WordPress Website Maintenance

Short answer – updating & maintaining your website is important for functionality, security, and performance:

Long answer – WordPress is built on what is called open source technology where the source code used to create it is freely available for the public to view, edit, and redistribute. For this reason, regular updates are required in order to improve functionality, resolve any bug fixes, and help to secure any vulnerabilities to possible hacking attempts.

Furthermore, your database (where all your sites information & settings are stored) can build up a collection of unneeded data over time such as post revisions, spam comments, trash, transient options, orphaned metadata, and so on. So maintaining & optimising your database means faster backups, easier restorations, and improved speed & performance. Essentially it’s like giving your website a spring clean.

Of course you can! These tasks can be a steep learning curve for most though. Plus, the DIY approach is a time consuming and often tricky process that can sometimes lead to disastrous outcomes.

If you don’t feel confident that you are capable of performing maintenance tasks yourself, that’s where our maintenance plans come in handy.

Knowing that your site is being professionally updated & maintained is a small price to pay for peace of mind. Plus isn’t your time better invested elsewhere?

Payment methods: We accept Visa & Mastercard (processed through Stripe).

Payment Processing: The first payment will be processed upon checkout. The following payment dates will be on the same day each month. Should any payments fail (lack of funds, tech issues etc.) the subscription will re-commence from whatever date the renewal is successfully processed.

Failed payments: Failed payments will be retried automatically 5 times over 7 days. At this point, if your payment has still failed to process unfortunately your maintenance package will be cancelled and no further work will be performed.

All work is paid for upfront and the work is performed within 1-4 business days after your subscription payment has been successfully processed.

We have no lock-in contracts so you can upgrade, downgrade or cancel your subscription plan at any time, just log in to your My Account area, and within the “My Subscriptions” tab you can manage your subscription/s from there.

Plan switching: If you upgrade or downgrade your subscription plan, you will need to checkout again as you did the first time. Payment will be adjusted in the subsequent renewals.

Cancellations: If you cancel before your subscription renews then your subscription will cease and no further work on your website will be carried out. There are no refunds if you cancel after your subscription has already renewed.

This includes updating your WordPress core, plugins & theme/s when new releases become available as well as a compatibility check.

Please Note:

• We will only update plugins that are compatible with your installed version of WordPress
• We will only perform theme updates if a child theme in place
• As mentioned we will do a compatibility check but it is your responsibility to inform us if you notice that your website is not working properly after updates are performed. Should this occur we will restore your website to how it was before the update (no extra charge).

If further work outside the scope of your maintenance package is required this will be discussed and agreed to by both parties before any additional work is commenced.

Over time, your database (where all your site information & settings are stored) can build up a collection of unneeded data such as post revisions, spam comments, trash, transient options, orphaned metadata, and so on. So maintaining & optimising your database means faster backups, easier restorations, and improved speed & performance.

Essentially it’s like giving your website a spring clean.

Security & malware scanning: We check your website for any malware (software created for malicious purposes by website hackers) and we make sure facilities are in place to reduce vulnerabilities & help prevent issues. Should we happen to find any issues, you will be notified immediately to discuss and resolve it.

Malware removal: In the unlikely event that malware is detected on your website, we will make this a priority fix and get your website back in tip-top shop ASAP.

We ensure facilities are in place to automatically back-up your site at regular intervals, giving you peace of mind that your site and content are fully protected.

Back-ups are stored on our remote storage so as not to take up valuable space on your server (website hosting). We store 3 sets of backups at a time.

Please note: While all precautions are taken to safeguard these back-ups sets we do not guarantee their safety and therefore strongly urge all customers to download and store them periodically.

We log all details of the updates and changes we have made to your site. This means you will have a complete history of all the work that has been completed for you.

When necessary we will also include optimisation suggestions for better performance.

In addition to performing a full backup monthly (which includes your database, themes, plugins, and uploads), the professional and ultimate plans also include fortnightly and weekly extra backups of the database.

The database is where all of the necessary website data is stored; posts, pages, comments, configuration settings, and so on. So, for sites with additional functionality and activity, the extra database backups ensure minimal impact should you encounter any losses of data, errors, mistakes, etc.

Many of the plugins available in WordPress are free, but there is a number of premium plugins that come at a cost as they offer more functionality & features. Payments are generally on a recurring annual subscription or sometimes just a once-off.

As a WordPress designer we often use premium plugins on various sites and therefore have our own developer versions of them. So instead of purchasing these yourself, you can save hundreds of dollars by simply accessing them through us.

Here’s just a few examples to demonstrate how quickly the cost of premium plugins can add up:

• Online forms: Gravity Forms + Bacic Add-ons – Valued at $59US/year
• Page Builder: WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress – Valued at $64US/year
• eCommerce extension: WooCommerce Subscriptions – Valued at $199US/year