Somebody quotes you 200 a month for website maintenance and you reasonably wonder what could possibly need doing every month on a site that does not change.
Fair question. Here is the actual list.
Updates
WordPress core, plugins, theme. These come out constantly and a lot of them are security patches. Skip them for six months and you are running known holes that automated scanners are actively looking for.
The work is not clicking update. The work is doing it somewhere safe first and catching the one time in twenty that something breaks, before your customers find it.
Backups you have actually tested
Off the server, in a place a hack cannot reach, kept for enough versions to go back past the day something went wrong quietly.
And restored at least once, on purpose, to confirm the thing works. A backup nobody has ever restored is a folder you feel good about. Not a backup.
Monitoring and security
Something checking every few minutes whether the site is up, so you find out from a text and not from a customer.
Plus a firewall, brute force protection, and somebody who notices when the login page is getting hammered from an IP in another hemisphere.
Hosting that is not four dollars
Real resources, current PHP, SSL that renews itself. Frequently bundled into the plan, which is honestly the right way to do it, because then one person owns the whole stack and there is nobody to blame.
Edit time, specifically stated
This is the part that varies most between shops and the part you should pin down. How much time, what counts, what happens if you do not use it.
Front Porch at 79 is hosting and watching. Workshop at 149 is that plus ninety minutes of edits a month. Studio at 249 is three hours and actual design work.
If you have gone three months without using your edit time, I would rather move you down a tier than let it sit there. That is the difference between a care plan and a subscription you forgot about.
How to spot padding
Ask for the list. If it is five plain lines, good. If it is twelve items with words like proactive and holistic in them, somebody is filling space.
And ask what happens when the site goes down at 8pm on a Saturday. The answer to that is what you are actually buying.