How to Find the Best WordPress Maintenance Plan
Jackson Dunagan
Digital Influencer, Speaker, & Founder of Bright Vessel | Bright Plugins | Bright Hosting | Co-Founder of Print Mavericks | Flawless WordPress management & plugins for eCommerce brands
So, it’s happening: you’ve decided to make the jump and start selling online. Whether you’re starting a business or want to expand to the web, it’s a big commitment. Many companies of all industries have an online presence at this point, and the competition can be brutal. Having a WordPress or WooCommerce website today is much more complicated than it used to be, especially if it is your marketing tool for the business. WordPress websites continuously need to be updated for maintenance, security, and marketing and if you’re trying to make your bottom line, maintaining your site can drain a lot of time.
As a WooCommerce Certified Agency, at Bright Vessel, we know a thing or two about this online sales platform. We’ve tried and tested many strategies and studied each outcome, and we’re committed to what works. That’s why we’ve prepared these WooCommerce Maintenance & Sales tips to help you sell online.
WordPress Maintenance Service Plans Tips
1. Find the Right Team to Maintain Your Site.
Pick the right developers not the host for your WordPress website. Hosting companies fall short in having the right team to provision servers and perform development tasks. It is best to work with a company which has your best interest in mind and is continually monitoring the uptime, updates, and speed of your site.
It is hard to find a good company that can do everything, so it is good to ask the right questions when reviewing companies to perform ongoing WordPress maintenance.
2. Ask a Vendor the Right Questions to Maintain Your WordPress or WooCommerce Site:
- Do you monitor Uptime?
- What are the specs of the server?
- If you’re on a shared hosting account, How many sites are currently on that server?
- Do I have access to a hosting control panel to administer your site altogether?
- Do you have full stack developers on your team?
- How do you prepare sites that can have a burst of traffic?
- Do you monitor for Malware?
- If my site is hacked, do you perform the clean or is this an extra charge?
- How many hours are included in the plan?
- Do you do any design services, ex: banner designs?
- How much is your hourly for additional development time?
- Do you perform SEO audits?
- Do you include any sort of SEO tools for keyword tracking?
- Do you have an easily deployable staging area?
- Do you perform updates on staging and not live site?
- Do you optimize the site for speed?
- Do you include and caching tools?
- Do you perform minification to CSS and Javascript files?
- Do you include a CDN (Content Delivery Network) in your fee?
- Do you have a ticket system for change requests?
- What is the turnaround time for an average request?
3. How should WordPress Maintenance be performed on a site?
WordPress websites need to be continually updated every month for bugs and more importantly security. It is very important to have periodical backups and include offsite backups in case of a catastrophic event.
We have outlined a few things your vendor or yourself should be doing for the maintenance of your website.
WordPress Back Ups
It might be relevant to highlight that this point could be one of the most important ones in connection to maintenance because if something backfires then your webpage can become:
- Slightly messed up,
- Irreparably broken,
- Gone in an instant.
These are concepts that you might want to avoid, but if they occur, you should know how to solve them. That is why backing up the website will give you the chance to restore it from the most recent backup. Plus you do not need to be an expert to do it, WordPress has many options to help you.
You might see that there are a lot of free options for you to do a manual backup and restore your website. We recommend the paid option WPTimeCapsule.com.
It will provide a staging area, backups, and offsite backups very easily and is worth every penny.
WordPress Back Ups
It might be relevant to highlight that this point could be one of the most important ones in connection to maintenance because if something backfires then your webpage can become:
- Slightly messed up,
- Irreparably broken,
- Gone in an instant.
These are concepts that you might want to avoid, but if they occur, you should know how to solve them. That is why backing up the website will give you the chance to restore it from the most recent backup. Plus you do not need to be an expert to do it, WordPress has many options to help you.
You might see that there are a lot of free options for you to do a manual backup and restore your website. We recommend the paid option WPTimeCapsule.com.
It will provide a staging area, backups, and offsite backups very easily and is worth every penny.
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