WordPress Maintenance Plans and Support Services

As well as our ad-hoc WordPress support, where we make changes to your website for you, we also offer WordPress training to show you how to make edits and updates to your own website.

We can include basic training on using WordPress to more advanced training for certain plugins and themes.

It's essential to have regular backups of your website. If it gets hacked or someone makes a mistake editing it, being able to restore a backup is worth its weight in gold.

There is no automatic backup system included with WordPress, and quite often, cheap hosting packages leave you, the website owner, to take backups yourself.

The first place we recommend you check is with your hosting company. A reputable host will include regular backups; our own WordPress hosting includes daily backups within the £99 per annum fee.

If your host doesn't include it you will need a plugin installed. We recommend Updraft Plus and Akeeba Backup linked to Dropbox or Google Drive, so your backup is stored remotely from your website.

Keeping the backups separate is very important. If your site gets hacked or goes down completely, there is often no way to restore the site if the backup is stored within it.

You can add as many plugins to your website as you want to; it's your website after all! But we encourage you not to!

Out-of-date plugins are the number one reason WordPress websites get hacked. Keeping lots of plugins up to date is time-consuming and the more plugins you install, the slower your website is likely to perform.

When adding plugins, make sure of the following:

• Do I really need the functionality this plugin offers?
• Has the plugin been updated within the last few months, or is it years out of date?
• Does the plugin offer a pro (paid) version? It's often worth buying a paid version as it's more likely to be updated regularly.

If you're not sure about a plugin, get in touch, and we'll be happy to advise. There might be a better alternative we use or a way to accomplish what you need with simple code rather than a plugin.

WordPress maintenance is the act of updating the plugins, theme and WordPress files to keep your website as secure as possible. Out-of-date software is the main reason WordPress websites get hacked.

You can perform maintenance yourself; update the plugins, theme and WordPress core files as often as possible. We recommend doing it at least monthly.

We know this is time-consuming as you have plenty of other things to do to run your business, and that's where our WordPress maintenance service comes in. We'll do the updates for you, as well as host your site, keeping it optimised, secure and performing at its best.

If you don't renew WordPress by keeping it up to date, eventually, your website will stop working.

It might take several years, but sooner or later, your website hosting company will update their servers to ensure they run the latest software, which an old WordPress site may no longer be compatible with; at this point, your website may break.

Keeping your site up to date regularly will make this much less likely to happen. If things break, they are much easier to fix small issues than rebuild an entire website.