THE RETAINER

Website care plans: $500 to $2,500 a month, flat fee.

No projects, no scope documents, no three-month statement of work before anything happens. One person looking after your website every month, for a number you can put in a budget and then stop thinking about. I am based in Litchfield Park, Arizona, and work with businesses across Phoenix and the West Valley, and remotely with clients anywhere.

What this is, and what it is not

What it is

Somebody competent looking at your website every month, fixing what is broken, improving what is underperforming, and telling you plainly what happened. The value is in the looking, repeated, rather than in any one heroic month.

What it is not

Not a redesign, not a rebrand, and not an agency retainer where most of the fee funds account management. No team, no pod, no weekly status call unless you want one. If a month has nothing worth doing, I say so instead of inventing work. And if you ever leave, you keep everything: the hosting account, the domain, the code and the backups. None of it is mine to hold onto.

PRICING

Three tiers

The difference between them is how much building I do, not how much attention you get. Every tier includes the monitoring and the honesty.

CARE

$500

per month

Someone is watching, so nothing rots quietly.

Monthly technical health check across the whole site

Uptime, SSL, backups, plugin and theme updates handled

Broken links, redirect chains and 404s cleaned up

Core Web Vitals tracked so regressions get caught early

Search Console and analytics reviewed for anything odd

Google Business Profile kept accurate, and watched for Google’s silent edits

Up to 2 hours of small fixes included

A short written report every month

Best for a site that works and needs to stay that way.

CARE + OPTIMIZATION

$1,200

per month · most start here

Watching, plus steadily making it better.

Everything in Care

Monthly speed work against real Core Web Vitals field data

On-page SEO: titles, headings, internal links, schema

One underperforming page rewritten or rebuilt each month

Conversion improvements to forms, CTAs and trust signals

Honest conversion tracking, not vanity dashboards

Google Business Profile worked monthly: posts, photos, and review responses drafted for you

Map pack position tracked on a geographic grid, not one lucky search from your desk

Up to 6 hours of build and fix work included

Best for a site that should be producing more leads than it does.

GROWTH

$2,500

per month

The website treated as a channel, not a brochure.

Everything in Care + Optimization

Keyword and competitor research driving a real content plan

Two new or substantially rebuilt pages per month

Technical SEO at scale: indexation, structured data, migrations

Local search built out: citation cleanup, location pages, competitor grid analysis

Email and lifecycle work where it earns its keep

A quarterly session on what to stop doing

Up to 14 hours included

Best for when organic search is meant to be a revenue line.

Month to month. No setup fee, no minimum term, thirty days’ notice to stop. Unused hours do not roll over, because a retainer that banks hours turns into a project queue and then nobody is watching the site.

THE RHYTHM

What a month actually looks like

Week one: look

Full technical sweep. Crawl the site, compare against last month, pull Search Console and analytics, check Core Web Vitals field data. Anything urgent gets fixed the same day rather than waiting for the report.

Week two: fix

The unglamorous list. Broken links, redirect chains, missing metadata, oversized images, index bloat, whatever the sweep turned up. This is where most of the compounding happens.

Week three: improve

One deliberate improvement: a page rewritten, a template sped up, a form simplified, schema added. One thing at a time, so we can actually tell whether it worked.

Week four: report and plan

A short written note. What I found, what I changed, what moved, and what I would do next month. If the answer is “not much, and here is why”, you get that too.

GETTING STARTED

The first month is different

Month one is stabilization. I am not going to pretend I can improve a site I have not properly read, so the first month is a full audit, the backlog of obvious fixes cleared, and monitoring put in place. From month two it settles into the rhythm above.

On the Google listing specifically: I will not promise you a position in the map pack. Where you appear depends heavily on how far the searcher is standing from you, and nobody controls that. What I will promise is that the listing is complete, matches the site, stays current, and that reviews get answered.

1. A short conversation

Twenty minutes on what the site is meant to do and what has been annoying you. Free, and I will tell you if I think you do not need me.

2. Access and a baseline

CMS admin, plus read access to analytics and Search Console. I record where everything stands so we can argue with the numbers later.

3. The first invoice

Sent after the first month of work, not before it. If the first month disappoints you, you have lost one month and no contract.

A mechanic working under the hood of a vehicle
The same few checks, every month, on purpose.

Sources: Hardening WordPress · WordPress backups

By Bill Belcamino · Last updated

Cite this page: Average Idiot, “Website Care Plans: $500 to $2,500 a Month”, averageidiot.com/retainer/ (updated ). Research data at averageidiot.com/data/ is licensed CC BY 4.0.