WordPress maintenance is recurring work: a business pays a flat monthly fee, and you keep its site updated, backed up and working. W3Techs, which tracks website technology, put WordPress at about 40 percent of all websites in October 2026, so there are millions of owners who have a site and no one looking after it. The way to win these clients is to offer a plan with a clear price and a clear list of what you do, and to approach businesses whose sites you can see are neglected.
Who needs it
- Small companies whose site was built by an agency that no longer answers.
- Businesses where the person who built the site left.
- Shops and clinics that take bookings or orders through the site, where an outage costs money.
- Companies with a site that shows an old copyright year, a broken form or a "your connection is not private" warning.
What you can spot from outside
Open the site in a browser. A copyright year that is three years old, a contact form that returns an error, a very slow home page, or a missing security padlock are signs of neglect. Do not run scans on sites you do not own or manage. Stay with what any visitor sees. Write down two or three things per business.
A three tier care plan
Customers choose faster from three clear plans than from a custom quote. A fictional freelancer, Hamid Rahimi, sells these:
- Basic, $79 a month. Weekly updates to the core software and plugins, daily backups kept 30 days, uptime checks, and a monthly one line report.
- Standard, $149 a month. Everything in Basic plus a security scan, one hour of small changes (text, images, a form), and priority replies within one business day.
- Plus, $299 a month. Everything in Standard plus three hours of changes, a quarterly speed review and a restore test.
The arithmetic: at 20 clients on the Standard plan, that is $2,980 a month. If each client takes about 90 minutes a month, that is 30 hours, or about $99 an hour. Set your prices from your own hours, and keep notes on actual time for the first three months. Use a tool that updates many sites from one dashboard so updates do not take 20 separate logins.
Say what you will not do
Write exclusions into the plan: redesigns, new features and recovery of a site that was hacked before you took it on are separate. A one paragraph agreement with a monthly term, the list of what is included, how to cancel and who owns the accounts avoids most arguments. Use a lawyer in your state to review any contract you use at scale.
The email that starts it
Subject: A quick note about your website
Hi Priya, I was on your clinic's site and noticed that the booking form returned an error when I tried it, and the footer still shows 2022. I look after WordPress sites for small clinics: updates, daily backups and fixes, from $79 a month. If you want, I can check the form and send you a short list of what I would fix, at no charge.
Hamid Rahimi, hamid@rahimiwp.example
48 Cedar Ln, Raleigh, NC 27601. Reply "stop" and I won't write again.
It reports a fact, names a price and offers a small free check. Follow up once after five days. Include your address and opt-out, since it is commercial email under CAN-SPAM, which gives you 10 business days to honor a request.
Grow from your existing work
Anyone you built a site for is a candidate for a plan. Offer it at handover. Our guides on getting clients as a web designer and getting Shopify clients cover related work, and how to reactivate old leads is a good way to revisit past clients.
Rocketship finds businesses that fit, such as clinics, shops or firms in your area, by name, emails them from your own Gmail and follows up so you can spend your time on updates. Start the 7-day trial, card required.
Sign five clients before you build any system around it. Five is enough to learn your real hours.