WordPress Website Maintenance & Care Packages

Yes, we take daily and weekly off-site backups to ensure that we can restore your site to a safe working configuration if the need arises.

Our aim is to prevent things going wrong in the first place. Just like you maintain your car, you also have to care for your website. This gives it the best chance to prevent things going wrong. We can’t promise that your site won’t be hacked… However, if something does go wrong, we will have backups to restore from and will work with your hosting provider to rectify the problem.

We always take time to understand your requirements as best we can before we start making any changes to your site. If we think the work will go over the allocated time included in our care plans each month, we will always provide an estimate of how long it will take. You can then make a choice if you would like to proceed.

Our care plans are designed first and foremost for clients that we have built or redesigned sites for.

If you have a website that you would like us to care for (that we did not build or redesign, or if we did build it but it has been over 1 year), we will need to conduct a full site audit to check for any existing or potential issues. From this, we can put together a list of issues and suggested improvements that can be discussed with you. Depending on the outcome, this may be worked on over the next few months.

This full site audit is charged as a fixed 3-hour fee. If any serious issues are uncovered, these may be needed to be quoted on separately.

If you have a simple site and it takes less than 3 hours to complete the full site audit, then any remaining time left over can be used for minor site updates and content changes in the first month we care for your site.

While we encourage website owners to keep their sites updated, if you are on one of our website care plans, then please leave this job to us. We take special care in keeping websites up-to-date by performing backups and before-and-after checks to make sure that everything is working as it should. We also keep track of all the updates, so that if something does not go as planned, we have a record of what was done so that tracking down the issue is easier.

In addition to this, some updates and plugins require special attention (major version updates to plugins and themes, and WordPress core updates). We have special procedures for these involving testing the updates on development servers and sites, to highlight any issues.

We also run performance and security scans. If we notice that performance has degraded, then since we have an accurate record of the work that has been performed, we can more easily find the source of the issue.

All this is included in our monthly website care plans, so you don’t have to worry.

There can be a variety of reasons for your website may appear to be down.

Firstly, you may want to check your own internet connection. Try browsing other sites.

You can also check your site on Is It Down Right Now. This will advise if it is just you, or if it is down for everyone. If it is down for just you, try clearing your browser cache and cookies, and also reboot your pc and modem.

If it is down for everyone, then send us a support ticket (although we will probably know about it already due to our monitoring systems).

If it is after-hours, then you may want to call or send a support ticket directly to your hosting provider. They will be able to help to diagnose the problem.

If you have been made aware that your website has been hacked, then let us know immediately by lodging a support ticket.

We will get in touch with your hosting company to discuss their protocol for websites that have been compromised. They should perform scans to confirm.

If a problem is confirmed, we can perform restoration from previous clean backups.

If problems arise that can’t be easily fixed, or if the hosting company recommends using a 3^rd party service to clean the website and provide additional security, then we will be in touch to advise of the details, as this is beyond what is covered under our care plans.

Keeping your website theme, plugins and WordPress core up-to-date, and by running regular backups to restore from in the event that things do go wrong, is the best way to prevent your website from becoming compromised. Unfortunately, this does not remove 100% of the risk… however, you can rest assured knowing that we will help you in case anything does go wrong.

There are a number of reasons why your website may be slow to load.

Use of large images

We have talked about optimising your images in a previous blog post. Basically, images can really slow down your site. Instead of just uploading full resolution images to your website, it’s a good idea to reduce the size (pixels and quality) so that they load quickly on your site.

Loading external content

If you have load ads, social media feeds, videos, or images from other websites on your site, this all adds to the load time of your site. It’s best to minimise the calls to external sites, and only load content from your web server.

Plugins and themes

Updates to plugins and themes may make your site run slower. As part of our care plans, we check the performance of your website. If there has been a degradation, it may be able to be traced back to a plugin or theme update.

Some plugins are just slow. We can do investigative work to identify which plugins may be causing issues and make recommendations on alternatives. Please get in touch for a quote.