Website care plan: what monitoring to include

You sell a monthly care plan, and your client wants to see what the fee pays for. OctoPing checks each client site on a schedule you set, alerts you when something breaks, and sends the client a monthly summary of their sites' uptime, outages and expiry dates.

What a care plan usually contains

The Admin Bar describes a care plan, also called a website maintenance plan, as “a recurring service that’s offered by web agencies” to keep client sites secure, updated and performing well after launch. Its author, Kyle Van Deusen, names backups, software updates, security and uptime monitoring as the essentials, and reporting among the optional deliverables. The article was published March 13, 2025.

On price, the author says that after looking at 100+ sites it was “rare to see anything under $75”, with most between $100 and $150 and the top end “around $250”. The figures leave out plans that bundled the website or SEO, and the article doesn't say whether those figures are monthly.

OctoPing covers the monitoring and sends the client a monthly summary of their sites. The updates, backups and security work stay with your own tools, and OctoPing tells you when their results go wrong: the site is down, a certificate is about to lapse or a backup job misses its check-in.

Monitoring lines for a care plan

Every site can use all the checks. This is how each care plan line maps to a check, and whether a new site starts with it on:

Heartbeats don't use up site allowance. Ping a heartbeat only after the job succeeds, because OctoPing records that its URL was requested and can't tell whether the job did its work. The heartbeat guide shows how.

Showing the client the work

A status page lists the client's sites with 90 days of history, the incidents you post and maintenance running or starting within 7 days, with the client's logo and colors. Add the client's email as a contact and they get the alerts for those sites and a summary at the start of each month. Heartbeats aren't in the summary. The client reporting page and the contact guide cover the emails.

One group per client

Give each client's sites a group of their own, and the group filter at the top of the websites list narrows it to one client. A Viewer sees every site in the workspace, including other clients', so give clients a status page and contacts instead of a login.

Maintenance windows for update work

Updates can take a site down for a few minutes. Schedule a maintenance window for the update night. While it runs, down and slow alerts are held back, the time stays out of uptime and outages, and the client's status page lists the window by name from 7 days before it starts, so write the name for the client. Certificate, domain expiry and change alerts still send. Clients aren't emailed about a window, so tell them yourself.

What monitoring costs per client

Plans price by site, and each URL you add counts as one, including a www address beside the bare domain. The plans and billing docs list what counts as a site. The table divides each plan's price by its sites and prices an example client with 3 sites. That count is only an example, so use the number for each of your own clients.

These figures assume the plan's whole site allowance is in use, since a plan with unused sites costs the same. Figures are rounded once from the plan price, so a per-site price times 3 can differ from the example client's cost by a cent. Annual billing lowers each figure, and the pricing page shows 2 months free.

Set up a care plan client

1. Add the client's URLs as sites in a new group, following the first site guide.
2. Turn on DNS, hosting and robots.txt checks for the domains where a move or a block would hurt. The guides cover host migrations, robots.txt blocks and domain expiry.
3. Create a heartbeat for each backup or scheduled job.
4. Build the client's status page and add them as a contact.

Seats and plans are covered on website monitoring for agencies.

Who builds OctoPing

OctoPing is built by Axiolo, which uses it to watch its clients' marketing websites and landing pages. The checks, the client status pages and the monthly summaries are the ones Axiolo relies on for that work.

How it fits the price

Count your clients' URLs to pick a plan. The checks, status pages and maintenance windows described here come with every plan, and allowances such as sites, seats and history differ. Plans start at $19 a month for 20 sites. See pricing for the full list.

Every account starts with a 14-day free trial. No card required. Start your 14-day trial and add one care plan client's sites to see it working.