What is WordPress Maintenance?
WordPress maintenance is the process of keeping the WordPress core files, themes and plugins up to date when new updates are released. It is essential that you do this, or you will leave your site open to security vulnerabilities. These can be costly to fix, both in terms of rebuilding the website and regaining customer trust.
What Does WordPress Maintenance Entail?
You might think, anyone can click on the update button, and while this is true, what you need to be prepared for is plugin conflicts and update failures. If this happens, you need a rollback plan. These can largely be avoided if you keep up to date with the latest changes in WordPress and the surrounding plugins. A lot of the work involved in maintaining websites is ensuring you update quickly for security updates and holding out for compatibility on minor updates to reduce conflicts.
Do I Need To Pay For WordPress Maintenance?
No, you don’t have to pay for
WordPress maintenance, there are a lot of other options. You can use managed WordPress hosting, and this will handle all of the updates for you. But you lose a lot of the flexibility you get with WordPress, and you will not be able to use the whole library of plugins and themes it has available to you. This is because some server modules cannot be enabled on shared managed hosting packages. You can
read more about the topic here.
The alternative is to use
hosting with a server dashboard like CPanel or Plesk. Through this, you can use the WordPress install service that will offer automatic updates. This can be very useful, but often it cannot resolve update errors. So you may be left with a broken website until someone emails you or you notice it yourself.
Is Security Part of WordPress Maintenance?
Website security is something that is generally taken care of in
maintenance plans. This entails keeping an eye on who is accessing the site and from where, making sure all passwords are secure and that malicious IP addresses and high-volume scrapers are rate-limited or blocked from hitting the server. Monitoring these types of traffic sources ensures that the server runs smoothly and avoids downtime. Another big part of website security for WordPress is knowing which plugins are prone to security breaches and which are deprecated.
Does WordPress Maintenance Cover Uptime Monitoring?
Uptime monitoring is crucial in making sure that your website is always online and you are never missing potential sales or leads. Using an uptime monitor takes away the responsibility of notifying downtime issues from you and gives you peace of mind that your website is being taken care of. Using a professional uptime monitoring solution like
Domain Monitor will ensure that you have complete visibility over your website’s uptime day or night.
Does WordPress Maintenance Cover Backups?
Everybody structures and prices their services differently. I offer a higher level of cover that includes on-server and off-server backups, but this is not always needed by clients. Some website hosting plans will have this in place included in the monthly fee, and some will offer it as a paid add-on. You do need to make sure this is being done and in a methodical way. One issue I come across a lot is clients who are doing their own backups through plugins and not deleting the old backups. This results in the server going over its allowed storage allocation and resulting in the server going down. This has to be done though, as the last thing you want is to lose any data, or in the worst-case scenario lose your whole website and have to start again from scratch. You need to make sure the backup frequency and coverage is enough for the type of website you have, whether that be a brochure or ecommerce site.
PHP Updates For WordPress
PHP is the programming language that WordPress is built on, and it is important that the version of PHP you are running is taken into consideration. You need to be aware that PHP may need to be upgraded for specific versions of WordPress, and alongside this update, you will need to provision the server to meet the requirements of the new version of WordPress to ensure it runs smoothly. A lot of clients I have worked with were paying extra every month to run legacy versions of PHP on WordPress hosting they didn’t even need. So, outsourcing maintenance actually saved them some money in that sense.
Broken WordPress Contact Forms
This is something that I often see, and I have rolled form testing into my
monthly maintenance plans. More often than not, clients only find out their forms aren’t working when they either do a test themselves or a customer tells them over the phone that they didn’t get a reply to their form request. This results in lost leads and ultimately lost customers and revenue.
Want To Discuss WordPress Maintenance In More Detail?
If you are interested in discussing WordPress Maintenance for your website, feel free to
get in contact using the form below.
