WordPress Maintenance Service

Always Up to Date

With updates to WordPress, plugins and themes required on a regular basis, our tools perform "safe updates" including taking a backup beforehand.

Website Security

All websites are susceptible to hacking, redirection and malware attacks. We can monitor and protect your sites 24/7 to help prevent downtime and errors.

Support Plans

Your WordPress support plan can be tailored to meet your requirements. Select one of our plans listed below, or request a personalised quote.

Maintenance Plans

Pay annually for 15% discount

Starter Plan

£15 per month

Professional Plan

£20 per month

Professional Plus Plan

£30 per month

Performance Plan

£45 per month

Prices exclude VAT

Not quite what you were looking for?

Updates

WordPress releases security, performance, and functionality updates on a regular basis to improve the WordPress software and fix any flaws discovered - a bit like Windows updates.  Your themes and plugins that give functionality to your site, will need updating for the same reasons.  On the average site, one of your themes or plugins would require an update every day, and the core WordPress system would need updating roughly once a quarter.

It is important to back up the website prior to making any changes - the WordPress team can't guarantee every possible combination of WordPress version x theme x plugin will work.  At the last count there were over 57,000 plugins (Oct 2020).  If something were to go wrong and you didn't have a backup of your site, then you might be looking at serious development time to fix it.  Once the update has been applied, the website needs to be checked to make sure it still looks and works the way it was intended.

We have tools that can automatically perform “Safe Updates”.  They back up the site, and then check the pages once the updates are applied by checking the page code for errors.  The previous version will then be automatically rolled back if any issues are detected.

Backups

Just like backing up your important documents, your website needs backing up too.  How would you recover it if it were to be hacked, but you didn't have a backup?  Do you have a copy of the words or images used, or could you afford to pay again for development?

Website failure can occur due to errors from updating the software, server upgrades, hacking or malware - having a backup of your site enables quick recovery.  The longer your site displays an error or a spammy post, the more it will affect the page ranking and search visibility.

We would recommend taking a backup of your site at least monthly, if not more frequently for business critical or e-commerce websites.

Reporting

We produce quick and easy to read reports on your websites. These include details on when the site was backed up and how many updates have been made over the report period.

We would recommend a monthly report for small websites and a weekly one for larger or e-commerce website.

If the reports raise any questions we aim to answer these, and if your maintenance plan covers the work required, to fix the errors before sending the reports.

Security

Any public website will find malicious login attempts, where unauthorised users are trying to add malware or spam links, posts or pages. It's important that any default log in URLs and usernames are disabled, and any attempts to inject malware code are blocked.

WordPress is an open source platform (meaning the source code is freely available), and some plugin developers are not too selective about who they let access their source code.  Over the last year WordPress have listed multiple plugins as insecure and recommend they should not be used.

Our software enables us to restrict all these items, and scan to check that no files are amended without authorisation and notification.  The software will also safeguard any critical files that have the potential to be compromised.

Security Monitoring

This service reports any attempts to login or amend files, and provides details of where the attempt was made from.  It also logs authorised user access and what files the user has changed, for audit purposes.

Uptime Monitoring

Uptime monitoring reports whether your site is accessible from the internet.  Sometimes sites go offline due to a server issue at the web host, planned maintenance or other factors.

By monitoring the uptime of your website, it alerts us when it is offline, so that we can take remedial action – currently this is during business hours only.

Speed Optimisation

Website speed is important. If a visitor finds it takes too long to open a page, they will go elsewhere. Most search engines use website speed as a major factor to determine what position your website appears in search results.By monitoring the site speed, it is possible to fix speed issues as they occur.

Performance Monitoring

This enables us to report on how your website performs compared to other sites.  Performance monitoring is a combination of speed, readability and build quality, with recommendations on how to improve your overall performance.

SEO Optimisation

We will recommend changes to your site, to improve your search engine ranking.  This could be changing data in the background of the website (known as metadata), changing the way search engines crawl your site, or as simple as changing the site map that search engines use.

A list of full recommendations can be given to you upon request.

SEO Monitoring

This is a report on how many people look at your website and how long they stay, and will give your site a rating.

Monitoring SEO is important to make sure that your pages are still engaging to users, and to understand how the site is performing.

As over 10,000 new sites are being launched every day, our websites are constantly challenged to be the best and appeal to potential clients over and above other sites.

Google Analytics

Google offer a more in depth look at how websites perform.  Their analytics can be used to see where visitors come from, current search trends, what devices and apps people use to view your site, and a vast amount of other information.

Google uses algorithms to rank websites in searches, and trying to get the highest possible ranking in results is a specialist and time consuming task. Google Analytics can help with this.

About our website maintenance plans:

The reports we create provide insights for both us and our clients, as to what work should be completed on their sites.  While we try to undertake all repairs within the time allocated by our maintenance plans, some work will not be covered, so we will supply a separate quote for it, and a suggestion of how high a priority this should be.  It is then at your discretion whether you would like us to undertake the work or not.  Some optimisation will be completed by automatically by our tools, but for the best results a manual change may be required. 

Automated items such as backups and updates are checked manually to ensure they have been completed.  If a backup fails, we check why and resolve the issue if it is an easy fix – or notify you if it is not.

It must be noted that signing up for our maintenance service can lead to us quoting for extra work, but you are under no obligation to have this performed.

As always, if you have any questions about maintenance plans, or websites in general, please get in touch.