Website Maintenance Plans

Like your car, maintaining your website is important to keep it running smoothly. Whether you need backups, software updates to keep your website secure and operational, or you’d like some help with content and graphic design, we’ve got you covered!

Like your car, your WordPress website has many moving parts. Over time, some of them become outdated and break down. Did you know that the plugins you use to perform various functions on your website are all written by different developers in different software companies? Plugins are often used to make banners scroll, make forms work, allow people to sign up for classes, handle your url redirects from another website or in some cases when you change a page, display your blog posts, display your testimonials and much more. WordPress issues ongoing updates to its platform, and if any one of those little plugin developers has not tested their plugin with the new version, then something on your site will break. Sometimes the plugin developers go out of business or stop updating their plugin and you’ll need to find another plugin to do the same thing, which always requires development time. It’s a lot like the software you use on your computer when the operating system is updated. And if you don’t keep all of the software up to date, then your website becomes vulnerable to hackers.

In addition to technical updates, most small businesses will want to make ongoing content updates to their website. It may be listing an upcoming event, adding a speaking event to a media page, describing a new service or adding a testimonial. In our experience, most small business owners don’t have the time to update their website, even if they know how.

When was the last time you had to rely on a backup for anything? It doesn’t happen frequently but when you need it, you REALLY need it! Don’t just rely on your web hosting company to perform backups, best practices are to also maintain an offsite backup just in case.
Your WordPress theme controls the look and feel of your website. On top of that theme, your developer may have made other customizations to colors, fonts and style. Every few months most theme developers make updates for WordPress core software functionality, enhanced security, and bug fixes. If your developer has made changes to your theme and you accept the theme update, you may wipe out all of those customizations. The solution? A child theme. A child theme separates the style and function files from the theme file which protects your changes from being overwritten and speeds up development time. When we maintain your theme we’ll start by creating a child theme structure and then apply changes as they are released. Note that in order to have access to those changes you may need to have a software maintenance plan with the theme developer but we’ll let you know if that is a requirement.
Broken links, which generate that annoying 404 Error page when clicked, are not only problematic for website visitor experience, but will cause Google and other search engines to penalize your website as well. Sometimes external resources you link to may no longer be valid and sometimes the links break within your own website. Perhaps you updated a page name and did not create a 301 redirect. Even if you updated the link within your own website, it is possible that other websites referenced your page in a blog or directory and that link will now be broken. It is a simple fix, but one that left unchecked can damage your SEO and your business credibility. Our link checker service will find and fix links where possible, or set up 301 redirects or escalate any issues to you for guidance in the event the new and correct link is not obvious.
Sadly there are armies of offshore workers who manually seek to promote websites through “black hat” SEO means. They will pretend to comment on your blog, but really are finding a way to add a backlink to the website they are promoting. You may see something like “I enjoyed your post (insert link to undesirable product here)”. Unfortunately there is only so much prevention that can be done with software. You can add a CAPTCHA word or image to your website which will prevent spambots from adding to your site, but a real person can still enter the required code so that won’t block their spam comments. What to do? You could block your blog from comments entirely but then you’ll miss out on valuable interaction. We suggest holding comments for moderation. As part of our monthly spam cleanup we’ll review comments, block spam urls, remove any inappropriate comments and leave only apparently valid comments for you to moderate…a MUCH easier task than sifting through 100s of spam entries!

Basic ($50 Monthly)

  • WordPress Version Updates
  • WordPress Plugin Updates
  • 1 Hour/Month Technical Support & Changes

Basic Plus ($100 Monthly)

  • WordPress Version Updates
  • WordPress Plugin Updates
  • WordPress Theme Updates
  • Monthly Offsite Backups To Your Dropbox
  • 2 Hours/Month Technical Support & Changes

Deluxe ($150 Monthly)

  • WordPress Version Updates
  • WordPress Plugin Updates
  • WordPress Theme Updates
  • Monthly Offsite Backups To Your Dropbox
  • Monthly Spam & Revisions Cleanup
  • 3 Hours/Month Technical Support & Changes Capped at 8hrs

Premium ($250 Monthly)

  • WordPress Version Updates
  • WordPress Plugin Updates
  • WordPress Theme Updates
  • Monthly Offsite Backups To Your Dropbox
  • Monthly Spam & Revisions Cleanup
  • Scan & Fix Broken Website Links
  • 4 Hours/Month Technical Support & Changes Capped at 10hrs

Let’s Work Together

TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR PROJECT

Whether you’re looking for help with strategy, web design, social media, or something else – we’d love to help. Tell us a little bit about your needs and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.