What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source CMS (Content Management System) platform, i.e. a program where code is open to anyone and freely available on the internet.
Any coder can use WP base code to expand on it and build additional blocks of code to add extra features (called plugins) to websites.
+ The advantage is that WP is a highly flexible platform that evolves with user needs, hence its worldwide success and monopoly in the CMS sphere: 50% of CMS based websites are built with WP, which represents nearly 16 million websites.
– The disadvantage is that this constantly evolving platform and its additional ‘building blocks’ (plugins) need to be updated regularly to work in tune. Another disadvantage of WP dominant position and open source is that WP based websites a great magnet for hackers.
What is WordPress maintenance?
WP maintenance involves keeping WP itself and WP plugins and themes updated with their latest versions and making sure these versions are designed to work in unison.
It is not difficult. It just requires a bit of work and caution. We can teach you how to do it safely or can do it for you at a minimal cost.
Website maintenance goes a little further than WP
More than keeping the ‘engine’ aka WP healthy, website maintenance also involves
- Making regular backups of your website
- Checking for broken links
- Monitoring website security (checking for malware)
This is the basic minimum website maintenance.
Broader maintenance would also include monitoring the loading speed, checking for browser compatibility, checking the traffic analytics and adjust the SEO, etc.
How often should you maintain your website?
Ideally, once a fortnight minimum.
This is how often WP, themes or plugin versions might be updated by their developers and you should implement these updates as soon as possible to minimise the risk of hacking.
Why is your website at risk? What do hackers want?
Hackers are probably not interested in your website content. What they want is free space with a good reputation on the Internet. Your domain has exactly that.
They will use this free space to upload files (ads, prohibited content,…) and make them available to their viewers or they will use your Internet disk space as a spamming base.
In both cases you run the risk that your website is blacklisted and taken offline by your hosting provider.
Restoring your reputation, cleaning your website and putting it back online is a huge job.
Prevention is a far better option. Your website must be kept as secure as possible and that means as up-to-date as possible.
What solution do we offer?
We offer a web maintenance service that will guarantee your website is as safe as possible and that you always have several backups that can be used to restore it to a safe version.
Please note that this service, or any other competitor web maintenance service, cannot guarantee that your website will never be hacked or taken offline. Hackers can be very clever and if they can attack multinational companies and international organisations websites, they can also attack yours.
Our web maintenance service however will make your website far more difficult to attack than other WP-based websites and this will discourage most petty criminals.
What does our Website Maintenance Service include?
- Initial malware scan and secure off-site base backup
- Secure Off-Site Scheduled Backups
- WordPress Core Updates
- Theme/Plugin Updates
- Compatibility Support (for plugins and themes)
- 24/7 Security Monitoring
- Priority support for all website related issues
Costing
The Website Maintenance Service described here above is competitively priced.
Contact us to get a quote.
What if your website is hacked despite having subscribed to our services?
If despite all our efforts your website is hacked or found to contain malware by our security monitoring, we will be able to clean it or to restore it to the last clean backup we have.
Additional services
Please contact us for a quote if you would like to include some of the following additional services:
- Check for broken links & fix them
- Performance Scans
- Analytics Reports
- SEO Analysis
- Media File Management
- Content Management
- Publishing and formatting blog posts
- Test Browser & Device Compatibility
- Measure page speed
- DB cleaning
- WordPress Cloning & Migration
Any question? Call us on 02 9971 7861.