you can log into.

  3. 03

    Monthly update cycle

    Ongoing

    Updates land on a staging clone first, get visually diffed and smoke-tested against your forms and checkout, then go to production. Anything that breaks stays on staging.

    You leave with: A change log naming every version that moved, and why.

  4. 04

    Report and review

    Monthly

    One page: uptime, backup and restore status, updates applied, blocked threats, Core Web Vitals, and hours used. No 40-page PDF nobody reads.

    You leave with: A one-page report and a standing invitation to ask about any line.

Honest fit

Worth booking, or worth looking elsewhere

Maintenance retainers are the easiest place in this industry to quietly charge for nothing. Two of these are reasons we turn work down.

Worth booking

  • Your site earns money, generates leads, or represents a real business.
  • You want someone accountable when something breaks at 2am.
  • You can give us admin and hosting access, or get it for us.
  • You’d rather pay monthly than pay for an emergency rebuild.
  • You want to keep owning your hosting, domain, and backups.

Look elsewhere

  • You want hosting included. We deliberately don’t resell hosting, so you’re never locked to us to keep your site online.
  • Your site is a hobby project with no revenue. A $149 monthly plan is hard to justify. Use managed hosting with automatic backups instead.
  • You need a full redesign or rebuild first. Maintenance on a broken site is money into a hole, and we’ll say so in the onboarding audit.
  • You want unlimited development hours. Nobody delivers that honestly. Our hours are named and capped for a reason.
  • You need 24/7 phone support. Same-business-day is the fastest we promise, and we keep that promise.
Before you ask

The questions that decide it

Something not covered? Ask directly and you’ll get a straight answer, not a calendar link.

Is hosting included?

No, deliberately. We don’t resell hosting, because bundling it means leaving us also means moving your site. You keep the hosting account in your name and we work inside it. If your host is the actual problem, we’ll tell you and help you move, but the account stays yours.

What happens if an update breaks something?

It usually doesn’t reach you, because updates go to a staging clone and get smoke-tested against your forms and checkout first. If something slips through to production anyway, we roll back from that day’s backup and fix the underlying conflict at no extra charge. That’s on us, not billable.

Do unused developer hours roll over?

No. Rolling hours sound generous and quietly turn into a balance nobody uses and both sides argue about later. If you’re consistently not using your hours, we’ll move you down a plan. If you’re always over, we’ll tell you before the invoice, not after.

How is this different from a caching or backup plugin?

A plugin tells you something happened. It doesn’t decide what to do, test a restore, read a PHP error log, or diff a layout after an update. The plugins we install are part of the work, not the work itself. The difference you’re paying for is a person who reads the alert.

Can you take over a site somebody else built?

Yes, and most of what we maintain was built elsewhere. The onboarding audit exists precisely for this. Expect it to surface abandoned plugins, an outdated PHP version, or a backup that has never been restored. We fix what we find before starting the normal cycle.

What if we want to leave?

Cancel any month with no exit fee. We hand over backups, credentials, documentation, and the staging environment. Nothing about the setup is proprietary to us, which is intentional.

Next step

Tell us what worries you about your site

Send the URL and whatever keeps you up at night, whether that’s an ancient plugin, a backup nobody has tested, or a form you’re not sure still works. We’ll tell you which plan fits, or that you don’t need one yet.

Replies within one business day. Onboarding audits start within a week.