arete logo
Services
01Services
02Industries 03Resources
Book a Strategy Call647-812-5125
What we do
Website Design Website Accessibility Custom WordPress UX/UI Design Branding & Creative
Shopify & Shopify Plus WooCommerce Migrations
SEO AI Search (GEO/AEO) Technical SEO Content
Google Ads Meta & Paid Social Paid Media & CRO Email & CRM
Website Maintenance Support & Retainers CRO Audits
Industries
01Services
02Industries
03Resources
Book a Strategy Call647-812-5125
Industries we serve
Manufacturing & IndustrialProfessional ServicesLegal Finance & AccountingSaaS & TechnologyEducation & Training Wholesale & DistributionTransportation & LogisticsTravel & Tourism Non-Profit & AssociationsHealthcare & MedicalConstruction & Trades
Resources
01Services 02Industries
03Resources
Book a Strategy Call647-812-5125
Resources
The Arete BriefMonthly B2B web & SEO insights BlogGuides, playbooks & how-tos Case StudiesReal results, real clients FAQStraight answers, fast
Featured · BlogHow B2B sites get cited by AI search enginesRead article →
Our Work About
647-812-5125 Get a Quote
Website DesignCustom WordPressUX/UI DesignBranding & Creative
Shopify & Shopify PlusWooCommerceMigrations
SEOAI Search (GEO/AEO)Technical SEO
Google AdsMeta & Paid SocialPaid Media & CRO
Website MaintenanceSupport & RetainersCRO
Manufacturing & IndustrialProfessional ServicesLegalFinance & AccountingSaaS & TechnologyEducation & TrainingWholesale & DistributionTransportation & LogisticsTravel & TourismNon-Profit & AssociationsHealthcare & MedicalConstruction & Trades
The Arete BriefBlogCase StudiesFAQ
Our Work About
Get a Quote ↗ 647-812-5125
Book a Call + Start a Project
Home/Services/Website Maintenance
Arete Care · Website Maintenance Services

Website maintenance services for WordPress and WooCommerce

Updates, security, backups and fixes for business websites, handled every month by the team that builds them — so your site stays fast, safe and working, and nobody in your office has to think about it. Serving Toronto, Ottawa, and businesses across Canada & USA.

See maintenance plans ↗Book a call
★★★★★4.9 Google · 4.8 Clutch · 300+ sites maintained · Since 2007
Trusted to keep these sites running
genrep FSTesting Markwell Law  Digital Governance Council TELUS Fund Shift Management genrep FSTesting Markwell Law  Digital Governance Council TELUS Fund Shift Management genrep FSTesting Markwell Law  Digital Governance Council TELUS Fund Shift Management
What do website maintenance services include?
Website maintenance services keep a live website secure, current and working. That means updating WordPress, plugins and themes, monitoring for malware and downtime, taking backups you can restore from, fixing what breaks, and making the content changes your team needs — every month, on a fixed plan.
300+
Sites on maintenance plans
19 yrs
Since 2007
20
In-house team

A WordPress site is not finished at launch. The core software, every plugin and the theme release updates through the year — many of them security fixes for holes that are already public. Skip them and the site keeps working, right up until it doesn’t.

You can run updates yourself, and for a small site with a few plugins that is a fair call. Most businesses hand it over once they have a store, forms that feed sales, or a site nobody on staff wants to be responsible for. We maintain over 300 of them.

Why it matters

Why your website needs ongoing maintenance

Two of our clients. One came to us after years without updates. One has been maintained since the day it launched.

Unmaintained · Transportation · Winnipeg

A site nobody had touched since launch

A Winnipeg transportation company had not updated its WordPress site since it was built. It picked up malware, slowed to a crawl, and Google started showing a warning to anyone who tried to visit.

Then it reached their email. Messages containing the company’s own web address were flagged and rejected, so official email stopped arriving and staff fell back on personal accounts to reach clients. The founder was losing two to three hours a day answering for it.

MalwareGoogle warningEmail blocked2–3 hrs/day lost
Maintained since launch · Medical testing · Montreal

FSTesting

FSTesting runs a bilingual site of more than 200 pages, which we built and have maintained ever since. In that time there has been no security breach, no malware, no unplanned downtime and no disruption to their business.

Not one hour of their team’s time has gone into dealing with website problems. That is what maintenance is supposed to look like: nothing to report.

200+
Pages
0
Incidents
0
Hours lost

We cleaned the Winnipeg site, updated everything and had the Google warning removed in three days. They are on a maintenance plan now. The cleanup was the expensive part — and the avoidable one.

Plans and pricing

Website maintenance packages and pricing

Three plans. Pick the one that matches how much your site does, not how much it costs.

Essential
Keeping a business website secure and updated
from $65/mo
billed
  • WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates, with a backup taken before each run
  • Malware scanning, firewall, and security monitoring
  • Daily offsite backups and restore if anything goes wrong
  • Uptime and SSL monitoring
  • Monthly report of what was done
  • Email support, reply within one business day
Sign up or book a call
Most popular
Growth
Sites your team updates and sells from
from $195/mo
billed $xx
  • Everything in Essential
  • 1 hour per month of content changes and small fixes — unused hours roll over
  • Updates tested on a staging copy before they touch the live site
  • Monthly speed and Core Web Vitals check
  • Form, link and checkout testing
  • PHP, database and plugin clean-up
  • Email and phone support, same-business-day response
Book a call
Priority
Larger sites, WooCommerce stores, and businesses with insurer or compliance requirements
from $325/mo
billed $xx
  • Everything in Growth
  • Larger hours bank — 2 hours a month
  • WooCommerce checkout and order monitoring
  • Security log, MFA on admin accounts, and fixes for findings from your cyber insurer’s scans
  • Quarterly SEO, AI search and accessibility checks
  • Named senior contact, critical issues answered within xx hours
Book a call
Add-on

Add managed hosting to any plan — from $xx/mo. One bill, one team for the server and the site.

Monthly plans have a three-month minimum. Annual plans are paid upfront at 20% off. One plan per website. Sites we did not build start with a one-time audit — see below.

What’s included

WordPress maintenance and support, task by task

What actually happens on your site each month, and why each piece is there.

Custom website design
Arete Care

Website security and updates

Most hacked WordPress sites are not targeted. They are found by automated scans looking for a plugin version with a known hole, and that is almost always an update somebody did not run. We run them, check the site afterwards, and roll back if anything breaks. If you’d rather handle it yourself, start with our WordPress security tips.

→Core, plugin and theme updates on a set schedule
→Firewall, malware scanning and login protection
→Unused and abandoned plugins removed
Compare maintenance plans ↗
Custom CMS and WordPress development
Arete Care

Backups, uptime and recovery

A backup only counts if it restores. Yours are taken daily, stored away from your server, and we restore from them when something goes wrong — a bad update, a hack, or someone deleting the wrong page. If the site goes down, we hear about it before your customers do.

→Daily offsite backups with tested restores
→Uptime and SSL certificate monitoring
→Recovery handled by us, not left to your host
See what each plan backs up ↗
Ecommerce and B2B websites
Arete Care

Content updates, speed and fixes

The small jobs are the ones that sit for months: a new team member, an updated price list, a form that stopped sending. Your monthly hours cover them, and you email one team rather than finding a freelancer. Speed gets checked every month too, because sites slow down quietly as content piles up.

→Page, product, team and blog updates
→Broken forms, links and layout fixes
→Speed and Core Web Vitals checks
Compare monthly hours by plan ↗
Accessible web design and AODA compliance
Arete Care

WooCommerce maintenance

On a store, an update that breaks the checkout costs sales by the hour. WooCommerce updates are tested on a staging copy first, and checkout, payments and order emails are checked after every release. Running Shopify instead? That is handled separately.

→Staging-tested WooCommerce and extension updates
→Checkout, payment gateway and order email checks
→Product and pricing updates within your hours
See plans for WooCommerce stores ↗
Multilingual and bilingual websites
Arete Care

Maintenance for regulated and insured businesses

Law firms, accountants, clinics and anyone handling client data are now being asked by their cyber insurer to prove the website is patched, backed up and locked down. We provide the evidence. For Markwell Law we keep the site patched, enforce MFA, store backups offsite and keep the logs — and when their insurer’s monthly security scan flags something, we fix it.

→Patch records, offsite backups and access logs
→MFA and access reviews on admin accounts
→Fixes for insurer scan findings, reported back to you

we provide records; we never claim to guarantee coverage or compliance.

Request a quote for insurer requirements ↗
Not ready for a plan?

One-time website repair, audit and takeover

Some sites need fixing before they need maintaining. We take on one-off repair work — a hacked site, a broken form, a site that slowed to a crawl — and you decide afterwards whether a plan makes sense.

If we did not build your site, every plan starts with a one-time audit, from $130.. We check what is installed, what is out of date and what is already broken, then bring it up to current before monthly maintenance begins. It is the honest way to start: we cannot keep a site healthy that is not healthy yet.

Get a repair quoteRead the maintenance FAQ
Problems we fix every week
  • Site hacked, infected with malware, or flagged by Google
  • Business email rejected because of your website’s domain
  • Contact or donation forms not sending, or landing in spam
  • Slow pages, white screens and error messages
  • Broken layout on mobile after an update
  • Lost access to admin, hosting or domain accounts
Why Arete

Why 300+ businesses keep their website maintenance with us

Most maintenance problems are made at build time. The people maintaining your site here are the people who build sites, so they know where to look.

A plugin conflict, a slow database, a form that stopped sending — our developers have seen each of these across hundreds of builds, which is why a fix usually takes an hour rather than a week of guessing. Design, development, ecommerce and SEO all sit in-house, so a problem that crosses from one into another does not bounce between vendors.

You get one senior contact who knows your site, and you own everything — code, hosting access, admin accounts. If you leave, you take it all with you.

We maintain sites for businesses in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Halifax and across Canada, and some for 10+ years.

300 +
Sites on maintenance plans
19 yrs
Since 2007
30 +
Industry awards
4.9 ★
Google rating
google
4.9 ★
Google Reviews
clutch
4.8 ★
Clutch Reviews
Faq

Website maintenance questions answered

The questions we hear most before someone signs up.

For a WordPress business website, maintenance runs from $65 to $325 a month, depending on the size of the site and how much ongoing work it needs.

  • Essential: from $65/mo — security, updates and backups, priced by site size.
  • Growth: from $195/mo — adds monthly content and fix hours, staging and speed checks.
  • Priority: from $325/mo — for large sites, stores and businesses with insurer requirements.

Annual plans are paid upfront at 10% off, which works out to $2106–$3510 a year. There is a longer breakdown of the costs in our maintenance FAQ.

Doing it yourself costs nothing but time — until an update breaks the site, or one that was skipped lets malware in. A cleanup after a hack typically costs more than a year of maintenance, before you count the lost enquiries and the hours your team spends on it.

Every plan covers WordPress core, plugin and theme updates, security monitoring, daily offsite backups, uptime monitoring and a monthly report. Growth and Priority add monthly hours for content changes and fixes, staging-tested updates, speed checks, and faster response. The full list is in the plans above.

Probably — the sites that get hacked are usually the ones that seemed fine. If your site is a few pages, has very few plugins, and someone on your team runs updates every month, you can manage without us. If nobody owns that job, a plan is the cheaper option.

Hosting is the server your site lives on. Maintenance is the work done on the site itself — updates, security, backups, fixes. Most hosts keep the server running but will not touch your WordPress install. You can add managed hosting to any of our plans for one bill and one team.

At least monthly, and sooner when a security release comes out. We check for updates on a set schedule and apply critical security patches as they are published rather than waiting for the next cycle.

Yes — a large share of our plans are sites we did not build. Every takeover starts with a one-time audit, from $130, to find what is outdated or already broken and bring it up to current. Monthly maintenance starts once the site is in a state we can keep healthy.

Yes. We take on one-off repairs — malware cleanup, broken forms, speed problems, errors after an update — quoted before we start. Plenty of clients start that way and sign up for a plan later.

On a plan, we usually know before you do. We restore from a clean backup or remove the infection, close the hole that let it in, and request removal of any Google warning. When we took on a hacked Winnipeg site, the cleanup and warning removal took three days.

Yes. Insurers increasingly ask law firms and other businesses handling client data to show their website is patched, backed up, and protected by MFA. We keep the records, and when an insurer’s security scan flags a website issue, we fix it and report back. We provide the evidence; the policy decision stays with your insurer.

Yes. WooCommerce stores sit on the 50+ pages tier of Essential or on Growth and Priority, with updates tested on staging and checkout checked after every release. We do not cover Shopify on these plans.

Monthly plans have a three-month minimum, then continue month to month. Annual plans are paid upfront at 20% off. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time, and each plan covers one website.

Yes, on Growth and Priority. Hours you do not use one month carry into the next, so a quiet month pays for a busier one.

Yes, on both. We maintain sites across Canada, from Vancouver to Halifax, and the work is all done remotely. Most of what we maintain is WordPress and WooCommerce; Drupal, Joomla, and custom-built sites are quoted on request.

Get started

Hand over your website maintenance and stop thinking about it.

Send us your website address and tell us what is bothering you about it. We will come back within one business day with the plan that fits, or a quote for fixing it first.

300+ sites maintained · Everything in-house · You own it all

647-812-5125 hello@aretesoftware.ca

    We will never share your details.

    arete logo

    An award-winning B2B web design and digital marketing agency in Toronto & Ottawa. Building, growing, and being found across Canada and the US since 2007.

    Start a Project ↗
    Arete Build
    Web DesignWebsite AccessibilityIndustriesCustom WordPressUX/UI DesignBranding & CreativeShopify & Shopify PlusWooCommerceMigrations
    Arete Search
    SEOAI Search (GEO/AEO)Technical SEOContentGoogle AdsMeta & Paid SocialPaid Media & CRO
    Arete Care
    Website MaintenanceSupport & RetainersCROAuditsAboutOur WorkIndustriesResourcesContact

    Toronto
    1 Yonge Street, Suite 1801
    Toronto, ON M5E 1W7

    Ottawa
    502 Langelier Avenue
    Ottawa, ON K1W 0E9

    Get in touch
    hello@aretesoftware.ca647-812-5125
    The Arete Brief

    Monthly B2B web, SEO & AI-search insights. Free.

    © 2026 Arete Soft Labs Inc. All Rights Reserved. · Privacy · Sitemap
    linkedininstagramfacebookx