Developing Themes for WordPress: Part 5

Luke Perrie

So far I have gone over a lot of the basic requirements for putting together a WordPress theme. Some stuff is pretty simple and other stuff might take a bit more time for you to wrap your head around. All in all, if you follow these tutorials you will be on the right track to completing your first customizable theme for WordPress. During my WordCamp presentation, people asked me about getting their themes out there. I think the best way to discuss this is to tell you exactly how I did it, since it seemed to work for me. I started working with WordPress about 5 years ago. I released my first free theme back in 2008. It was Magazine Basic. I tried to develop a theme that had multiple easy-to-use options so users could configure it to their liking and could each create something unique. As of today, it has been downloaded 143,114 times from the WordPress.org theme directory. Within the first week of its release, it had so many downloads that I wanted to release another theme. So I did. Before I knew it, I had a lot of requests for extra features, so I thought, “Why not see if I could sell some premium versions with as many extra features as possible?” Of course, I didn’t want to go overboard, so I developed some theme options that I thought would please a multitude of users. That’s when I started Themes by bavotasan.com.

Making Money

There is no sure fire way to make money selling Premium WordPress Themes, but there are certain steps you can take that might help you cash in on the demand for high quality themes. Building a great theme and giving it away for free by including it in the WordPress.org directory is the first step into making a name for yourself in the community. People who use WordPress are very big on the fact that it’s free and open source. So give them something free and open source as well. The better your theme, the more people will download it. Once your theme gets downloaded a few times, you will see that users will start to email you with questions about bugs, features they would like to see, and both positive and negative feedback on your work. These are all great things. The open discussion with your end user is invaluable. The information you gather will help point you in the right direction for how you should develop your theme on the next level: The Premium Theme level. Premium Themes usually offer more control over every aspect of customization. They can have higher quality designs, multiple skins, different layouts and any other options you can imagine. Users expect something more from a Premium Theme and what better way to find out what that is exactly than by keeping an open communication with people that have already downloaded your free product? Take a look at what other Premium Theme sites are offering by going to https://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/. That is the WordPress.org commercial theme listing page. Once you release your themes, getting your site listed on this page is a must. But you need to follow the guidelines from part 1 to a tee in order to qualify. Once you are listed on this page, people will check you out. Whether they buy your product or not will all depend on its quality and features.

Translation Ready

I had some questions about making your theme translation ready during my presentation, so that is obviously something that people are interested in. WordPress has a codex page dedicated to making your theme or plugin ready for internationalization. Read it at https://codex.wordpress.org/I18n_for_WordPress_Developers. Once you have prepared your files using the gettext libraries, you can create a .po file using this great online resource: https://www.icanlocalize.com/tools/php_scanner. Create a languages folder in your theme and place your .po file in it. Then use the following code in your functions.php file:

// Make theme available for translation
// Translations can be filed in the /languages/ directory
load_theme_textdomain('theme_name', TEMPLATEPATH . '/languages');

$locale = get_locale();
$locale_file = TEMPLATEPATH . "/languages/$locale.php";
if ( is_readable( $locale_file ) )
	require_once( $locale_file );

Replace theme_name with the string you used in the gettext statements; it should be the name of your theme in lowercase with no spaces.

Working Demos

Putting together a demos site with the latest version of your themes allows users to test them out in a live environment. This is absolutely one of the best ways to promote your products. I am currently rebuilding my demo site using the WordPress 3.0 multi-site feature. Now each of my themes will be demoed on their own site, which means I can make sure that their greatest features are front and center, and I can customize my content to show where each theme stands out.

Customer Support

If you don’t support your themes, no one will want to use them because they won’t be able to rely on you for fixing bugs, upgrading as WordPress upgrades and day to day questions about how your theme works. Whether you do this through email, the WordPress.org forum or your own site, it doesn’t matter. Just as long as you do it. This help builds confidence in your users to try out other products you have developed. I spend a lot of time in my support forum responding to questions, and more often then not, things come up that I would have never thought of. Different ways to use my themes, simple features that might blow people away, or even just bugs that might only occur for 1% of my user base. I need to know this stuff. It helps to understand my customers, and in turn build better themes.

Conclusion

There are probably tons of things I might have missed along the way, but I think these tutorials will really get you moving in the right direction. If you have any questions, or feel like I didn’t go into enough detail about something, please let me know. I’ll do my best to keep things updated and will add in anything that you might think is necessary (or maybe I’ll save that for the book, wink-wink). Part 1: Guidelines for Developing a WordPress Theme Part 2: Basic Template Files Part 3: Understand The WordPress Loop Part 4: Adding Theme Options Part 5: Making Money

Protecting a good investment image by Arpad Nagy-Bagoly, provided by Pixmac.

WordPress maintenance vs management is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the WordPress services market, and most agencies actively make it worse.
Quick answer: In the WordPress maintenance vs management comparison, maintenance is the technical upkeep that keeps a site running — updates, backups, security scanning, uptime monitoring. Management includes all of that and adds ownership of the site’s direction and performance. Maintenance keeps the site alive. Management is accountable for what it does.
Most providers reduce WordPress maintenance vs management to two tiers sitting side by side on a pricing page. Pick one.
That framing is wrong, and it is why so many businesses sign a contract expecting one thing and receive the other. Maintenance and management are not siblings. Management is the superset that contains maintenance. Every genuine management engagement includes the full maintenance task list. No maintenance plan includes management.
Get the WordPress maintenance vs management decision wrong and you end up with a site that is perfectly updated, perfectly backed up, perfectly secure — and going nowhere.
WordPress maintenance vs management at a glance
WordPress Maintenance WordPress Management
Core question Is the site working? Is the site working for the business?
Posture Reactive and scheduled Proactive and strategic
Who decides what changes You do. The provider executes. The provider recommends. You approve.
Scope Updates, backups, security scans, uptime monitoring Everything in maintenance, plus performance, content, SEO, conversion, roadmap
Monthly deliverable A completed-tasks report A performance report with recommendations
Measured by Uptime, patch currency, backup success Traffic, rankings, conversions, revenue
Accountable for outcomes No Yes
Typical US cost $50–$200/mo $250–$2,000+/mo
If you skip it The site breaks The site quietly stops competing
WordPress maintenance vs management: the 7 critical differences
Seven differences do the real work in WordPress maintenance vs management. Everything else is a variation on them.
1. Detection. Under maintenance, you notice problems first. Under management, your provider does.
2. Decision-making. Maintenance executes your instructions. Management forms its own recommendations.
3. Accountability. Maintenance is accountable for tasks completed. Management is accountable for business outcomes.
4. Scope boundaries. Maintenance has a fixed task list. Management has a roadmap that changes with your goals.
5. Reporting. Maintenance reports what was done. Management reports what happened and what to do next.
6. Judgement. Maintenance keeps your existing plugins updated. Management questions whether you should be running them at all.
7. Direction. Maintenance preserves the status quo. Management moves the site somewhere.
What WordPress maintenance actually covers
WordPress maintenance is the recurring technical work required to keep an installation secure, current and available. Whether you run the list in-house or buy WordPress maintenance services from an agency, that list barely changes month to month:
Core, plugin and theme updates, staged and tested before they touch production
Offsite backups with periodic restore tests — an untested backup is a guess
Security scanning and malware monitoring, plus firewall rules and login hardening
Uptime monitoring with alerting
Database optimisation — post revisions, expired transients, orphaned tables
Broken link and 404 monitoring
PHP compatibility checks ahead of host-forced version bumps
A monthly report confirming what was done
That is the whole category. It is genuinely valuable and genuinely finite.
The defining characteristic is that the provider is not deciding anything. If your plugin roster is wrong, maintenance keeps the wrong plugins updated. If your homepage does not convert, maintenance keeps a non-converting homepage online with excellent uptime.
What WordPress management adds on top
Management contains the full maintenance list, then adds responsibility for direction and performance. That is the line between buying a maintenance plan and buying website management services: one keeps the site current, the other is answerable for what it achieves.
You cannot manage a site you are not maintaining. You can absolutely maintain a site nobody is managing — and a great many businesses are doing exactly that.
Management adds performance ownership, content and publishing, SEO oversight, conversion work, roadmap planning, vendor coordination, and reporting that ties site metrics to business outcomes.
The one test that settles WordPress maintenance vs management
Ignore the feature list. Ask one question:
When something on your site should change, who notices first?
Under maintenance, you notice. You find the broken contact form when a customer complains, email your provider, and they fix it — billing you if it falls outside scope. Detection sits with you. That is not a failure; it is how maintenance is designed.
Under management, your provider notices, and comes to you with a diagnosis before you have seen the problem.
Detection order matters more than response time. If your provider’s first awareness of a problem is your email, a two-hour response SLA is irrelevant. The delay already happened, and it was measured in days.
Why “my host handles updates” is dangerously wrong
This is the costliest misunderstanding inside the WordPress maintenance vs management question, and the documentation is partly to blame.
Plugin and theme auto-updates are off by default in WordPress. The explicit statement lives on make.wordpress.org rather than user-facing docs. There is a setting called plugins_auto_update_enabled that defaults to true, which is easy to misread as auto-updates being on. It only controls whether the interface elements display.
More significantly: any plugin or theme not hosted in the WordPress.org directory receives no automatic updates at all. The update check is a single request matched by directory slug, so a commercial product produces no result. If you run a premium theme or paid plugins — and most business sites do — that entire portion of your attack surface is invisible to every automatic mechanism in the platform.
The scale is not small. Patchstack recorded 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, a 42% year-on-year rise, with 91% in plugins. (Patchstack, State of WordPress Security in 2026)
Here is why that lands on the management side of the WordPress maintenance vs management line. Patching on schedule is a checklist task. Deciding which plugins are worth their attack surface, keeping a tracked manual process for every commercial product the auto-updater cannot see, and noticing when a vendor has abandoned a plugin — those are judgement calls. No checklist produces them.
One honest caveat. The widely repeated claim that plugin vulnerabilities cause most WordPress compromises is not currently sourced. The 91% figure describes the vulnerability catalogue, not breach causes. The most recent hacked-site telemetry, Sucuri’s 2023 report, found 13.97% of compromised sites had a vulnerable component present — presence, not cause. Meanwhile Wordfence blocked 55 billion password-hacking attempts against 48 billion vulnerability-targeting requests in 2024, and both vendors name stolen credentials as the rising intrusion source. (Wordfence, 2024 Annual WordPress Security Report)
Which is itself the argument. Maintenance patches. Management looks at where the evidence points and fixes your credential controls too.
WordPress maintenance vs management in five real scenarios
Scenario Maintenance only Full management
Critical plugin vulnerability disclosed Patched next scheduled cycle Identified, staged, tested, deployed — including commercial plugins no auto-updater reaches
Traffic spike overloads the server Site slows; you hear it from visitors Load monitored, resources scaled before users notice
Rankings decline over three months You find it in Analytics weeks later Flagged in the monthly report with a fix
Contact forms stop capturing leads You find out when prospects stop calling Conversion tracking catches it and escalates
Seasonal campaign needs a new feature You request a quote; billed separately Proposed proactively as part of the roadmap
That is WordPress maintenance vs management in practice: maintenance keeps the engine running, management drives the car somewhere.
Where hosting and support fit into WordPress maintenance vs management
Managed WordPress hosting covers the server: infrastructure uptime, server-side caching, platform security, sometimes automatic core updates. It does not cover anything inside your install. If a plugin update breaks your checkout, your host will tell you that is not their problem.
WordPress support services are reactive help on request. Something breaks, you open a ticket, someone fixes it. Support is measured in response time. Maintenance is measured in prevention.
The clean hierarchy:
Hosting — where the site runs
Maintenance — keeping what runs healthy
Support — fixing what breaks
Management — all of the above, plus deciding what should change and owning the result
WordPress maintenance vs management: which does your business need?
Your decision is not which to pick. It is how far up the hierarchy your site needs to go.
WordPress maintenance vs management: choose maintenance when…
The site is primarily informational, changing infrequently
It is not central to lead generation or revenue
Someone internal can handle edits and recognise breakage
You accept being first to notice problems, because the stakes are lower
Paying management rates here is a waste. Buy good maintenance and spend the difference elsewhere.
WordPress maintenance vs management: choose management when…
The site supports lead generation, ecommerce or donations
Downtime or slow performance has material financial impact
You cannot describe the site’s roadmap for the next year
Multiple integrations create dependencies nobody is watching
Nobody internally owns the site’s performance
This is the most expensive gap we see: a site receiving excellent maintenance, no downtime in two years, and not one ranking position gained. The provider did nothing wrong — nobody asked them to.
If you are losing leads because something broke and nobody noticed for days, you do not have a maintenance problem. You have a management gap.
Start with maintenance, upgrade later when…
You are early, budget is tight, and the site is not yet a primary channel. Set a trigger and revisit. The mistake is not starting with maintenance — it is staying there for four years while expecting management outcomes.
Five questions that settle WordPress maintenance vs management before you sign
Who decides what changes on my site? “You tell us” means maintenance.
How do you detect issues, and how fast? Management describes monitoring, alerting and SLAs.
Do you test updates in staging first? Lower tiers push straight to production.
What is in the monthly report? Completed tasks is maintenance. Metrics with recommendations is management.
What is out of scope, and what does it cost? A provider who cannot answer quickly has not thought about it.
Red flags
A plan marketed as management, priced at maintenance rates, with no strategic work
No proactive monitoring beyond a basic uptime check
No tracked process for commercial plugins and themes
The provider has never contacted you first. You always initiate.
Audit which side of WordPress maintenance vs management you are paying for
Review the last three issues. Did your provider flag them, or did you?
Check six months of reports. Tasks, or metrics with recommendations?
Count your commercial plugins and themes — those get nothing automatically.
Map the site’s business role. Revenue or leads means maintenance alone is insufficient.
Match spend to need. Do not overpay on a brochure site; do not underpay on a revenue site.

WordPress maintenance vs management FAQ

What is the difference between WordPress maintenance vs management?

Maintenance is scheduled technical upkeep — updates, backups, security scanning, uptime monitoring. Management includes every maintenance task and adds ownership of performance, content, SEO and business outcomes. Maintenance sits inside management rather than beside it, which is why every management plan includes maintenance but no maintenance plan includes management.

Is WordPress management the same as managed WordPress hosting?

No. Managed hosting is a server product covering infrastructure, caching and platform security. Management is a service relationship covering everything inside your site, including strategy. You can have both, and most active business sites should.

How do I know which one I am currently buying?

Over the past six months, has your provider contacted you about a performance decline or a ranking drop before you noticed? Do reports contain recommendations, or only completed tasks? If the answer to both is no, you are receiving maintenance regardless of what the invoice says.

Can I start with maintenance and upgrade to management later?

Yes, and many businesses should. As traffic and revenue dependence grow, the cost of nobody noticing problems first grows with them. Most providers offer stackable tiers that make the transition straightforward.

How much does WordPress maintenance cost compared to management?

In the US market, WordPress maintenance plans typically run $50–$200 per month. Management generally starts around $250 and rises with scope, commonly reaching $1,000–$2,000 where the provider owns SEO, content and conversion work.

Why is maintenance important if my host already does updates?

Because plugin and theme auto-updates are off by default in WordPress, and anything outside the WordPress.org directory receives no automatic updates at all. Most business sites run at least one commercial theme or paid plugin, so the platform’s automatic machinery cannot reach a meaningful part of the attack surface.

Can I maintain my WordPress site myself?

Yes, and for a simple site it is reasonable. Budget two to four hours a month. The failure mode is not incompetence — it is the third consecutive month where something more urgent came up.

How quickly should a provider notice and respond?

With proper monitoring, critical issues should be detected within minutes and a six-business-hour response is a reasonable benchmark. But detection matters more than response. If your provider’s first awareness comes from your email, the delay already happened.

In WordPress maintenance vs management, what happens if I only pay for maintenance?

The site stays secure, current and online. It will not improve. Over two or three years, competitors actively managing their sites will out-rank and out-convert you, and your maintenance reports will show green the entire time.

WordPress maintenance vs management: the short version

The WordPress maintenance vs management question comes down to this: maintenance answers “is the site working?” Management answers “is the site working for the business?” One is contained inside the other, and confusing them is the most common reason businesses feel let down by a provider who is technically delivering exactly what was purchased.

Work out which question you need answered, then buy accordingly.

Luke Perrie

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	WordPress Maintenance	WordPress Management
Core question	Is the site working?	Is the site working for the business?
Posture	Reactive and scheduled	Proactive and strategic
Who decides what changes	You do. The provider executes.	The provider recommends. You approve.
Scope	Updates, backups, security scans, uptime monitoring	Everything in maintenance, plus performance, content, SEO, conversion, roadmap
Monthly deliverable	A completed-tasks report	A performance report with recommendations
Measured by	Uptime, patch currency, backup success	Traffic, rankings, conversions, revenue
Accountable for outcomes	No	Yes
Typical US cost	$50–$200/mo	$250–$2,000+/mo
If you skip it	The site breaks	The site quietly stops competing

Scenario	Maintenance only	Full management
Critical plugin vulnerability disclosed	Patched next scheduled cycle	Identified, staged, tested, deployed — including commercial plugins no auto-updater reaches
Traffic spike overloads the server	Site slows; you hear it from visitors	Load monitored, resources scaled before users notice
Rankings decline over three months	You find it in Analytics weeks later	Flagged in the monthly report with a fix
Contact forms stop capturing leads	You find out when prospects stop calling	Conversion tracking catches it and escalates
Seasonal campaign needs a new feature	You request a quote; billed separately	Proposed proactively as part of the roadmap