WordPress support and maintenance

Taking care of technical maintenance for your peace of mind

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.

If you'd like more information on what is actually involved in maintaining a WordPress website, you can read this article.

Uptime Monitoring

I monitor your website server uptime as well as updates and security alerts

Software updates

I keep your software up to date to minimise security risks to your website

Security

Your site is scanned daily for potential security issue;  security patches applied to your software where required

Backup

I take regular files and database backups to mitigate risks and costs in a 'worst case scenario'

Training

Providing WordPress training to support you and your team

Development

As business needs change, offering further development of your website at cost-effective rates

Content Management

All sites come with an easy to use "visual editor", but if you prefer, I can take care of updating your text and image content for you

WordPress maintenance care plan and support packages

TECHNICAL MAINTENANCE CARE PLAN

£49 * pcm
  • Eyes on your site
  • Security scanning
  • Uptime monitoring
  • Database & file backups
  • WordPress core software updates
  • Plugins and theme software updates
  • Priority support
  • Disaster recovery assistance (**)

MAINTENANCE plus SUPPORT

£109 pcm
  • ALL THE FEATURES OF 'TECHNICAL MAINTENANCE'
  • + UP TO 2 HOURS PER MONTH FOR:
  • New features or design changes
  • Training support
  • Content updates
  • Digital Marketing
  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

MAINTENANCE plus EXTENDED SUPPORT

£169 pcm
  • ALL THE FEATURES OF 'TECHNICAL MAINTENANCE'
  • + UP TO 4 HOURS PER MONTH FOR:
  • New features or design changes
  • Training support
  • Content updates
  • Digital Marketing
  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

(*) Transactional websites such as ecommerce or membership sites care plan costs may vary, please contact me for details

The (not so) small print:
These WordPress website support packages are usually only available for websites designed and developed by ehawebdesign.com and hosted with my preferred hosting provider.
My current preferred supplier for website hosting is Siteground. This is reviewed from time to time based on performance and service levels.
(**) Should your site suffer a major malfunction or security issue I will be on hand to assist with recovery. Depending on the issue, the time and possible external resources required to fix it may result in additional charges.

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.