Not All WordPress Maintenance Plans Protect What Matters Most
Your website deserves more than routine updates — it deserves proactive care.
At AF Digital Native, we don’t just maintain your site, we strengthen it. Our plans combine expert oversight, performance optimization, and hands-on support to keep your website secure, fast, and reliable month after month.
For less than the cost of a single emergency fix, you’ll have a dedicated team ensuring your site runs flawlessly — preventing issues before they happen and keeping your business online, optimized, and growing.
Smart maintenance isn’t an expense. It’s protection, performance, and peace of mind.
Your Website Isn’t Set It and Forget It
Why WordPress Maintenance Matters
WordPress was built with the non-technical user in mind, empowering everyday business owners, marketers, and content creators to build beautiful, functional websites without writing code. But that ease and flexibility comes with a hidden tradeoff…
The power of WordPress lies in its vast ecosystem of themes, plugins, and customization options. This unique combination is what makes your site one-of-a-kind, but it’s also what makes it fragile. Each plugin, theme, or integration adds another moving part to your system. And while everything may work perfectly today, there’s no guarantee it will tomorrow.
Technology is evolving rapidly, and so are the plugins, systems, and hosting environments that power your site. A single outdated plugin or unchecked update can slow your site down, or worse, bring it offline altogether.
For many, updating WordPress is as simple as clicking a button… until it’s not. One plugin conflict or version mismatch can trigger a cascade of errors, costing you hours in downtime or thousands in lost revenue and emergency repairs.
That’s why routine maintenance isn’t just a best practice, it’s essential. With the right support and proactive processes in place, you can avoid common pitfalls, keep your site running at peak performance, and ensure that your website continues to serve your business, your users, and your goals.
The Truth About Most WordPress Maintenance Plans
Why Our Plans Are Different
At first glance, most WordPress maintenance plans look alike — especially when you’re comparing prices. Basic “update-only” plans often range between $99 and $200 per month, promising plugin updates and backups. But in reality, these are mostly automated services that simply keep your site online, not optimized. They don’t monitor performance, address issues, or provide hands-on support when something breaks.
That’s where our approach stands apart. At AF Digital Native, our maintenance plans are built around true partnership and proactive care. We combine technical oversight, security management, and real on-demand support to keep your site running at peak performance. Instead of a generic automated service, you get a dedicated team who knows your website, your tools, and your goals — protecting your investment and giving you complete peace of mind.
WordPress Core, Theme & Plugin Updates
Keeping your website updated is one of the most important — and most overlooked — aspects of maintaining a healthy, secure, and high-performing WordPress site.
These updates don’t just add new features; they patch vulnerabilities, improve stability, and ensure your site stays compatible with modern web standards.
We handle regular updates for your WordPress core software, licensed theme files, and plugin libraries. Our approach isn’t just about hitting the “update all” button — it’s strategic, cautious, and tailored to the specific ecosystem your site runs on.
Why It Matters
Your site’s stability depends on how well its moving parts — core software, themes, and plugins — work together. But every update introduces risk. One incompatibility or poorly timed update can break functionality, introduce bugs, or crash your entire site.
That’s why proper update management isn’t just about “keeping current” — it’s about knowing when and how to update.
What Makes Our Approach Different
Most WordPress maintenance providers treat updates as a checklist item — something that just runs in the background. We treat them as a critical quality control process. Our update workflows are intentional, informed by experience, and backed by accountability.
What You Should Know
Not all updates are created equal. Just like with your phone, a rushed update can sometimes introduce bugs instead of fixing them. That’s why we don’t update blindly.
Every update is reviewed for compatibility and performance to ensure it supports, not breaks, your site.
So while others may guarantee a quick update, we guarantee something far more valuable… assurance.
That means taking the time to verify the stability of each release, assessing how it interacts with your site’s unique setup, and applying updates only when we’re confident they won’t compromise your performance or functionality.
Pros & Considerations
- Pros
- Reduces your exposure to known vulnerabilities
- Helps maintain compatibility with hosting, browsers, and third-party integrations
- Prevents “version drift” that leads to broken features or outdated code
- Minimizes user errors from auto-updates or unmanaged changes
- Considerations
- We can only maintain and update plugins and themes that are properly licensed and supported
- Unsupported or abandoned tools increase the risk of update conflicts or long-term site instability
- Updates are tested and staged based on priority — not all updates are applied instantly
Daily Off-Site Backups
We perform automated, off-site cloud backups of your website every single day — ensuring that your site can be recovered quickly, cleanly, and without stress.
We back up both files and database content, with manual backups available upon request. All backups are retained for a full 30 days, giving you far more peace of mind than the industry standard.
Why It Matters
Backups are like insurance for your website. But not all backups are created equal — and not all hosting providers offer truly dependable options.
If your backups are stored on the same server as your site, a crash, corruption, or forced reset could wipe them out along with everything else.
Even premium hosts typically offer just 7 to 14 days of retention, and some don’t include database backups or off-site storage unless you pay extra.
Without the right backup system in place, a single overlooked issue — like malware injection, plugin failure, or file corruption — can leave you stranded with no clean restore point.
What Makes Our Approach Different
Backups are only valuable if you can use them when it counts.
We treat restoration as an essential service, not a chargeable exception.
You’ll never find “emergency recovery” buried in a service addendum — it’s built into our process from day one.
And we don’t just hit restore and hope for the best. We plan restorations based on what your site needs — file-level only, database rollback only, or a full reset.
That flexibility can be the difference between a seamless recovery and a costly catastrophe.
With AF Digital Native, your site’s safety net isn’t just bigger — it’s smarter, stronger, and fully supported.
What You Should Know
We don’t just back up your site — we restore it when needed, without hidden fees or conditions.
Other service providers often charge extra for backup restoration under clauses we jokingly refer to as “Scheduled Exception Protocols” — fine-print language that treats emergency recovery like an edge case instead of a core part of support.
We reject that philosophy. With us, restoration support is included, not optional. Whether your site goes down due to a bad plugin update or a misstep during content edits, we’re here to roll things back — fast.
Pros & Considerations
- Pros
- True off-site, secure storage
- 30-day retention offers extended rollback window
- Full-site recovery included — no added fee
- Supports both scheduled and manual backups
- Considerations
- Manual backups must be requested if needed outside of the automated schedule
- Limit one restoration per week
Plugin & Theme Licensing Support
One of the most powerful advantages of our maintenance plans is access to our Premium Agency Licensing Program — a curated collection of the very same plugins and themes we use to build enterprise-grade websites.
These are not just popular tools — they’re trusted, stable, and battle-tested across dozens of high-performing sites we’ve managed and scaled over the past ten years.
Even if we didn’t build your site, you still get access to this full library of digital infrastructure — giving you the same high-performance foundation we use with our top-tier clients.
Why It Matters
Plugins and themes are the building blocks of every WordPress site. But with thousands of options available, it’s easy to get overwhelmed — or worse, install tools that are bloated, unsupported, or conflict-prone.
We’ve already done the heavy lifting by testing, validating, and standardizing a stack of reliable, future-proof tools.
These plugins cover everything from SEO and caching to form builders, content protection, visual design, analytics, LMS, and more.
When you use licensed, maintained software — and you don’t have to pay hundreds out of pocket for it — your site stays faster, more stable, and easier to evolve.
What Makes Our Approach Different
Most maintenance plans stop at the basics — updates and backups. But we believe in giving our clients real power and real value.
We don’t just recommend good tools — we give you access to the best ones.
The same plugins we use to build $10K–$50K websites are available to you as part of your maintenance plan, even if your site wasn’t originally built by us.
That means you get trusted performance, professional-grade functionality, and freedom from annual plugin renewals — all without lifting a finger.
This is the difference between a patchwork maintenance plan and a true growth-ready infrastructure.
What You Should Know
A question we get asked all the time is:
“What plugins do you recommend for doing X, Y, or Z on my site?”
Over the years, we’ve tested dozens — if not hundreds — of plugins, and through experience, we’ve identified a core set of tools we trust to deliver consistent results.
These aren’t just popular — they’re the same premium plugins we use as the foundation of every website we build. Instead of simply handing over a list of recommendations, we decided to go a step further and include them directly in our maintenance plans.
Why? Because even if we didn’t build your site, we still want it to be great.
And giving you access to the tools that power high-performing, scalable WordPress sites is one of the most effective ways to do that.
Through our agency licensing program, you gain access to a curated library of premium plugins and themes — saving you hundreds in annual licensing fees and giving your site the functionality, flexibility, and stability it deserves.
Pros & Considerations
- Pros
- Access to $500–$1,200+ in licensed tools (depending on plan)
- No need to purchase or manage licenses separately
- Covers all essential categories: SEO, performance, design, membership, forms, and more
- Keeps your tools up-to-date and secure with ongoing updates
- Considerations
- Licensing only applies to tools within our Agency License Program
- If your site uses custom, third-party, or unsupported plugins/themes, you must provide the license
- Unsupported tools may limit compatibility, functionality, or our ability to provide conflict resolution
Plugin Conflict Resolution
Our maintenance plans include hands-on plugin conflict resolution to help you troubleshoot and fix what others can’t or won’t.
Whether it’s a fatal error, a layout-breaking update, or a slow-burn issue that’s been frustrating your team, we dig deep to restore functionality and stability.
Why It Matters
The average WordPress site runs dozens of plugins — all developed by different people, updated on different schedules, and rarely tested together.
Every plugin you install increases the complexity of your system, and with that complexity comes risk.
Conflicts can arise between plugins, themes, hosting environments, caching tools, or even third-party integrations.
And unlike a basic bug or missing setting, plugin conflicts are often hard to spot, hard to trace, and even harder to fix without the right experience or diagnostic tools.
It’s like a car’s check engine light: just knowing something’s wrong isn’t enough. You need the right diagnostic equipment — and someone who knows how to use it — to pinpoint the issue and get you back on the road.
What Makes Our Approach Different
Most providers avoid plugin conflict support entirely — because it’s messy, unpredictable, and resource-intensive. But we lean into it and cover it at no additional cost.
We’ve built our toolkit and process around solving the complex problems most maintenance providers and plugin authors won’t touch.
We don’t just disable a plugin and walk away — we diagnose, test, and work toward a stable, long-term solution.
Think of us as your check engine tech for WordPress — with the right tools, experience, and commitment to make sense of the mess and get your site running like it should.
What You Should Know
Plugin conflicts, version mismatches, or accidental overwrites can create cascading issues — and sometimes, continued updates only make the problem worse.
That’s why our maintenance plans include hands-on plugin conflict resolution.
We take the time to analyze, isolate, and resolve conflicts when they arise, restoring functionality and stability with minimal disruption.
And if the conflict stems from an unsupported or abandoned plugin, we’ll recommend the best alternative and assist in migrating to a more sustainable solution.
Pros & Considerations
- Pros
- Fast issue identification and resolution
- Reduces downtime caused by plugin errors or version clashes
- Includes proactive plugin analysis and replacement suggestions
- Protects site performance and functionality without guesswork
- Considerations
- Conflicts from unsupported/abandoned plugins may require removal or rebuilds
- Complex plugin stacks may increase troubleshooting time
- Conflicts stemming from unlicensed or unsupported third-party tools are not always fully resolvable
Browser & Device Compatibility
Ensuring your website looks and functions beautifully across all browsers and devices isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s a business requirement.
Every visitor, whether they’re on a laptop, iPhone, Android tablet, or desktop PC, should experience your website without layout issues, broken menus, or overlapping text.
That’s why browser and device compatibility isn’t an afterthought in our maintenance plans — it’s baked in. We proactively test, monitor, and adjust your site to stay aligned with today’s most commonly used environments.
Why It Matters
Modern websites are accessed across a wide range of devices, screen sizes, and browsers — and they don’t all behave the same way.
A layout that looks perfect on desktop Chrome may break on Safari Mobile. A plugin that performs great on Edge might glitch on Firefox.
And here’s the hard truth: those inconsistencies are costing you.
Broken layouts mean lost trust, lost conversions, and frustrated users who are unlikely to come back.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your site looks on your screen — what matters is how it performs on theirs.
What Makes Our Approach Different
Most developers only guarantee responsiveness for the day your site launches. After that, you’re on your own.
Many maintenance providers won’t touch compatibility issues — especially on websites they didn’t build.
But we do. Whether we built your site or not, we take responsibility for making sure it works where your users are.
We don’t play the blame game — we get in, diagnose the problem, and fix it.
Because in our eyes, if your site is under our care, then its visitors are our responsibility too.
What You Should Know
We monitor and maintain compatibility across all major browsers and devices to ensure a smooth, consistent experience for every visitor — whether they’re on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge, and whether they’re viewing on desktop, tablet, or mobile.
And here’s the thing: even if we didn’t build your site, we’ll fix it.
Yeah, you heard that right!
There’s no reason your website shouldn’t be fully compatible — not under our watch. We don’t just passively “support” compatibility; we actively ensure it.
We’ll audit your site’s layout and responsiveness across platforms, identify inconsistencies, and make the adjustments needed to correct them.
Then we keep checking — because browsers update regularly, screen resolutions change, and so should your site.
Like we’ve said from the beginning, we’re not just here to maintain — we’re here to enhance.
Pros & Considerations
- Pros
- Site works consistently across all devices and browsers
- Prevents loss of users due to frustrating mobile experiences
- Increases engagement, usability, and trust
- Includes visual audits and proactive adjustment workflows
- Considerations
- Fixes are limited to front-end responsiveness, not full redesigns
- Legacy browser support (IE, outdated Android) not included
- Mobile issues caused by third-party embeds or unsupported page builders may require additional scoping
On-Demand Support
Our maintenance plans include monthly on-demand support hours for content updates, edits, and site changes — giving you reliable, hands-on help when you need to keep your website current, accurate, and aligned with your business activity.
From seasonal image swaps to blog publishing, you get more than peace of mind — you get a partner ready to help.
Why It Matters
Your website is a living part of your business. But too often, businesses delay updates or avoid changes because they’re unsure how to make them — or worried they’ll break something.
Our on-demand support eliminates that friction. Whether you’re launching a campaign, uploading a new product, or making weekly edits to your pages, you’ve got a trusted team on hand to make it happen.
What Makes Our Approach Different
We believe a website should empower your business — not slow it down.
It should be a consistent revenue driver, not just another expense. But for many businesses, website changes feel risky, expensive, or technically out of reach.
That’s why On-Demand Support is the #1 reason so many clients choose us as their maintenance provider. Because what they need isn’t just behind-the-scenes updates — they need real, day-to-day support they can rely on.
We remove the guesswork, reduce the cost of inaction, and give you the confidence to keep your site working for you — not the other way around.
What You Should Know
Our On-Demand Support gives you reliable, hands-on help every month to keep your website current and performing at its best.
Each plan includes dedicated support time — starting with 2 hours per month — that can be used for content edits, image or text updates, publishing new pages within your existing tools, or general site tasks. These hours scale with your plan, giving you the flexibility to choose the right level of ongoing support for your needs.
Whether you’re updating seasonal content, launching a new campaign, or making regular improvements, you’ll have a team who already knows your site and systems — ready to make updates quickly and accurately.
Pros & Considerations
- Pros
- Empowers you to keep your site fresh without DIY hassle
- Responsive help from a team that already understands your site
- Alleviates bottlenecks for content updates and minor edits
- Predictable and flexible — use time where you need it most
- Considerations
- Large builds or new features require separate scope
- Support hours reset monthly based on your plan
- Support is limited to your site’s current structure and tools
Protect your investment. Keep your site fast, secure, and stress-free.
Ready to Simplify, Secure, and Strengthen Your Website?
Stop worrying about updates, performance issues, or downtime. With AF Digital Native Maintenance, you get proactive care, expert support, and complete peace of mind — all for less than the cost of a single emergency fix.
Starting At
Experience worry-free website care with proactive maintenance, hands-on support, and continuous optimization that keeps your WordPress site secure, stable, and performing at its best.
$375
/monthly
Features Include:
WordPress Core, Theme & Plugin Updates
Regular, managed updates that protect your site from vulnerabilities and keep everything running smoothly.
Daily Off-Site Backups
Your data is backed up automatically and stored securely for quick recovery and peace of mind.
Performance Monitoring & Optimization
We track uptime, speed, and key performance metrics to ensure your site runs at peak efficiency.
Browser & Device Compatibility
Ensures your site looks and works perfectly across all major browsers and devices.
On-Demand Support (2 hrs/mo)
Get additional support beyond maintenance for content updates, edits, and site changes — covering most minor WordPress adjustments to keep your website current and professional.