Why do I need WordPress Maintenance for my website?

We think WordPress is great - it's open source and free to use. But just like any software, WordPress is prone to bugs and problems over time if the software is not maintained. WordPress needs a health plan to keep it working properly. With this in mind, we have developed our 'WordPress Maintenance' service. At Net Solutions we are experts in 'anything' WordPress and know how to look after it so you don't have any issues down the track.

We have developed our own methods, processes and tools making sure your site continues to operate in tip-top shape. We manage and maintain our own servers where security and performance are at the top of the list. We also perform daily backups should anything go wrong.

If you’re finding the task of updating your WordPress software too complicated or arduous and not given the right priority, then your best option is to outsource these WordPress Maintenance tasks to professionals. Getting your WordPress site hosted and maintained by Net Solutions makes sense.

Can I manage my WordPress site myself?

Yes you can, as long as you know what you are doing and have the time and discipline to regularly carry out the various tasks associated with WordPress Maintenance.

All WordPress sites run on multiple 3rd party plugins all of which have to 'play' nicely with each other and with WordPress. But seeing as plugins are created by software developers who come from all walks of life, the quality of their work varies anywhere from good, bad to really ugly, so the chances of something breaking are real and inevitable over time.

Often your site may 'appear' to be running fine, you could even be hacked without any symptoms. You need to be prepared with a good set of processes & tools to perform routine tasks to maintain your site. Should your site break, you need the knowledge, skills and the time to resolve all issues.

My website was just built so I don't need any WordPress Maintenance. Right?

All too often we get enquiries from clients along the lines of "My web designers are really good! They built my website and said as long as you don't touch anything you don't need to do anything more to it and it will run forever!"

This is bad advice. Once you site has been built the risk of anything going wrong may be small, but over time risks of things breaking and having your site compromised increase. When your site does break or become compromised or when you notice things aren't working as expected, you will most likely need to reach out to a developer to get your site fixed.

Don't be surprised to find that the costs of getting your website cleaned and restored will be significantly more than the annual cost of WordPress Maintenance.

Why wasn't I made aware of WordPress Maintenance when my site was built?

Your web developers should have advised you of the importance of this.

When WordPress was first released the need to keep your software updated was not of a high priority. Software updates were generally only required when things broke. WordPress has evolved over time and has rapidly become the leading content-management system.

At the same time, hackers and criminals have discovered that there is a great deal of money to be made from hacking websites with a low risk of ever being caught.

The importance of protecting your site from hackers has never been greater and software updates are released more frequently.

Why should I use WordPress if it needs all this maintenance?

In 2020, over 455 million websites are built using WordPress. That's approximately 38% of the market share, making WordPress one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems (CMS) available.

WordPress software is complex and fully-featured. Frequent updates make it a dynamic, easy-to-use solution with on-going improvements via upgrades.

We continue to advise that WordPress is a good solution for our clients who want a modern, easy-to-update website that can grow with their business needs.

Can you guarantee that my site will operate error free?

No we can’t. We cannot guarantee that any software will be error free. WordPress software is written by humans, who can and do make mistakes.

WordPress also uses plugins and relies on themes. This is software that is written by third parties and again, we cannot guarantee that their software is written well.

We will use best practices to make sure your site is protected as much as possible.

Can't I just restore my site from backups?

Backups are great, if you have the time to do them and you do them regularly. All too often though this activity gets low priority until something hits the fan and the situation then becomes critical.

Simply restoring a backup will often not resolve the issue. If your site was hacked though a vulnerability and you restore from your last backups, the hackers will simply return and gain access again, as the vulnerability is still there. Backups are important, but you need to update all the software, plugins and themes regularly.

What do you do as part of WordPress Maintenance?

Daily Offsite Backups

Backups are the cornerstone of our WordPress Maintenance service.

If an update fails or your website crashes, it’s imperative to have an up-to-date backup of your website. Our automated backup service takes the load off your mind by running scheduled backups and making sure that an up-to-date backup is always ready.

Our backups are incremental and run off-site. Depending on your plan backups are stored for 30 -90 days.

24x7 Uptime Monitoring

Uptime Monitor saves you time worrying about what your website is up to. It notifies our support team if your website goes down, giving us a good chance to fix the problem before it becomes critical.

Your website is checked every minute from multiple geographically displaced locations.

Daily Security Scans

We perform daily server-side security scans on your site to make sure it is clean and free of any malware, viruses or trojans using Imunify360 and custom developed scripts. In addition to this we deploy a WordPress Security & Firewall plugin for extra protection.

We also perform a blacklist check with a number of services, like Google Safe Browsing, Norton Safe Web, ESET, etc.

The results of each scan are stored in an archive and are included in our maintenance reports.

Core Updates

WordPress is in active development so software patches and updates are periodically released to address security issues, bugs and functionality updates. These need to be updated as soon as possible once they are released.

For major software releases to the core software we also undertake backups before implementing any major updates. This is in case the update somehow breaks the site we can revert back to the position it was in before the attempted update

Plugin Updates

We initially perform an audit of all your plugins, to determrine the license and auto update status of each plugin. This helps us determine which plugins can be updated as part of the service and which ones require additional license requirements.

Plugins that are not premium or commercial and support auto updates will be managed and updated by Net Solutions as part of our service. This usually covers all plugins supported via the official WordPress.org repository.

Plugins that are premium or commercial which require a license, will only be updated if the license is valid and automated updates are supported. If the license is not valid, or auto updates are not supported they will be disavowed.

Where plugins that are disavowed, Net Solutions can in most cases, manage and maintain these plugins for an additional fee. In such a case, and subject to the plugin license conditions, we can managed the license and updates as part of the service.

Theme Updates

We initially perform an audit of your theme to determrine the license and auto update status. This helps us determine if the theme can be updated as part of the service or requires additional license requirements.

Themes that are not premium or commercial and support auto updates will be managed and updated by Net Solutions as part of our service. This usually covers all themes supported via the official WordPress.org repository.

Themes that are premium or commercial which require a license, will be updated if the license is valid and automated updates are supported. If the license is not valid, or auto updates are not supported the theme will also be disavowed.

Where themes are disavowed, Net Solutions can in most cases, manage and maintain the theme for an additional fee. In such a case, and subject to the theme license conditions, we can managed the license and updates of that theme as part of the service.

Maintenance Reports

Our WordPress Maintenance Reports are designed to give clients a baseline and awareness of what's taking place on their website.

Reports are emailed in PDF format and depending on your package, include details on core, theme & plugin updates, backups, site optimisation, Google Analytics tracking, security scans, performance monitoring, Uptime Monitoring, WooCommerce statistics and SEO keyword tracking.

Almost all activities happen behind the scenes so our aim is to keep you in the loop so you can get a good understanding of what we do.

Site Optimisation

Our site optimisation process helps tidy up your website by removing and purging obsolete post revisions and spam comments.

We also perform database cleanups to remove overheads.

Having too many post revisions, spam comments and database overhead can increase the load on your database, which will slow your website down.

Daily Performance Monitoring

The Performance Reporting feature benchmarks the performance of your site against some basic standards. It shows you if your site has any bottlenecks and if it's loading 'Fast', 'Standard' or 'Slow'.

We run daily website speed tests from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (Firefox, IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. Our results provide rich diagnostic information including site load time, resource loading waterfall charts and page speed checks.

Database Optimisation

Your website stores most of its data in a database, including blog posts, pages, comments, and custom post types such as links, form entries, and theme and plugin settings. Under normal conditions your database will grow larger over time. A large database can greatly affect the performance of your website as it takes longer for your server to retrieve information from database tables. This is why database optimization is so important.

By removing unnecessary data, we can improve the efficiency of your database and make your web pages load quicker.

What do you do as part of WordPress Support?

While WordPress Maintenance takes care of all the regular and mundane tasks to keep your site healthy, what happens when your website doesn't work like it should or something breaks? We know that no software is perfect or error free, so even when you have applied all the updates, it's not unusual for things to break from time time.

This is where WordPress Support is needed. Someone to call on to help you out who knows WordPress inside and out.

You will have direct access to our WordPress experts who can assist with 'anything' WordPress. Backed by over 30 years of software experience and working with WordPress since 2003 we can trouble shoot and fix a range of WordPress related issues. Our team are experts in PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, development, web hosting, design and digital marketing.

Simply submit your request for WordPress support and it will be given priority.

Submit your request via this form