WordPress Maintenance

We include the licenses in our project cost. We recommend using WP Engine for hosting, as they specialize in WordPress. We offer Care Plans that sit on top of the hosting, starting at $49 per month. See the full comparison here. If we need to use any additional special plugins that cost extra we will talk to you about it first. 

You betcha! We love our clients and always want to maintain a healthy relationship. We would hate to lose you but we know that sometimes financial needs have to be adjusted. In the case that you do need to cancel, send us an email and we’ll stop your next payment right away.

No one knows your audience better than you do, so we will need your help. We’ll meet periodically to go over the plan for publishing content and/or SEO work. After we’ve established the goals and content strategies, we’ll send to you for approval. You can send us ideas throughout the month as well, things like news, articles you find interesting, videos and other content.

Yes, we specialize in WordPress sites, and we use WP Engine to host them. They provide excellent security, daily backups, critical updates, malware scanning, and more. In case of emergencies, you can contact them directly if you can’t reach us and they’ll provide fantastic support. Full details here.

Our support packages are set up like retainers, every month time slots are set aside for our Basic and Priority clients. When requests come in, they go into the queue and are taken care of. Time does not rollover due to resource limitations.

Email is usually the best form of communication because we can respond quickly, however, we know some clients prefer a phone call or video call. These strategy calls are only provided for the Professional and Premium plans. These sessions are intended to help form a path for growth and improvements to your website and online presence. Many clients use this time for screen-sharing to make small updates or training.

If you received an email about your website files being compromised, make sure it is legit by calling your web hosting company and forwarding the email to our support team.

Our next steps, as webmaster, is to reach out to your webhost about their protocol for a compromised website and a scan on their end to confirm where the compromised files are on the server. Under your website care we will restore a clean backup of WordPress, and then take note from the webhost about where the issue arose if outside of WordPress. This may mean the webhost recommending a third-party service to clean up the compromised files or additional security.

The best way to prevent a compromised website is to keep WordPress and plugins up-to-date, which we do for you monthly under website care, as well as keep daily backups to restore in the event of an issue. Unfortunately just updating won’t prevent a hack 100% which is why we help work with the web host and third parties to restore your website on the event of a hack and institute security measures to prevent most known methods by hackers.

If your website is not loading, first check to make sure this is the same experience for everyone at DownForEveryoneOrJustMe – https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

If the website is down just for you, try clearing your browser history (cache and cookies) and reload, also checking your internet connection. If the website is down for everyone, shoot us a support ticket email, even though chances are that our website uptime monitor has already alerted us.

If this happens outside office hours, call the web host directly and see what they can do to get the website back online. Chances are most likely it’s related to the following issues:

• Your web hosting, domain or SSL certificate has expired and bill is due for payment
• The web hosting is experiencing maintenance issues

Anything outside of those we will investigate to bring the site back online.

Common causes of a slow website are unoptimized images and external embedded media and ads.

Full-sized images can consume a lot of bandwidth while loading. So, take time to resize your images. Take a look at the image tag – it allows you to set the height and width. Be sure to scale the photos proportionally so that they don’t get stretched or skewed. Then, consider changing image format, which can significantly reduce the file size. Finally, reduce image quality. No, that doesn’t mean making your photos look bad. It just means tweaking some simple settings. For JPG images, this is done by directly reducing the quality. In most cases, a quality setting of 80 to 90 percent will show no significant changes from the original version. And you can go even lower depending on the type of image, the detail, and the colors. For other image formats such as GIF and PNG, you can reduce quality by opting for a smaller color palette.

For external embedded media, think twice before embedding someone else’s media into your site. Once you embed external material into your site, your pages will only run as fast as the host site. In other words, if that external site is having a particularly slow day, your site may run slowly too. Don’t let another site drag yours down! Whenever possible, it’s smart to host all content on your own server.

Plugins may also be causing an issues, as just like external embedded media, plugins can bring in resources from other websites. We can perform some investigative work to see what plugins could be causing this outside of the typical monthly website care. Reach out for a quote for evaluation and plugin cleanup.

Although these plans have been set up for the sites we’ve built we are open to building a long term relationship with new clients in need of our TLC.

First we’ll want to do a website evaluation to get familiar with your website and how it was built so we can save it in a pinch. During the evaluation, we’ll run through our list and make suggestions for improvements in order to proceed with a monthly plan. Contact us for more details about getting an evaluation.

Please leave the updating to us. Website maintenance is an integral part of updating and keeping your site working properly. At SHD we take great care to first backup the website, check the website, update, then check the website again for any changes. Our software keeps a record of plugins we update so if there is ever an issue we see what plugin version was changed and revert back.

If you just update from your WordPress admin, SHD wouldn’t have that record. We update client’s site once a month so we can take the time to devote to checking your website thoroughly (either the 15th or the 30th). Also included on our monthly maintenance report are the performance and security scans. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket and we address it before you. We also take care about which plugins we are updating and single out large updates (like WooCommerce) as its own task for additional quality control.

We test in all the latest major browsers, plus one version behind, unless you have specific audience requirements. This includes smart phones and tablets.

You’re hiring professional and pleasant people, with whom others simply love to work. You’re getting a business partner, one who truly cares about you and your customers.

We will lay the process out in front of you clearly. We’ll move along at your pace.

Depending on your graphics needs, you could get a logo, a website, print collateral, and social media items. Basically, everything you need for establishing your full brand identity. We’re a one-stop-shop, in a way.

In addition to the above, you’ll get clear communication… and you’ll likely witness a quirky sense of humor in all of its cheesy glory.

And here are your Client Bill of Rights.

The purpose of our support plans is to prevent such things from happening, so ideally this won’t be the case. However, software as a whole is imperfect and things do break, servers do go down. In that situation, we’ll be notified and investigate as soon as humanly possible. We can’t promise that you won’t get hacked, but we do everything we can to prevent that and will be ready to restore your site to an unhacked state and boot the nasty hackers.

We handle urgent matters as quickly as we can. Depending on how urgent your request is, you have options. You can send an email with the word “urgent” in the subject line. That gets our attention pretty fast. If email is not fast enough, then try texting. And if that still isn’t fast enough, then you should call. More details here.

If we host your website with WP Engine and you can’t get a hold of us, you can contact WP Engine directly.