A website care plan is a monthly service that keeps a live site updated, secure, backed up and monitored, with a set number of content edits. Third-party costs are separate: GoDaddy Canada estimates web hosting at $65-700+ upfront and website security at $0-325+ upfront, in CAD. The maintainer's time is quoted separately, ideally per site.
Your website went live, the launch invoice got paid, and since then nobody has touched it. For a lot of small businesses in New Brunswick and across Atlantic Canada, that is the normal state of things. The site still loads, so it feels finished.
It is not finished. The software behind it keeps changing. SSL certificates and domains expire on fixed dates. Contact forms can stop sending without showing any error. None of this is visible from the homepage, which is why it gets ignored until a customer calls to say the site is down or their message never arrived.
This guide is for owners whose site is already live and who are deciding whether to pay for a monthly website care plan, keep doing the work themselves, or leave it alone. It explains what website maintenance includes, what goes wrong without it, what it costs in Canada, how it differs on WordPress, Webflow and Shopify, and what to ask before you sign a contract. We build and maintain sites from Saint John, so the examples come from real New Brunswick projects.
A website care plan is a recurring service that keeps a live website updated, secure, backed up and working after launch. You pay a monthly fee so routine technical jobs happen on a schedule, not after something breaks.
Our monthly care plans at DigiBenders cover hosting, security updates, backups, uptime monitoring, performance checks and a set number of content edits each month. We build on Webflow, WordPress and Shopify, and each plan is shaped around the platform the site runs on.
A care plan suits owners whose website matters to the business but who have nobody in-house watching it. That includes law firms, restaurants and service businesses across New Brunswick, especially when the site takes enquiries, bookings or orders. If your site came out of a project like our web design services, the care plan is what keeps that work running after launch day.
Website maintenance includes software updates, security, backups, uptime monitoring, renewals, performance checks, content edits and reporting. Updates, security, backups, monitoring and renewals are the essentials; edits and reporting are where plans usually vary.
On WordPress, updates are not optional housekeeping. The official WordPress.org documentation says you should always update to the latest version and recommends backing up your site before you start. Since WordPress 3.7, minor and security updates can apply automatically in the background, but major feature releases still need someone to click Update Now. Automatic updates help, but they do not replace a maintenance routine.
An unmaintained website decays quietly: software falls behind, renewals lapse and features break without anyone noticing. Most of the emergency work we take on comes from sites with no maintenance at all.
None of these problems announce themselves. A law firm or a restaurant in Moncton or Fredericton can lose weeks of enquiries to a dead form before anyone thinks to test it.
Once a site has gone years without care, its theme or plugins may no longer be supported, and patching it turns into rebuilding it. At that point the honest recommendation is a new site, which is project work for a team offering web design in Saint John, NB, not a maintenance task.
Website maintenance in Canada costs two separate things: third-party fees for the domain, hosting and security, and the maintainer's time. GoDaddy Canada publishes upfront estimates for the first part, while the second depends on your platform and how many edits you need.
GoDaddy Canada's guide lists rough upfront costs, in CAD, for the building blocks every website needs:
| Cost item | Who you pay | GoDaddy Canada upfront estimate (CAD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain name | Domain registrar | $0.01-$20 | Premium domains excluded |
| Web hosting | Hosting company, often passed through by your web firm | $65-700+ | Billing schedule set by the host |
| Website security | Security or SSL provider, or bundled by the host | $0-325+ | Ask what your host already includes |
| Care plan (maintainer's time) | Your web firm | Not covered in GoDaddy's guide | Quoted per site, by platform and edit volume |
The domain is the one item GoDaddy also frames on a yearly basis: it suggests expecting to pay around $20 a year for your domain. Keep the other figures as GoDaddy labels them, as upfront estimates.
BDC notes that most web firms use third-party hosting companies rather than their own servers, so the hosting cost is often transferred to the client on a monthly or yearly basis and is rarely negotiable. When you compare quotes, separate that line from the maintainer's fee.
Two things drive the maintainer's share of the bill:
That is why we quote care plans per site: a six-page brochure site and a Shopify store are not the same maintenance job. For the build side of the budget, read our guide to how much a website costs in Canada.
WordPress involves more maintenance work than Webflow or Shopify, because scheduled software updates and host security are part of the job. Webflow and Shopify are fully managed platforms with no server to patch, so their care plans are mostly content edits, monitoring and backups.
| WordPress | Webflow | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting and patching | A hardened host, plus core, theme and plugin updates on a schedule | Fully managed platform, no server to patch | Fully managed platform, no server to patch |
| Extra security work | Malware scanning and a firewall | No server hardening to manage | No server hardening to manage |
| What the care plan mostly covers | Updates, security, monitoring, backups and edits | Content edits, monitoring and backups | Content edits, monitoring and backups |
Your platform choice is a build decision, but it sets your maintenance workload for as long as the site is live. If you are choosing a platform now, ask what the care plan will look like on each one before you commit.
For Moss Hachey Law in Fredericton, we moved the site from Squarespace to WordPress. Ongoing updates and security are part of keeping it fast and secure for the ads and search traffic it depends on. A firm paying for that traffic cannot afford a site that is slow or flagged as unsafe. You can see the build in our Moss Hachey law firm website case study.
On Webflow or Shopify, the platform handles the server. Your maintenance still matters, but it shifts toward checking that forms send, pages load, content is current and backups exist. That is work many owners can take on themselves, which the next sections cover.
Get the hosting terms, the yearly cost, the service level, ownership of the site, the response time and the definition of an edit in writing before you sign. A vague maintenance paragraph buried in a larger contract leaves all of those open to argument later.
BDC, which says it has advised more than 400 entrepreneurs on digital marketing projects, warns that the maintenance contract is typically a brief paragraph in the overall agreement and is rarely discussed in detail before the sale. Its guidance covers the first three questions below; the rest cover ownership, speed and scope.
You can maintain your own website if it is a simple site on a managed platform and you will actually do the checks. If the site brings in leads or takes bookings, it needs monitoring and backups whether or not anyone is editing it.
Work through these questions in order:
Hopscotch Whisky Bar in Saint John is a good example. The owner edits his own content, which is the right setup for a restaurant with a changing menu. A care plan does not have to mean the agency makes every change.
A website care plan is the routine work that keeps a live site from quietly falling apart: updates, security, backups, monitoring, renewals and the small edits a business needs. Budget for it in two parts. Domain, hosting and security are third-party costs, and the maintainer's time should be quoted for your platform and your edit volume, not pulled from a generic tier.
Before you sign, get the hosting terms, yearly cost, service hours, ownership, response time and edit definition in writing. If your site is a simple brochure site on a managed platform and you will keep up the monthly checks, maintaining it yourself is a fair choice. If the site brings in leads or bookings, put monitoring and backups in place either way.
Not sure which group you fall into? Book a free consultation with our team in Saint John.
