Just like your phone and your computer’s operating system, your website requires maintenance. Every month it seems my phone and computer gets a major software update. Your WordPress website needs the same care and attention so it can be online all the time to showcase your products & services.
The #1 reason for a Care Plan? To protect your website.
Hackers target WordPress more than any other platform online. WordPress has a 60% website market share of content management systems and 52,000+ available plugins that can be hacked. It is just too big of a target for hackers to ignore.
When a WordPress website is hacked, it isn’t even humans behind a computer doing the work. Most of the time it is an autonomous computer script that finds the vulnerability in an outdated WordPress plugin, theme, or even WordPress itself.
The top 3 goals of hackers are to steal sensitive information, install software that infects your website visitors with a virus, or send spam through your website.
When a website is hacked it must be cleaned or restored from a backup. Unfortunately, most of the cut-rate hosts limit backups to 30 days time or put the responsibility of backups on you. This includes GoDaddy, Bluehost, and Hostgator.
Shockingly, 70% of all WordPress websites are vulnerable right now. Read this article for more stats around WordPress vulnerabilities. If you are a major data nerd check out Sucuri’s annual report that with a complete breakdown including that of all hacked websites in 2017, 83% of them were WordPress.
The Benefits of a Care Plan
Many people don’t know what a care plan is, let alone what contains. Here is what we provide at Seattle Design as part of our basic care plan.
- Website is backed up every day and stored for 90 days. At any point we can restore your website any one of these backups in about 5 minutes.
- 24/7 website uptime monitoring. If a website goes down our team is notified immediately and we review the issue.
- Website is scanned for security vulnerabilities once a week
- Website is graded on website load times once a week. How fast your website loads is critical for user engagement.
- Any paid plugins are reviewed once a month to ensure the license is valid
- WordPress database is optimized and spam comments removed twice a month
- Each month our customers receive a PDF report that shows which of the activities above were performed and any actions that need to be taken. See an example of a report here
Why We Don’t Recommend the DIY approach
Maintaining a website is more complicated than one would think at close glance. Updating a site directly from the WordPress admin doesn’t store a record of what was done. If an update to a plugin created an issue down the road, it would be difficult to know what changed and how to revert back without restoring a very old backup and lose content changes, sales orders, form submissions, etc.
Also, Care Plans are one of our core services. There’s no panic when there’s a plugin conflict during an update or tricky issue to debug. We’ve seen it all. Over the years we’ve received calls with people with broken websites and incomplete backups. Many time the cost of a whole year of a Care Plan is needed to fix the issue when there is no complete backup. Just like a car, it costs more to fix it than it does to maintain it properly. Regular oil changes help keep your car running smoothly and regular website care helps keeps your website purring along at optimum performance.
Call in a Pro
Why not focus on your business and let us help you with what we know best? Would you change the pipes in your bathroom or call a plumber? Then why try to maintain your own website if that isn’t your trade? By securing an experienced WordPress company to care for and support your site properly you are actually saving potential lost revenue and customers.
Secure a Care Plan for your website! Contact us to learn how we can keep your site in proper working order.
We are certified as Care Plan experts through WP Elevation, the most accredited WordPress training company in the world.
