Once your shiny new site is up and running, I offer a range of support options to ensure its stability, continued success and cost-effective ongoing development
Technical maintenance and support for your WordPress website
All the websites I design and develop are based on the world’s leading content management system: WordPress.
A content management system (CMS) offers many advantages in terms of flexibility, performance and the ability for you to control your own content. Like all content management systems, WordPress needs a minimum amount of regular maintenance to keep your website in good working order.
Whether you are happy to update your website software yourself or prefer to have me carry out technical maintenance for you, it is something which needs regular attention in order to minimise the risk of your website being compromised.
Why you need to maintain your WordPress website
Regular backups
Having backups of your website is essential.
Every website owner should have backups of his or her website in case something goes wrong (including off-site backups).
For example, your site may become compromised by malware or malicious code and need to be repaired, there may be a problem at the hosting company, you may inadvertently delete pages or content, a theme or plugin update can sometimes break your site…
WordPress updates
Like any software, WordPress needs to be updated on a regular basis.
Because of the open source nature of WordPress it benefits from ongoing scrutiny - hundreds of people work constantly on it, improving and fixing any bugs or security issues as they become apparent.
This means that updated versions are released frequently with 2 major updates every year and minor fixes issued in between to address bugs or security issues.
Why update WordPress
To improve website security: New security features prevent hackers from gaining control of your site and inserting malicious code. Keeping your site safe is important for maintaining the credibility of your business and for preserving your search engine ranking position - hacked websites can be blacklisted by search engines.
To fix bugs: WordPress updates are regularly issued to fix functionality problems and optimise the way in which your website operates. Applying the updates keeps your website in tip top performance condition.
Plugins and theme updates
A plugin is a software component or code that adds a specific feature to WordPress so that your website can be customised to do what you need. Plugins may add functionality to the part of your site visible to the public (also known as “front end”) such as: a google map , an email newsletter sign-up form, a contact form, a countdown, ecommerce, events management, a portfolio of your work...
There may also be a number of plugins running to take care of the nuts and bolt of your site behind the scenes (also known as “back end”), for example a page builder to design your static pages, a customs post types plugin, a web application firewall to reinforce the security of your site, an SEO optimisation plugin, or a backup plugin to perform off-server backups.
Updating your plugins is just as important as updating WordPress as out-of-date plugins can be even more vulnerable to security attacks than an outdated WordPress versions.
The way your website appears visually is driven by something called a theme. As you update WordPress core files, so too should you update the theme. Indeed the theme itself may have a functionality or security update independently of whether or not WordPress is being updated.
Is keeping my WordPress site up to date difficult ?
In principle, no. However, there is a process to follow to ensure things run smoothly.
- Backup site files & database – so the site can be restored if any update goes wrong
- Update WordPress core files
- Update your theme
- Update Plugins – there can be anything from 6 to 15 plugins running your site
- Test site functionality
On a typical small to medium website I generally perform around 10 to 15 software updates each month.
What can go wrong with a WordPress update ?
Updates mostly run smoothly. However, occasionally an update will cause functionality issues which may result in something “breaking” on your website.
For example:
- One of the plugins you use hasn’t been updated to work with the latest version of WordPress. In this case you either need to remove that functionality, or find and implement a different plugin to perform the same thing.
- A compatibility issues between the theme, WordPress and/or other plugins arises and "breaks your site". This can take a bit of detective work to isolate and fix.