Churches - WordPress Maintenance
Your church website publishes new content every single week: a new sermon, an updated event, a giving campaign. Weekly WordPress maintenance keeps your giving forms, sermon library, and event calendar working reliably without pulling your staff away from ministry.
Overview
A new sermon every week, events that change, ministry pages that get updated, giving campaigns that go live. Every content addition is also a potential point of failure if the underlying WordPress installation isn't kept current and tested.
Online giving now accounts for 50% of all church donations, and 43% of digital giving transactions are recurring automatic gifts. A giving form powered by an unpatched plugin is a real liability, not a hypothetical one.
Most churches manage their websites with a combination of volunteer effort and stretched staff time. WordPress maintenance doesn't happen on a schedule when someone has a quiet Tuesday. It happens when something breaks.
Prayer request forms, pastoral counseling inquiries, and donor records pass through your WordPress site. This isn't marketing data. It's information congregants trust you to protect.
What's included
Updates
Every update is applied and tested for compatibility before and after it goes live. We don't apply updates and hope for the best, especially on a site with a giving form running through it.
Backups
Your site and database are backed up daily to an offsite location. If something goes wrong, we restore from a clean backup without losing your sermon archive, giving records, or member content.
Reliability
We monitor your site 24/7 and get an alert the moment it goes down. You shouldn't find out your site is down from a congregant. We find out first and act immediately.
Security
Login protection, brute force mitigation, malware scanning, and SSL certificate monitoring. Church websites are targeted by automated attacks just like any other site.
Performance
We track page load times on your key pages, like the homepage, giving page, and sermon archive, and flag degradation before it drives visitors away on mobile.
Accessibility
New sermon content without alt text or new forms that break keyboard navigation are the kind of regressions that creep in over time. We flag issues before they compound.
A plugin conflict or outdated API integration breaks the donation flow silently. Congregants try to give and see an error. Recurring gifts fail, and you don't find out until donations drop and someone calls to report it, often days later.
An outdated plugin leaves a vulnerability. Google detects the compromise and flags your site as dangerous in search results, showing a browser warning to every visitor. Some of your congregation may never come back after seeing that warning.
API changes, plugin version conflicts, and expired SSL certificates cause silent failures on media-heavy pages. A first-time visitor trying to watch a service before attending gets a blank embed, and that failure erodes trust before you know it's happened.
Plans
Three tiers built around how much your site publishes and how many integrations it runs. We'll recommend the right one on the intake call.
Care
Solo pastors and small churches
Care+
Most churches
Care Pro
Multi-campus and complex sites
Managed hosting starts at $99/mo.
Real numbers
50% of all church donations now come via card or online methods, and 43% of digital giving transactions are recurring automatic gifts. If your giving form goes down, even for a day, you're not just losing a one-time transaction. You're interrupting a congregant's giving habit, potentially during a stewardship campaign or year-end giving push.
Sermon libraries grow every week too. A page that loads fine at 50 sermon entries can slow noticeably at 500 if it hasn't been optimized for performance over time. Video embeds rely on API connections to YouTube or Vimeo, and podcast feeds require valid XML that search engines and podcast apps depend on. We monitor performance across your key pages so media-heavy content keeps loading fast, not just at launch.
Traffic isn't steady through the week, either. It clusters around service times and major events, and a site that hasn't been tuned for performance shows the strain exactly when the most people are watching or trying to give.
Deeper reads pulled from our blog, all written with churches in mind.
Good to know
Our maintenance plans for churches start at $79/month for a basic Care plan and go up to $299/month for multi-campus or complex integration environments. The right plan depends on your site's size, the giving and ChMS integrations running on it, and how much content your team updates each week. We'll walk through the right fit in your strategy call.
Yes. We take over maintenance for WordPress church websites built by other developers, volunteers, or agencies. We start with a site audit to understand the current state, identify any immediate security or compatibility issues, and bring it up to a stable baseline before starting the ongoing maintenance cycle.
We catch it before you do. Every update cycle includes compatibility testing on your key functionality: giving forms, sermon embeds, event calendars, and ChMS integrations. If an update breaks something in our testing environment, we investigate and resolve it before applying it to the live site. If something unexpected breaks on the live site, our uptime monitoring flags it quickly and we resolve it as a priority.
Volunteer WordPress management works until it doesn't. WordPress vulnerabilities don't wait for your volunteer's schedule, and plugins release security patches on no particular timetable. When something breaks on a Saturday night before services, the urgency is real but the availability isn't. A maintenance plan gives you a team that monitors and responds to your site's health as a primary responsibility, not a favor squeezed in around other commitments.
Yes. ADA and WCAG requirements don't end at launch. New sermon content without alt text, new event pages without proper heading structure, and new forms that break keyboard navigation are the kinds of regressions that creep in as content gets added over time. Our Care Pro plan includes accessibility regression monitoring as part of the quarterly site health review, so issues get flagged before they compound.
Content edits aren't bundled into the base plan. Sermon uploads, event page updates, announcement swaps, and ministry page copy edits are scoped a la carte at our hourly rate. For churches with a predictable weekly content cadence, we can put together a support retainer sized to your actual volume so it's not a burden on pastoral or administrative staff.
Still have questions? We're happy to answer them, let's connect.
Support
The people who build your site are the people who maintain it. You're not handed off to a rotating helpdesk that's never seen your project or your integrations.
When a giving form breaks the night before a campaign, you need a person who understands the stakes, not a generic support ticket sitting in a queue behind unrelated requests.
We provide documentation specific to your site so your staff can handle simple updates themselves, and call on us for everything else.
Tell us about your project and we'll take a look. No pushy sales, no wasted calls.