What Should Be Included in WordPress Care Plans?
WordPress care plans provide website owners with a convenient solution for keeping their sites updated, secure and optimized – but not all care plans are created equal!
In order to help you select an effective plan for your website’s needs, this blog post will explore what should be included in effective WordPress care plans.
Core WordPress Updates and Plugin Management
One of the key aspects of WordPress maintenance is keeping both its core and plugins up-to-date, which will ensure your website is safe and optimized while saving money by avoiding expensive upgrades or costly fixes.
Updates to WordPress, plugins and themes should generally be fast and straightforward – you simply click a button – but if you are careless with updates, things could go awry and break your site completely, leading to lost data or even the possibility of content loss – something no one wants to happen!
To avoid this scenario, it is wise to update only certain plugins at a time and revert back to previous versions if necessary – this way you can ensure everything runs smoothly before moving on to another plugin or theme.
Staying current with plugin updates is made even simpler using a service such as Jetpack or ManageWP. Both services offer comprehensive WordPress management features such as automatic core and plugin updates as well as backups.
Additionally, these services can assist with rolling back plugins that no longer function after an update – for instance if your site builder or gallery plugin no longer functions as expected following an upgrade.
Before updating any plugin, it is a wise move to inspect their changelog for new requirements for PHP or any modifications that could impact functionality of your plugins and therefore determine whether they need updating at all.
Regular Backups and Disaster Recovery
As data security is of the utmost importance, website owners and managers should create regular backup copies. Doing this could prevent an irreparable loss of information should something happen to the original file.
Reliable backup solutions are an essential element of your WordPress maintenance plan. An ideal backup solution should create automatic daily backups of your site as well as providing manual back up capabilities prior to making updates to any key components.
DreamHost’s Managed WordPress Hosting solution includes automated and on-demand backups to give you peace of mind that your website is safe from harm during updates.
However, backups alone won’t suffice; your business also needs a disaster recovery solution in place to ensure continuity following security incidents or disruption.
At the core of any backup and disaster recovery strategy lies ensuring you have an off-site copy of your data stored securely either locally or remotely – either on-premise or in the cloud. Once this step has been taken, however, further measures such as using proper recovery systems, encrypting backups for extra protection, testing them for viruses before use are also essential parts of successful planning.
Disaster recovery solutions designed for virtualized servers often reconfigure network settings to quickly deploy VM replicas after any failure, allowing business operations to resume quickly without major impact on service level agreements (SLA) and customers’ experiences.
Security Monitoring and Malware Removal
Security monitoring and malware removal should be included as essential elements in WordPress maintenance plans to protect the health of your website and maintain customer trust and reputation, reduce sales, and threaten revenue loss for your business.
Malware is malicious software designed to do harm on websites, from stealing visitors’ sensitive data to disabling site availability or redirecting them to spam pages, hijacking it entirely and more. Malware must be eradicated quickly to preserve your reputation, SEO ranking, avoid security warnings or blacklisting from Google.
Hackers gain entry to websites by breaking into the server or hosting control panel, or through exploiting content management systems (CMSs). They may gain unauthorized access to sensitive data by abusing CMS administrative accounts to gain entry.
If your site has been compromised, there are various malware removal tools available that can assist in scanning it and eliminating harmful files and scripts. However, experts with technical training and experience should only attempt to eradicate malware from websites themselves.
Implementing effective access controls is one way to protect your website from malicious code, as they limit administrative areas access and require strong passwords – limiting attacks that come through can reduce their frequency significantly. Furthermore, make sure CMS and third-party plugin updates occur frequently – this will protect it against vulnerabilities caused by outdated code that could lead to malware infections.
Uptime Monitoring and Performance Optimization
There are various tools that can help you keep an eye on website performance, making monitoring an invaluable way of making sure that your WordPress website stays online 24/7 and also to identify areas for potential improvement.
One of the best ways to monitor your website’s health is using a service that alerts you when specific metrics reach an acceptable level of accuracy – whether that means response times reaching acceptable thresholds, page load speeds reaching acceptable thresholds, etc.
An effective website maintenance service will save time and money in the long run, as well as protect customers from being exposed to broken websites that take too long to load. One study discovered that nearly half of online users will leave any site which takes longer than three seconds to load, according to one research project.
Monitoring solutions provide valuable alerts that alert you if any performance issues arise with your website and can even send notifications if things become serious. Many services also generate error snapshots for easy troubleshooting purposes.
As with any monitoring solution, the best choice depends on your unique requirements and budget. That being said, here are a few that we feel deserve consideration:
Better Uptime, a pay-as-you-go service, offers HTTP(s) keyword checks, multi-step verification, heartbeat monitoring, SSL monitoring API calls and much more. With its many integrations such as Datadog, New Relic Grafana Prometheus Splunk On Call Zabbix alerts can also be set up via Slack SMS Phone calls Webhooks webhooks so you stay informed. And most importantly of all alerting when something goes amiss!
Professional Support and Guidance
No matter if you own a small business or operate within an established corporation, having the appropriate tools in place is crucial to keeping your website operational. No one wants their site going down unexpectedly or being compromised with viruses and hackers; without reliable support in place it would simply cease functioning at some point in the future.
WordPress care plans provide the solution. These packages will ensure your WordPress website runs efficiently, including professional support from experienced WordPress experts. Having these care plans in place is vital since one-off help sites usually only provide limited assistance with your site – such as theme or plugin developers who may only provide temporary fixes; instead they won’t address its root causes.
Valet offers comprehensive WordPress website maintenance to keep your site up and running efficiently from start to finish, with an expert team available 24/7 to take calls and resolve issues swiftly – an invaluable asset for any online business owner or manager. Our WordPress care plans offer everything needed for optimal operation of a WordPress site from core updates and plugin management through to security monitoring and performance optimization.
