Unlocking the Benefits of WordPress Maintenance Plans: What You Need to Know
I’ve seen first-hand how a well maintained WordPress site can be the backbone of your online presence. So let’s dive into the world of WordPress maintenance plans – unravel how they’re not just a safety net, but also a growth catalyst for your website and business.
WP Maintenance Plans: Ensuring Website Health and Security
The core of all WordPress Maintenance Plans is ‘keeping stuff up to date’. But not more up to date than is safe. Because that’s a tricky yet important balance to achieve. Security updates need applying promptly, but rush in to applying all those other updates and you can expect problems!
At My Tech Guy we’ve fixed plenty of broken WordPress websites. Most often these are broken because they haven’t been updated for a long time (we provide an update my old WordPress site service).
But all too often we get asked to fix a site because someone else enthusiastically applied updates too soon, when not everything was compatible yet. Too soon for a php update. Or too soon for a core WordPress update (plugins still catching up to changes).
The result can range from minor broken functionality to a completely ‘white screen’ dead website. You can only fix that by getting your hands dirty in the web hosting account.
WordPress Care Plans: Comprehensive Support for Your Website
So care plans are primarily about managing all those updates. Keeping things updated and secure but not blindly updating.
For WordPress that means plugins, themes and the core WordPress code. But it also means php (the underlying programming language) and knowing when to move up major versions there. It may also mean database maintenance and upgrades depending on your hosting setup.
Typically this means WordPress monthly plans include a regular weekly schedule of updates, often multiple times per week. Tuned with the knowledge of what updates are critical, what updates are significant and what updates should be held back.
We tailor our web care plans around your specific websites needs. If an update provides you important functionality you’ve been wanting – it gets priority. If it’s a security related fix – it gets priority.
But if an update adds major changes we’ll hold that back as these often bring bugs and minor issues. We’ll wait until that plugin has been patched with those minor fixes and only then update.
It’s this hands-on care, tailored to each site, that means our care plan customers rarely ever have any problems with their websites.
But of course there is more to looking after a website.
WordPress Monthly Maintenance: Tailored Solutions for Ongoing Management
WordPress monthly maintenance packages typically provide more than just updates. All kinds of web platform maintenance plans should include good backup solutions (onsite and offsite – if the server fails it’s no good having your only backups on that server!).
But often web hosting will be included too, and a whole variety of site monitoring and security functions.
For hosting in particular don’t underestimate the real value being provided. The quality of hosting in a WordPress maintenance package is normally streets ahead of what you get from typical web hosting companies. Your ‘budget’ $15pm plan from companies like Crazydomains, Siteground and Bluehost are pretty awful. Sometimes you get lucky, but generally you’re squeezed onto a server struggling to cope with thousands of other websites – all on the same server! Performance is poor and it takes a lot of effort just to get things working ‘adequately’. And just wait till one of those (many) noisy neighbours gets hacked or does something to slam the server resources.
Maintenance plan hosting is very different. For our plans we look at each website individually and determine what resources it needs. Each site gets far more resources than it needs – because we care about performance over penny pinching. In most cases it won’t even cost you any extra. But will be dramatically better.
Cost-Effective Maintenance: Monthly Web Maintenance Fees
So monthly maintenance fees for most sites are going to be in the $50 – $250 range. It’s a big range because it greatly depends on what your site requires, and what additional services you want taken off your hands.
We provide additional support time in our maintenance packages which you can use for whatever tasks you need. From making design changes to setting up new plugins. Our base plan only costs $75 monthly, handles all your WordPress updates, backups, fast hosting etc and gives you 30 mins of support time on top. That’s very cost-effective even if you have tech-savvy staff currently handling this stuff.
Enhancing Online Visibility: WordPress Monthly SEO Maintenance
‘SEO maintenance’ is a little tricky to define, as every case is different. But a whole heap of search engine optimisation (SEO) is normally done when your site is first built. Then you would do more SEO if e.g. your business expanded service offerings or opened a branch in a new area. These are the big strokes.
But inbetween times things are constantly changing. Google is always updating and improving their algorithms. But new features and opportunities come up regularly as a result. SEO maintenance is partly about staying on top of those things. And partly about monitoring/reporting where you stand from month to month. And partly about any agreed ongoing work to maintain and improve your standing in the search results.
Again, it greatly depends on what your site needs (based on where it currently stands). A website audit can tell you a lot about how your site measures up and identify problems and opportunities.
In Short
- Maintaining WordPress websites is of course very necessary and important.
- Managing updates well and avoiding problems is not as straightforward as just hitting lots of ‘update’ buttons.
- Good WordPress maintenance plans include more than just updates – they include backups, good hosting, monitoring and security.
- The best maintenance plans tailor everything to what your business and your website need.
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