Website Maintenance Contract: What to Include for Monthly Care Plans

Once you have built a site, the client needs someone to keep it running: updates, backups, small edits, fixing things when a plugin breaks. A maintenance plan turns that into predictable monthly income. Without a contract, though, "maintenance" quietly expands into "redesign the homepage whenever we feel like it".

The goal of a maintenance contract is to be precise about what the monthly fee buys and what it doesn't.

List the recurring tasks and the flexible allowance separately:

• Recurring: core, theme and plugin updates, backups (with frequency), uptime monitoring, security scans, a short monthly report.
• Allowance: e.g. up to 2 hours of content edits and small fixes per month.
• Not covered: new pages or features, redesigns, third-party licence fees, fixing problems caused by changes the client made themselves.

The maintenance and support clause is a good starting point.

Avoid promising 100% uptime or instant fixes. Promise how fast you will respond, by severity:

• Site down: response within 4 business hours.
• Something broken but site working: within 1 business day.
• Content edits: within 3 business days.

Define business hours and time zone. The response time clause covers the wording. If you offer weekend emergency support, price it separately.

Be explicit about who is responsible for what:

• Who pays for and owns the hosting account and domain (ideally the client, in their name).
• What access you need and how it is shared.
• How long backups are kept and whether restoring one is included.

If a hosting provider has an outage, that is normally outside your control; a force majeure clause and a limitation of liability clause keep your exposure proportionate to the monthly fee.

• Unused hours: expire at month end, or roll over for one month only. Pick one and write it down.
• Extra work: billed at your hourly rate, quoted in advance for anything above a set amount. See the hourly rate clause.
• Billing: monthly in advance, with work paused if an invoice is overdue.
• Cancellation: 30 days' notice from either side, with a handover of credentials.

The website maintenance agreement template includes all of this. Use the retainer calculator to price the plan.

Many freelancers offer maintenance in simple tiers, so the client chooses the level of cover instead of negotiating line by line:

• Essential: monthly updates, weekly backups, uptime monitoring, no edit allowance. Priced for small brochure sites.
• Standard: everything in Essential, daily backups, and up to 2 hours of edits a month.
• Priority: everything in Standard, up to 5 hours of edits, and faster response times for urgent issues.

Each tier lists exactly what's included, so a client on Essential asking for a new page gets a quote, not a debate. The numbers depend on your rate and how much work each site typically needs; the retainer calculator helps you set them.

"For a monthly fee of $[AMOUNT], invoiced in advance, Contractor will perform the maintenance tasks listed in Schedule A and up to [X] hours of content edits and minor fixes per month. Unused hours expire at the end of each month. Work outside Schedule A, including new features, redesigns and repairs of issues caused by changes made by Client or third parties, will be quoted separately. Contractor does not guarantee uninterrupted availability of the website or hosting."

• Hosting in your own account. If the relationship ends, the client's site is tangled up with your business. Keep hosting and domains in the client's name where possible.
• Updating plugins on the live site without a backup. Take one first, every time.
• "Unlimited small changes". There is no such thing. Cap it in hours or tasks.
• No monthly report. When nothing breaks, the client may start wondering what they are paying for. A short report makes the invisible work visible.
• Fixing the client's own mistakes for free when the contract says they're excluded.

Should maintenance include hosting? It can, but keep the two lines separate on the invoice and in the contract, so the client knows what they're paying for each.

What if the client wants to cancel mid-month? With billing in advance and a notice period, the current month is already paid, and the plan ends at the end of the notice period.

The best time to propose maintenance is at handover of a new site, when the client is happy and has just realised they don't know how to update plugins. Draft it now with Clinch: describe the job in a sentence, get a clean draft, send one link. Your client signs from their phone without an account, and the deposit is paid in the same step.