Why you need a care plan for your WordPress Website
Your brand new WordPress website is live and you’re ready to take on the world. Have you considered how you are going to maintain it? Is it safe and secure? Without a plan in place, your site is at risk from hackers and all sorts of other threats.
If your website being offline could hurt your business, you need a care plan.
Whilst you concentrate on creating content and running your business, our WordPress care plans take care of managing the technical side. A care plan gives you peace of mind, knowing WordPress experts are looking after and maintaining your website.
What do you get in a WordPress Care Plan
Table of contents:
- Uptime, Security & Activity Monitoring
- Daily website backups
- Disaster recovery
- Software updates
- Monthly report
- Frequently Asked Questions
Uptime, Security & Activity Monitoring
There can be many things that can stop your website from being online. This could be caused by having the website on a shared hosting platform, where your website is sharing a server with many other websites. If one website runs a marketing campaign, it suddenly has a spike in traffic, or a website gets hacked and starts sending out spam, both of these will impact your website.
You may not think that having a small website would be of any interest to hackers. You’d be surprised. Using a servers resources, sending out spam and using a malicious redirect are just three things hackers could do with both large or small WordPress sites.
Our daily uptime, security & activity monitoring helps spot threats before they affect your site. Instant alerts to issues mean we can investigate and fix things quickly.
Daily website backups
To keep your WordPress website safe, you need to run & keep regular backups. Even if your website does get hacked, by having a backup you will be able to restore your site to a version from before the hack.
Without a WordPress Care Plan, you could spend countless hours rewriting content, uploading images, editing settings, installing plugins and tweaking settings to get a website back to how it was before!
We make daily backups of your website and store them in an off-site location (separate to where your website is hosted) to minimise risk.
Disaster recovery
There are a few things that can cause your website to be damaged irreparably: a server meltdown, a database corruption and, of course, when it’s hacked.
A GoDaddy hack in 2012 is a great example of an unexpected disaster. Millions of hosted sites were shut down, which hurt many businesses that relied on them. The truth is, you never know what might happen.
As a bare minimum, you should be taking regular backups of your website. Each hour your website is offline, you’re are losing visitors, conversions will drop and your search rank will be affected.
Disaster recovery means getting your website back online and fast. We will restore your website from a backup and run security scans to check for any further issues.
Software updates
As with any software, WordPress needs to updated every once in a while. It could be to simply improve performance, but also add new features, fix bugs and patch security flaws.
Some website owners don’t worry about or even know that they need to update the software running their website. Some don’t realise the importance of software updates. Others don’t have the time or know how to make sure a safe is safe and secure.
An example
One popular page builder plugin being used by 4.3million websites had a vulnerability this year:
“The plugin had custom onclick functionality for buttons. This made it possible for an attacker to inject malicious JavaScript in a button that would execute on a click of the button”…
Vulnerability Exposes Over 4 Million Sites Using WPBakery
It was recommend that users immediately update to the latest version available.
Any updates to WordPress plugins on your website that havent been tested properly could also impact your website. Then you may need to use a backup to revert to a previous version of your website before the updates.
Our care plan takes all the stress out of updating. You no longer have to worry about what happens if your theme or a plugin isn’t compatible with a new WordPress update or vice versa.
At a minimum, we update software each week, or sooner if there are any vital software releases (security and bug fixes). Updates should go as smoothly as possible.
If you’re unsure how you will fix your website if a software update goes wrong, you need a WordPress Care Plan.
Monthly report
Monthly reports give you insights into the work we carry out each month to ensure your website is up and running.
As a starting point, your monthly report will include:
- Completed Updates
- When the last backup was taken
- Any performance or security issues found
- Any downtime for your site
- Analytics site traffic report
- SEO keyword performance (includes showing your top competitors)
Some answers to frequently asked questions:
Backups will make sure that should anything go wrong when updating your website, be it plugins or WordPress itself, having a backup solution in place will give you the peace of mind. You can always revert your website changes back to the latest version, before things went pete tong!
Giving out passwords to other people can be asking for trouble. Hackers love to deface websites for no other reason than because they can. If you use the same password for various different account logins on the internet, you could be giving someone access to them all! For example, it may give someone access to your social media accounts, who then contacts your friends and starts asking for money to “help you in a time of need”. To keep safe, you need to use unique passwords for every different account.
When it comes to the securely communicating passwords, you have a few options, such as:
– verbally in person or over the phone
– through encrypted emails, which Gmail has a built in option to Send & open confidential emails
– or through a tool such as One Time Secret
You may not have the skills or time to update your WordPress website’s core software, or know how to test and improve the site over time. Most likely you have no idea how to stage a change before taking it live or reverse an update that breaks things. Even if you have the skills to deal with these things, you might not have the time. We have both.
By choosing a good web hosting company, you will have the framework for a very fast loading website, great customer support and up to 99.9% uptime to make sure your website is online. This can help you to appear at the top of search results. They will also give you a high level of security for your data and the internal & external backups. For one of the best WordPress hosting companies, you can’t go wrong with Kinsta.
Your website is critical to your business – are you taking care of it?
Keep your website secure with a WordPress Care Plan to keep your site in proper working order.
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