WordPress Maintenance

Your time is precious. Bloggers NEVER seem to have enough hours in the day. Free up the time you spend maintaining your website with professional WordPress maintenance services so you can focus your time where it matters most to your blog – writing, conquering social media, customer relations – whatever you never have enough time to do. In addition to reclaiming your time, you’ll gain peace of mind knowing that your website is being cared for by a seasoned professional with 20+ years of IT experience.

Not sure which plan is right for your website? Examine the specifics of the WordPress maintenance plans in the feature comparison chart below.

WordPress Maintenance Plan Comparison

Ok ... so why should you care about any of these things?

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Website Backups

Having your website backed up regularly (schedule dependent on the maintenance plan chosen) is the single most important maintenance task for your site. Simply having a reliable backup makes troubleshooting of and recovery from problems a much faster and simpler matter to resolve. The more frequently your site is updated, the more frequently you should consider having your site backed up. Far too often, bloggers will setup backups using free plugins that store them to their Google drive or Dropbox account but never backup frequently enough (typically to cut down on storage costs) and never test whether their backups are reliable nor how to recover from one if needed.

When I backup your site, your backups are stored for 90 days regardless of how often your site is backed up – whether it’s weekly or hourly – 90 days guaranteed. There’s no worries about how much space the backups take on your personal cloud accounts. Additionally, clients whose maintenance plan includes daily "safe" updates, your site is backed up before updates are applied. In the event that a plugin or WordPress update fails, your site is immediately restored back to its previous state.

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Daily “Safe” Updates

Keeping your software updated is the second most important maintenance task for your site. Just like you should keep your computers, phones, and other devices updated regularly to patch bugs and close up security vulnerabilities, so too should you keep your plugins and WordPress software updated for the same reasons. Too often, bloggers have forget to keep their site updated until it’s too late and a vulnerability is discovered in a plugin that allows an attacker to gain access to the site and now you’re left hoping that an expensive specialist can remove the malware that has been deposited on the site.

The old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. When it comes to your website, truer words were never spoken.

With all of that said then, what exactly are "safe" updates? A "safe" update is one where a backup of your site is made before the updates are applied so that in the event of a failure your site will immediately be returned back to its previous state. Even with WordPress adding automatic updating as a feature, it’s not unheard of for a plugin update to go poorly and leave a site crippled and no longer working. Having a backup complete before updating is critical! Should an update cause undesired behavior, I can roll your site back to where it was before the update was applied.

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Uptime Monitoring

Ever experience downtime with your website? If you said no … are you certain of that? Hosting companies DO NOT notify you if you’re experiencing downtime. If you want to minimize your site’s downtime, you need to know EXACTLY WHEN your site goes down. The sooner you know, the sooner you can contact your hosting provider. Besides the obvious reason – the sooner your site is back online the sooner your site is making you money again – there’s another reason to notify your hosting provider ASAP of any outage. Reputable hosting companies will credit your account for any downtime that you report to them. You can’t get a credit on your bill, however, if they don’t know your site is down.

All maintenance plans include uptime monitoring where your site checked every 60 seconds that it is indeed still working. If the site fails the test, an email is sent to you immediately so that you can verify that the site is indeed down and take action to resolve the problem. Premium plans include additional notification options - such as via Slack or Discord, for example - upon request.

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Daily Malware Scans

All maintenance plans include daily scanning of your website to ensure that it hasn’t been infected with malware that could be spread to your visitors or other websites. When combined with routine backups, you have a highly effective method of dealing with infections without requiring tons of time and money to correct.

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Security Audit

Many bloggers think that only big websites (such as Twitter or Facebook) get attacked / hacked because they have lots of information stored about people. The reality is that EVERY website is a target for hackers. Smaller websites can be just as useful for spreading malware or to function as a control system for other hacked systems. New client sites get a general security audit as part of the onboarding process where I'll make and/or recommend changes to better protect your website.

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Spam Removal

We’re all familiar with spam email. In the same way that your personal inbox gets spammed with unsolicited messages, so too does your blog post comments. While Akismet and other similar plugins can effectively flag spam messages, often – especially on busy sites – these spam messages sit in your site's spam folder congesting the database. If you don’t believe this is a real problem, I invite you to read about what a technician had to do to copy a WordPress database with 3 million spam comments. Heads up – the article is on the technical side. Needless to say, the database was HUGE. In short, though, don’t do this to your site. All maintenance plans include clearing comment spam daily.

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Database Maintenance

Spam comments aren’t the only thing that can clog up your WordPress database. Every time you change a page or post inside WordPress, the system creates a new revision of it. The idea here is that if you screw something up, you can revert back to the older version. What happens though, over time, is that the number of revisions begins to pile up. Now, while it’s smart to keep these revisions, it’s not necessary to keep ALL of them. Instead, my systems are setup to keep your 20 most recent revisions per page or post and discard the remainder – helping to keep your WordPress database trimmed. A lean database is a faster performing database.

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Service Reports

Depending on your plan, you'll receive either a monthly or a weekly report via email of the maintenance that's been performed on your WordPress site - including details on the backups, updates, and scans performed. Additionally, this report includes any SEO keyword reports if your plan includes this feature.

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Broken Link Scans (On Request)

As your website grows and ages it’s inevitable that it will develop broken links which can damage your SEO score and leave a bad impression on your site’s visitors. Request a report to be generated on your site (up to 10,000 links) to avoid having to look for broken links yourself.

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Staging Site (On Request - COMING SOON!)

Ever wish you could have a duplicate copy of your site so you could test out a new theme or any number of other changes without it affecting the live version of your site? If you require use of a staging site at any time, submit a request and I'll be happy to create a copy of your site on my own servers for you to experiment on. If you decide you'd like to apply those changes to your live site, I'll be happy to backup your live site and then apply the new version in its place.

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SEO Keyword Report

Premium maintenance plans include a weekly SEO keyword report as part of your regular Service Report. Effortlessly track how your site currently ranks on Google vs the previous week, month, and 3 months. Additionally, you'll get a list of your biggest competitors based upon the monitored keywords and your site's visibility score based on the combined ranking of all of your monitored keywords.

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Premium Themes & Plugins

Premium maintenance plan clients have access to my volume licenses of premium WordPress themes and plugins - saving you potentially hundreds of dollars in license fees per year. Not only can I save you money this way, but this also means there's no worrying about remembering to renew licenses or having lapses in available security updates due to a lapsed license.

If there's a theme or plugin you'd like to see included as part of this benefit, let me know and I'll look into adding it to my list of available plugins & themes. Installation / activation is not automatic. You must submit a request to have the license applied to your site.

Currently available premium WordPress themes include (links are affiliate links): Astra Pro