Most maintenance pages tell you a site will be "kept secure and up to date" and leave it there. Here is the actual cadence a Central Florida business gets on a HiXFi care plan, so you can compare it against whoever you are paying today.
| Cadence | What we do | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Every day | Uptime monitoring and an SSL certificate check. If the site stops answering, the alert reaches us, not you. | Most small business owners find out their site is down from a customer. That is usually hours of lost calls. |
| Every week | Malware and vulnerability scan against the installed plugin and theme versions. On the Premium plan, WordPress core, plugin and theme updates are applied weekly instead of monthly. | The large majority of hacked WordPress sites were running a plugin with a patch already available. Speed of patching is the whole defence. |
| Every month | Full backup taken and restore-tested, core and plugin updates applied on a staging copy first, Core Web Vitals re-measured, broken links and 404s swept. | A backup nobody has ever restored is not a backup. We verify ours. |
| Every month | A written report: what changed, what it did to speed and search visibility, and what we recommend next. | You should never have to ask what you are paying for. |
| Every quarter | A deeper pass: PHP version, hosting resource headroom, plugin bloat and anything that has quietly been abandoned by its developer. | Abandoned plugins are the slow leak that turns into an emergency eighteen months later. |
Updates are staged and checked before they reach your live site. If an update breaks a layout or a form, we roll it back and solve it properly rather than leaving you to discover it.
This is the question worth asking any maintenance provider, because it is the only one that gets answered honestly by what they do rather than what they wrote.
The site is checked continuously. A failed check pages us directly. You do not need to notice, and you do not need to be the one to report it.
Those three failures look identical to a business owner and need completely different fixes. Because we also handle networks and managed IT, we are not stuck emailing a host and waiting.
Monthly restore-tested backups mean a rollback is a known-good operation, not an experiment at eleven at night.
In writing, in the monthly report, in plain language. Managed plans carry a 24 hour response commitment and Premium carries 12 to 24 hours, so you are never guessing whether anyone is looking at it.
Plenty of small businesses genuinely can maintain their own WordPress site. The question is not whether it is possible, it is what the hours and the risk are worth to you.
| Doing it yourself | HiXFi care plan | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $0 in invoices, roughly 3 to 6 hours of your time | From $350 per month, none of your time |
| Updates | Applied straight to the live site, and you find out if one breaks | Staged, checked, rolled back if needed |
| Backups | Usually a plugin nobody has tested a restore from | Restore-tested monthly |
| If it goes down | You notice, then you start calling people | We notice, and we are already on it |
| If it gets hacked | $500 to $2,500 emergency cleanup is typical, plus the downtime | Covered by the plan, and far less likely in the first place |
| Search visibility | Drifts down quietly | Measured monthly and worked on |
One emergency malware cleanup usually costs more than several months of coverage, and that is before the lost enquiries while the site is showing a browser warning. That is the whole argument for a plan, and it is the only argument we make.
We are based in Central Florida and most of our maintenance clients are within an hour of Orlando. Being local matters less for the updates and more for everything around them: we can stand in your shop, look at the till, and understand what the website is actually for.
Retail, trades, auto shops and food businesses across Orange and Seminole County. Website care plans, managed IT and networks from one team, which means one phone number when something breaks.
Lake Mary, Sanford, Longwood and Winter Springs. Close enough that an on-site visit is a short drive rather than a scheduling exercise.
Clearwater, St. Petersburg and Tampa. Website maintenance, hosting oversight and search work are all handled remotely, which is exactly how maintenance should work anyway.
Our plans run $350 per month for Essential, $650 for Managed and $1,250 for Premium. Across the Florida market you will see anything from $50 per month for an automated plugin updater with no human attached, up to $2,000 plus for agency retainers that bundle in significant content and campaign work. The useful question is not the number, it is what happens when something breaks and who picks up.
Every plan includes core, plugin and theme updates, security scanning, backups, uptime monitoring, speed work and support. Managed adds monthly reporting, two SEO blog posts and up to five content updates per month with a 24 hour response commitment. Premium adds weekly updates, four blog posts, up to ten content updates, advanced malware protection and a 12 to 24 hour response commitment.
If your site is brochure-only, never changes and generates no enquiries, probably not. If customers find you through it, then yes, because the failure modes are expensive and silent. WordPress sites are compromised overwhelmingly through known vulnerabilities in outdated plugins, and a site that has drifted for a year is slower, less visible in search and one bad update away from a bad week.
We clean it up, restore from a verified backup if that is the fastest safe route, work out how the attacker got in and close it. There is no separate emergency invoice for that on a care plan. That is the point of the plan.
Yes, and most of the sites we maintain were built by someone else. We start with a full health check and fix the urgent issues up front, before the plan settles into its normal rhythm. If we find something during that audit that makes the site genuinely unsafe to maintain as it stands, we will tell you plainly rather than take the monthly fee and hope.
No long-term lock-in. Plans run month to month. If we are not worth the fee you should be able to stop, and knowing that keeps us honest.
We maintain WordPress, Shopify and custom platforms we have built. If you are on a website builder with a closed platform such as Wix or Squarespace, there is genuinely less to maintain, and we will tell you if a plan would not earn its keep.
Run the free audit first. It takes about a minute, and it will tell you whether you need a plan or just a couple of fixes.