Sell a website care plan: monitoring, speed checks and a monthly report
Small business websites break quietly: a certificate runs out, an update kills the booking form, nobody renews the domain. Be the person who spots it first, fixes it and sends a one-page report every month, for about an hour per site. Two client sources most people miss come with it: owners whose web designer has vanished, and CQC-registered practices whose sites quietly break the rules.
- A plan to sell it: messages, a weekly routine, a scoreboard and your first 30 days
- Two niches with a built-in reason to buy: sites left behind by a closed agency, and dental and care websites that must show their CQC rating
- A website to practise on: your own, the one from Build a fast website for a local business, or a friend's (with their permission)
- The monitoring lesson done: Know before your clients do when their website goes down. The other lessons are linked where you need them
- A password manager for client logins. KeePassXC is free
- About 105 minutes to read and set up, then around 8 hours a week to find clients
- The kit: download it all as a zip or read the kit overview
Decide what's in the plan, and what isn't
Owners don't buy "maintenance". They buy someone noticing first. A clear list stops the plan turning into free web design.
Here's the gap. A small business pays someone to build a website, then nobody looks after it. Certificates expire, plugins go out of date, a booking form breaks after an update, and the owner finds out from a customer. A care plan is a monthly fee for someone who watches the site, keeps it updated and backed up, and tells the owner in plain English what happened. You can learn every skill it needs on this site. This mission turns them into something you can sell every month.
TipWhat it takes. Each site takes roughly an hour a month once you're practised (step 4 breaks it down), and you're the person who takes the "my website's down" call. The tech is the easy part; the skill is selling prevention before anything breaks, which is why step 7 shows you how to find sites with a problem already visible. Your first client most often comes from someone you know or built a site for, and cold outreach takes a few weeks of steady contacts to warm up. Who this suits: you can be reachable in working hours, you like a reliable routine checklist, and you've updated a WordPress site before (practise on your own first if not).What goes in a care plan, and the lesson that teaches each part:
- Watching: a check every minute that the site loads and the key page (booking, shop, contact) still works, plus warnings before the certificate or domain runs out. Know before your clients do when their website goes down.
- Updating (WordPress sites): core, plugins and theme, after a backup, with the key pages tested afterwards. Step 5.
- Backups: encrypted, kept away from the web server, and restore-tested every month. Encrypted backups you can actually restore.
- Speed and SEO checks: the same scan every month, so you spot a page that's slowed down. Scan a whole website for slow pages, with the bigger Google picture from Audit any business's Google visibility.
- Small changes: a fixed number of minutes a month for text, prices, opening hours and photos.
- A one-page report every month, built with Typst like the invoices in Beautiful invoices and CVs from plain text. Step 4.
Scope creep is how care plans die. "While you're in there, could you just..." turns into hours of unpaid work. The fix is a written Not included list and a set number of change minutes. Then every request is either "that's in your plan" or "that's a separate job, here's the price".
Scope: what's not includedNot included (quoted separately, before any work starts): - New pages, new features, redesigns, new plugins or integrations - Writing new content beyond small edits - Fixing problems caused by changes someone else made - Cleaning up after a break-in, beyond restoring a clean backup - Moving host, or a PHP upgrade that needs code changes - Hosting, domain, email and plugin licence costs (the client pays, in their name) - Email problems, Google Ads, social media - Work outside working hours, unless agreed in writing - Anything not on the Included listPromise the work, not the outcomeYou control the checks, the updates, the backups and how fast you start on a problem. You don't control the hosting company, a plugin developer's bugs or Google.
CarefulNever write "99.9% uptime" or "your site will never go down" in a care plan. Unless you also run the hosting, that number belongs to the host, and promising it makes you answerable for their outages. Promise how often you check and how fast you start work instead.