Three ways a WordPress site gets looked after, and they are not the same job. Maintenance is the routine that keeps it running. Security is what you want before somebody gets in, or the morning after they did. Speed is keeping it quick, and it is already inside the plan.










Most sites need the first one and never the second. Buying both because a supplier bundled them is how a small site ends up paying for a service it will not use. So here is the line, and it is a short one.
The reason this is worth buying from a studio rather than a plugin is that somebody reads the result. An update that breaks a layout is worse than a late one, and a backup nobody has ever restored is a folder, not a backup.
“Our old website was years behind the business. Daniel rebuilt it from scratch and now runs our SEO — one point of contact, and things move without chasing.”

“Daniel set up our store and SEO completely. Within 3 months we were selling consistently online — he handles everything.”

Nothing, they are two names for the same thing. «Care plan» is what most studios call it; maintenance is what it does. Here it is $99 a month per site, with a normal WooCommerce shop included, and there is a page explaining exactly what happens each month.
Usually not. The hardening that matters month to month is already inside the $99, and the one-off audit is for when you want the whole thing checked properly or something has already gone wrong. If you do not need it, I will tell you on the call.
With the look, which costs nothing. A cleanup is priced after seeing the site, because the honest answer depends on how deep it went. What you should not do is buy a monthly plan and hope it cleans itself: maintenance keeps a healthy site healthy, it does not remove a backdoor somebody left behind.
That is most of this work. Server and panel access first, a look, and then it goes on the same routine as everything else. A WordPress login on its own is not enough to keep a site alive, and any studio that says otherwise has not had to restore one.
Also on this site WordPress maintenance · WordPress security · Website speed · WordPress security and speed basics
One look, no charge: what state it is in, which of the two you actually need, and what it would cost. If it is fine, I will say that too.