Why You Need A WordPress Website Care Plan
After your WordPress site goes live, what comes next? First, you must maintain your website and keep it safe, secure and valuable for your business. Without a plan, your site is at risk from hackers, disgruntled employees, security loopholes, bugs, server crashes and other threats.
If your website being offline could hurt your business, you need a care plan.
Our website care plans cover the technical side (backups, software updates, security scanning and disaster recovery) while you focus on content creation and running your business. In addition, a care plan gives you peace of mind – knowing WordPress experts maintain your site.
So what’s included in a typical website care plan?
- Daily security scanning
- Daily site backups
- Disaster recovery
- Software updates
- Monthly report
1. Daily Security Scanning – innoculate threats before they happen
The biggest issue with software security is that it is virtual. You can’t see the threats. You may not even know your website’s vulnerability until it’s too late.
Even if you only have a small site, hackers are still interested. Hackers use server resources, send spam, and use a malicious redirect, which are three top things hackers do with both large and small WordPress sites.
Our daily security scanning helps spot threats before they affect your site. In addition, instant issue alert issues mean we can investigate and fix them swiftly.
2. GDPR-compliant website backups
Regular backups are the most critical thing you can do to keep your site safe. Even if your site gets hacked, having backups will allow you to restore your site to a point before the hack.
If you have no site backups or a way to restore your content, you need a care plan.
We’ve fixed websites after they were compromised. Those without a care plan – spent countless hours rewriting content, uploading images, editing settings, installing plugins and tweaking settings; to get their site back to its previous state.
To minimise risk, we make daily backups of your website and store them in an off-site (separate from your website storage) location.
3. Disaster Recovery
Every hour your site is offline, you’re losing visitors, conversions and your search rank. Disaster recovery will get you back online fast.
Disaster recovery includes restoring your website from a backup and running security scans to check for further issues. I wrote a detailed post about How to survive your website being hacked. We follow those steps to ensure your site is back to normal.
4. Software Updates
When a cross-scripting vulnerability was discovered in 2014, 86% of the 75 million WordPress sites at the time were vulnerable because they weren’t up to date.
WordPress is software, and as with any software, it needs to be updated to add new features, improve performance, fix bugs and patch security flaws.
Many website owners worry about updating the software if it breaks their website. Others don’t have the time or technical know-how to ensure a safe and secure. Some don’t realise the importance of software updates.
If you’re unsure how you will fix your website if a software update goes wrong, you need a care plan.
Our care plan takes all the stress out of updating. For example, 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, but sooner, if there are any vital software releases (security and bug fixes), we can also update more frequently. We handle everything, so all updates should go as smoothly as possible – but we have a plan if it doesn’t go smoothly.
5. Monthly report – you can rest easy knowing it’s under control
Monthly reports give you insights into the work we do each month to keep your site up and running.
Your monthly report includes the following:
- The updates completed
- When we created the most current backup
- Any performance or security issues found
- Any downtime for your site
- Analytics site traffic report
- SEO keyword performance (includes showing your top competitors)
If you have any questions about a care plan for your website, get in touch.
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