Website Care Plans
What happens when nobody is minding your website
A website is not finished when it launches. If you are on WordPress, which is what most Standing Pine Media sites run on (an Astra child theme with custom PHP templates, hosted on Kinsta), the core software, your theme, and every plugin you are using keep getting patched by their own maintainers whether you keep up or not. Fall far enough behind and you land on a combination that stops working together: a form plugin conflicts with a core update and your contact form just stops submitting, silently. A customer tries to reach you, gets nothing back, and calls a competitor instead. You find out weeks later, if you find out at all.
Security ages the same way. An unpatched plugin is an open door, and it rarely takes a targeted attack, just a bot working down a list of known vulnerabilities. Without a backup outside the site itself, a hack or a bad update can mean rebuilding from nothing instead of restoring last week’s version in minutes. Add a lapsed hosting renewal or a checkout step that silently errors out, and “the site is fine” is actually costing you business every week nobody is watching it.
What a care plan actually covers
A care plan is the work that starts after your site goes live. It covers hosting, so you are not managing a server account or a renewal date yourself. It covers core and plugin updates, applied and checked rather than left to stack up until something conflicts. It covers security monitoring and regular backups, so a bad update or a hack has a clean point to restore from instead of a rebuild from zero. It covers uptime monitoring, so if the site goes down, we find out before your customers do. And it covers the small requests that eat a business owner’s week: swap a photo, update a price, fix a typo, add a new hire to the About page, sent straight to someone who already knows your site.
WordPress care is not the same job as Astro care
Most of what we build runs on WordPress, and that setup carries real ongoing risk: plugins to patch, a database to secure, a login page that is a permanent target. A care plan on those sites earns its cost every month.
Some sites we build are static, on Astro, with no CMS and no database at all. That changes the risk profile enough that we will not sell you the same scope, or bill you for maintenance your site does not need. There is no plugin to go out of date and nothing at the database level to attack, so most of what drives a WordPress care plan is not there. What a static site still needs is content upkeep, since even a small text change goes out as a code update and a rebuild, plus someone watching uptime and keeping the domain and hosting current. An Astro care plan is lighter than a WordPress one because the site carries less risk, and we would rather scope it honestly than bill WordPress-level work on a site that does not carry that exposure.
You call the person who built it
When something breaks, whoever answers needs to already understand your site, not open a ticket and route it to whoever is free. With Standing Pine Media, that is the person who built your site, or someone who worked on it directly: no outsourced help desk reading from a script, no re-explaining your setup from scratch every call. That matters most at the worst moment, when the site is down or a form is broken and you need it handled today, not logged and queued behind someone else’s ticket.
The relationship that outlasts the launch
The design and build is a flat-fee project that gets your site designed, built, and live: its own conversation, separate from this one. The care plan is what happens after, the monthly work that keeps what you paid to build from quietly falling apart. A site that launches clean and sits untouched for a couple of years is not rare, and it is not fine: just broken in ways nobody has noticed yet, outdated plugins piling up, a contact form that stopped working months ago, and no one checking any of it.
Get your site on a care plan
If Standing Pine Media built your site, or you are on WordPress or Astro elsewhere and nobody has touched it since launch, use the contact bar above or below to call or send a message. Tell us what platform you are on and what “maintained” should mean for your business, and we will tell you straight what a care plan should cover, and what it should not.
Frequently asked questions
What is actually included in a Standing Pine Media care plan?
Hosting, core and plugin updates, security monitoring, regular backups, and uptime monitoring, plus small content edits like text and image swaps. You also get a direct line to the person who maintains your site, not a support queue.
Do I need a care plan if my site was built on Astro instead of WordPress?
You need a lighter one, and we will tell you that up front. An Astro site has no plugins to patch and no database to get hacked, so the security and update workload that drives most of a WordPress plan is not there. What it still needs is content changes, handled as a code update and rebuild, plus someone watching uptime and hosting. We scope and price that separately from WordPress care, not the same.
What actually happens if I skip a care plan?
Updates pile up until something breaks: a plugin conflict, a lapsed security patch, a contact form that quietly stops sending leads. Without backups in place, fixing it after the fact can mean rebuilding instead of restoring a clean version from before things went wrong. Most unmaintained sites are not broken yet. They are just building toward it.
Who do I actually talk to when something goes wrong?
The person who built your site, or someone who worked on it directly, not a ticket queue or an outsourced help desk. You call or email, you talk to someone who already knows your setup, and you get it fixed.
How much does a care plan cost?
It depends on your platform and how much ongoing work your site actually needs. A WordPress site carries more moving parts than a static Astro site, so it costs more to maintain properly. Tell us what you are running and what "maintained" needs to mean for your business, and we will quote a flat monthly rate on a call.