WordPress Maintenance

We include the costs of any premium licenses for applications that provide a wide range of services from spam protection to SEO optimization. Here is a list of plugins that we support.

We also recommend using WP Engine for hosting, as they specialize in WordPress. 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.

If you cancel your Care Plan and we host your website, we can discuss if you want to stay with us or migrate away to a new hosting provider. 

No one knows your audience better than you do, so we’ll definitely want to periodically sit down with you to learn all about your customers and content goals. If you’ve hired us to write, we will develop the content for you and incorporate what you send to us as best as we can. While it is common for our clients to send us ideas as we go...things like news, interesting articles, videos, and other inspirations...we’re flexible.

Examples of add-on packages include: marketing, SEO, ADA compliance, or cyber security. 

Yes, we specialize in hosting 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.

Yes! We specialize in WordPress sites, and we use WP Engine to host. 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.

So yes, we can host your site and not provide the monthly maintenance, if you wish.

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.

Typically, no, meetings are not included. They are billed in 15 minute increments along with the work we do.

While some meetings are included, we try to be as mindful as possible of the monthly support tasks needed each month. If the plan includes two hours of support, and we have 1.5 hours of meetings - little time is left to put in work. 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.

On the other hand, some clients will utilize meetings as strategy sessions. 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 step, 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 https://www.isitdownrightnow.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.

If you host with us, or we manage your website please email support@smackhappy.com

Yes! We have a shortlist of go-to clean up solutions from plugin conflicts to image optimization that will improve your website from turtle speed to loading times under 2 seconds in just a few hours. Contact us to find out more about our WordPress Speed Optimization services.

Yes, we are happy to inherit websites built by others, though we don't accept everyone. 

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 Smack Happy Design (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 marketing or 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.