We use WordPress more often than any other content management software (CMS) on the market. It is open source and the impressive WordPress community continues to improve and update the software at very fast rate. Functionality and security updates are required to keep websites secure and robust.
Often, WordPress websites owners believe they will keep up with software updates but this fails to happen. Website owners get caught up with everything else, and software is not their focus. In doing so, they completely forget about keeping their website software updated and their data backed up.
But WordPress is just like any software used anywhere, such as your PC or your phone. WordPress needs to be regularly updated for functional and security updates. These updates aren’t made completely “friendly” for non-techie users, because this is actually tech work. If users fail to do so, they open themselves up to broken functionality, malware, and Google warnings of security issues. This is happening ALL the time. That is why it is wise to have a WordPress Care (or maintenance) agreement.
WordPress Care agreements provide peace of mind and security for your website while also protecting your online marketing efforts.
It is essential to any WordPress site’s performance to have assigned care/maintenance expertise responsible for the site’s operation.
In fact, we find much of our WordPress labor these days focused on maintenance, customization, updates, and review of plugins.
Once your site is set up on a self-hosted WordPress installation, you have a few options for your website:
Option A. You can count on luck by not doing anything – don’t back up, upgrade, or secure your site. Your recurring time commitment and cost can be practically nothing. But you have a MUCH higher chance of something going wrong, and it will cost you more money in the long run to fix it. You will also have the highest potential downtime with this option. This is, unfortunately, a too common choice among WordPress users. Non-maintained WordPress web sites are really a scourge for the entire WordPress community. They are a vector for systemic hacks and infections; and a waste of quality work – because developers that are fixing malfunctioning and/or infected sites are not working on improving functioning sites.
Option B. Hire someone to do it all for you. Back up and upgrade your site and manage security. If your backups are done properly, you should be able to quickly recover your website in the event of a disaster. This hiring can either be in-house staff or an out-of-house contractor, but in either case it should be someone you trust to do backups, upgrades, and secure your site on a regular basis. They will need to know what themes and plugins to use, how to restore from a backup, how to fix broken PHP code, etc. You should want them to look forward for future tools and software to utilize on the site, to find solutions before your problems occur, rather than sideways and treating it as simply as an administrative chore.
We provide annual agreements to provide WordPress Support and Care for our clients. They can include:
- Basic code changes
- Security
- Troubleshooting
- Plugin investigation and recommendations
- Theme code storage and revision tracking
- WordPress core updates performed as they become available and ready for use
- WordPress plugin and framework updates performed weekly if not more often
- Database optimization
- Scheduled backups
- Spam filtering and cleansing
- Ongoing security scanning by Wordfence
- Uptime monitoring
Price is based on the scope of the site. The greater functionality of the site obviously creates more complexity; more complexity requires a greater number of hours to do this right. Our agreements specify a set cost based on the number of hours we estimate will be involved over the year and cover the items above. Most agreements will be based on a plan of 1, 2, 3 or 4 hours each month.