WordPress Maintenance for Agencies & Complex Sites

Maintenance as an engineering problem

Most WordPress maintenance is a checklist: click update, confirm the backup ran, move on. That works for a brochure site. It does not work for a WooCommerce store with custom checkout logic, an agency portfolio of forty client sites on five different hosts, or a membership platform with three third-party integrations that each have their own release cycle.

Rootscope maintains sites like that. The work is closer to operating software than to tidying a website: reading changelogs before updates, testing on staging, watching PHP-FPM and MariaDB metrics rather than just an uptime ping, and fixing root causes instead of symptoms.

Who this is for

Agencies with a portfolio. You design and build; we keep the sites running under your brand or ours. One engineer, one process across every client site, with reporting you can forward.

WooCommerce stores with custom code. Subscriptions, bespoke pricing rules, ERP and fulfilment integrations, high order volumes. Updates here are revenue-affecting changes and get treated that way.

Sites with moving parts. Custom plugins, headless front ends, API integrations, multisite networks. Anything where "update all" is a risk rather than a routine.

What a Rootscope maintenance engagement covers

Staged, tested updates for core, plugins and themes, with changelog review and a rollback path for every change.
Backups with restore drills. Daily, off-server, and actually restored on a schedule so we know they work.
Real monitoring. Uptime, response times, PHP worker saturation, slow queries, queue depth (Action Scheduler, WP-Cron) and disk and database growth.
Security response. File integrity monitoring, vulnerability tracking for your plugin stack, malware clean-up and hardening when something gets through.
Performance work. Query optimisation, object caching, server tuning and the occasional difficult conversation about a plugin that has to go.
Developer time. Hours each month for fixes, small features and the integration that broke when a vendor changed their API.
Emergency response. When something does break, the engineer who already has access and context handles it. See WordPress emergency support for how that works.
Plain-English reporting. Monthly: what changed, what we found, what we recommend.

Retainers are scoped per site or portfolio and invoiced monthly, with no long-term contract.

Looking for a plan with published pricing?

If your site is a standard business site or a smaller store, you probably do not need a bespoke retainer. Our productised plans live on WP Maintenance PRO: fixed tiers, pricing on the page, sign up online, same engineer behind it. Every tier includes updates, off-server backups, security and uptime monitoring, and incident response.

Not sure which fits? Send us the URL and we will say honestly, including when the fixed-price plan is the better deal.

How an engagement starts

Audit. We review the install, plugin stack, custom code, hosting, security posture and performance baseline, and write up what needs attention now.
Scope. Update cadence, staging, monitoring depth, developer hours and response expectations are agreed, and you get a fixed monthly figure.
Onboarding. Credentials go into an encrypted password manager. Monitoring and off-server backups are set up, and a first restore is tested before the retainer begins.
Rhythm. Updates on schedule, security patches as they appear, monitoring reviewed daily, a quarterly review of what should change.

Related services

WordPress emergency support for sites that are down right now
Performance and scaling for slow sites and large WooCommerce databases
Server management when the hosting is part of the problem
Agency development for white-label build work alongside maintenance