The awkward first conversation
"Can you take over maintaining our website?" is a question we hear often, and the answer is "yes, after we have looked at it". That second half sometimes lands badly. The client wants a monthly price, and instead gets a proposal for a paid review. Here is why, what the review involves, and why it is in the client's interest as much as ours.
Why we will not quote blind
A care plan is a fixed monthly fee for keeping a site updated, backed up, secure, fast and working. The fee assumes the site is in a state where that is a routine job. A site that is not in that state, running an abandoned theme, on a host with no staging, with a plugin conflict lurking in the next update, with a domain nobody can log in to, makes the routine job an emergency job, repeatedly.
If we quote a care plan without looking, one of two things happens. We price for a healthy site and spend the first three months firefighting at a loss, which ends with a resentful "this is more than we agreed". Or we price for an unhealthy site and overcharge a client whose site was fine. Neither is fair. The review is what lets the monthly number be right.
What the review checks
It is the same diagnosis we run for rescue work, focused on maintainability:
Ownership and access. Who holds the domain, hosting, admin. Whether we can get in. Whether the client can.
Hosting. Which host, which plan, whether it has staging, backups, a supported PHP version, and reasonable support. A site on hosting that cannot do staging changes how updates have to be done.
Platform state. WordPress version, PHP version, how far behind. The theme: what it is, whether it is maintained, whether it is a child theme, whether customisations are in files that an update will overwrite.
Plugins. Every one: what it does, when it was last updated by its author, whether it is still needed, whether it has known vulnerabilities, whether its licence is active and in whose name.
Security. Signs of past compromise, admin user list, two-factor status, firewall presence, file permissions.
Backups. Whether any exist, where, how old, and whether one has ever been restored.
Performance baseline. Real-user data from Search Console if available, a lab test on key pages, page weights. So we know what "keeping it fast" means for this site.
Search health. Indexing status, obvious errors, whether the site is at least where it should be.
Anything scheduled or integrated. Booking systems, payment gateways, forms, email, and whether each currently works.
Half a day for a typical business site. The output is a short written report: the state of the site, the things that must be fixed before routine maintenance is possible, the things that should be fixed soon, and the monthly plan tier that fits.
What it can rule out
Sometimes the review finds a site that should not go onto a care plan at all. A theme so abandoned that every update will break it. A page builder site so heavy that "keeping it fast" is impossible without a rebuild. A hosting situation that cannot be maintained safely. In those cases the honest recommendation is a fixed rescue project first, or a rebuild, and the review has saved the client a year of monthly fees on a site that was never going to be stable.
That outcome is a good use of the fee, though it rarely feels like it in the moment.
What it costs and what happens to the fee
The review is priced as a fixed diagnosis, the same as for rescue work. If the client goes ahead with a care plan, the fee is credited against the first months, so a client who signs up has effectively paid nothing for the review. If they do not, they have a written assessment of their site that any developer can act on. Either way, they know what they own.
The onboarding after a clean review
For a site that passes, or that needs a few fixes first, onboarding looks like:
- Fix the must-fix items as a small project, priced from the report.
- Move accounts into the client's name where they are not.
- Set up staging if the host allows, or move hosts if it does not and the client agrees.
- Take and test a full backup.
- Install monitoring, scanning and the firewall.
- Do the first full update round on staging, then live.
- Write the one-page handover document that did not exist.
- Begin the monthly cycle.
A month, roughly, from review to routine.
Why clients thank us later
The review conversation is awkward. The alternative, a care plan that discovers the site's problems one emergency at a time, is worse. Every client who has been through the review knows exactly what their site is, what it needs and what it costs to keep, and that is the basis on which a care plan is worth paying for. A monthly fee quoted without looking is a guess with your website attached to it.