Ongoing website care, maintenance, editing, testing & reporting
If you don’t have the time or technical know how, we can maintain and update your website for you, keep backups and restore your site should disaster strike.
Essential website maintenance for WordPress and Drupal websites
Any website that is built upon a content management system such as WordPress, Drupal or countless others require ongoing maintenance. Content management systems make our life easier, but in order to do that they have become very large collections of code. Code is written by humans and as such is prone to containing errors and security vulnerabilities.
Ongoing site maintenance is required in order to:
- Upgrade software and plugins or modules quickly when vulnerabilities or errors are found
- Monitor security software and check for suspicious behaviour
- Create backups of your website files and database to provide disaster recovery options
- Ensure your server doesnt run out of space (ecommerce checkouts and baskets can stop working)
- Monitor your hosting package performance and capacity and ensure fit for purpose
Why use a human to update your website rather than set it to ‘auto’?
- We can read the changelog of a plugin or software update and risk assess its application
- We can clone your website and test the update before applying it to your live site so as to avoid nasty ‘suprises’
- We can check your server has enough space to allow backups and updates to continue without breaking your website (it happens)
- We can check your security logs and look for unusual behaviour
- Much like grooming a pet, manually updating a website is a good opportunity to assess its health
The potential cost of not having regular website maintenance
- Your site could be defaced
- The website could be deleted or rendered unusuable
- You could lose ecommerce sales
- Your brand may sustain damage
- You may find your website advertising things you dont approve of
- Your website may get blacklisted resulting in ranking lower in search engines like Google
- Search engines may put a warning on your website saying it has been hacked
- You may suffer data loss or data theft
All of the above outcomes have a significant cost to them which far outstrip the cost or time taken to keep a website backed up and updated. If you have any questions about the process or require a custom maintenance plan outside of those offered here, please do give us a call on 01903 527927.
What you get
When you have a subscription with us for website management we provide you with the following:
Site failure/downtime monitoring. We monitor your site for downtime and gaps in availability. When these happen we are well placed to quickly respond.
In-site support forms. We embed support forms in your website dashboard (if using a CMS) which allow you to contact us with a support request directly from your website.
Off site backups. Tailored to your requirements we can create a backup schedule which sends backups to a secure remote location so you don’t use up all your hosting space with backup files.
Security & plugin/module updates. On an agreed schedule we will apply any security updates to your website, keeping it secure against attack.
Content management system updates. The majority of all commonly used content management systems like WordPress or Drupal issue security and feature updates. We install these for you at an agreed frequency based upon the profile of your website.
Update testing. Unfortunately there is the chance for plugin and theme updates to contain bugs. We can’t stop this happening but what we can do is ensure all your updates are tested on a copy of your website prior to making changes to your live site.
Disaster recovery. We use one of your backups to restore your website to a date prior to any failure or risk. We store backups in a variety of formats and in multiple locations for redundency.
If you think you would benefit from our ongoing website management service please call us on +44 (0) 1903 527927 and we will discuss your website with you and propose a management solution tailored to your needs. Alternatively please fill in the form below and we will get back to you shortly.
Working with you has felt as if we’re working with someone who’s part of our team, rather than an external service supplier.
Stephanie Debere – Sanitation Ventures
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