WordPress Maintenance: My Introduction
WordPress maintenance is a necessary and fundamental aspect of having a site based on WordPress.
I’ve been at this for quite a number of years, and quite a few of my own sites back when I was merely a hobbyist, and the majority of my now clients’ websites are based on WordPress. WordPress is an extremely popular platform for websites and I completely understand why.
It makes things very simple and easy. It’s great for non-coders, people who either lack the skillsets that are needed for programming, or simply those that want a simple and straightforward platform to use that is easy to edit and update content.
It’s a great platform, even this site you are viewing now, though it’s not a WordPress site, the backend, where I host the articles uses WordPress. It just makes things simple when it comes to writing articles.
Personally, I like WordPress, I believe it’s a great platform. For this site and some of my others, I choose to program everything in React and Next.js, a much more complicated programming language, at least on the font end of the site. My reasoning for that is because of its speed and flexibility. It just runs significantly better than a WordPress site.
However, it’s much more complicated. What would take me 20-30 hours to build in WordPress with a popular plugin like Elementor, it takes 90+ hours to program everything in React and Next.js.
Don’t Make Your Life Complicated
I often get labeled or referred to as the “Linux” guy because of my choices of doing things that are sometimes more complex and harder than necessary. But I’m a programmer and that’s just what I do. I like things that are a challenge. I like to figure it out. I thoroughly enjoy solving puzzles and creating things with computers and programming languages.
Why WordPress
That being said, when a new client comes to our organization, I usually suggest going with WordPress because of its simplicity. It allows our clients to be more independent and not necessarily need us for every little change or update. It’s intuitive and they can do the normal things a site needs with ease.
Simplicity
Though we’re always on call for when things do get complicated and are there to resolve whatever issues our clients may be facing when it comes to their online presence.
To our clients, I will explain the benefits of making a web app, so to speak, in React and the benefits of it. Again, this site is built on React and hosted on Vercel, it’s blazing fast if you haven’t already noticed.
It’s a compromise though, a blazing fast site with more upkeep and time-consuming programming involved, or a slower site but very easy to update and add content such as WordPress.
WP Maintenance: The Fundamentals
One of the issues I have with WordPress, though it’s so simple to use, it needs maintenance and there is a lot of what I find to be mundane tasks that need to be implemented. For example, keeping the site up to date.
The importance of updating the plugins and the platform itself are necessary. WordPress is one of the, if not the, most popular methods of having a website. Because of that, bad actors are constantly trying to exploit it. Brute force attacks and what have you, trying to infiltrate a WordPress site.
Security
It’s not all the sites, but having done this for so long, I’ve seen it happen. E-Com sites, even personal blogs, getting attacked.
So part of maintenance is dealing with security as well. The level of security is usually determined by just how active the site is when it comes to these “bad actors”.
Plugins
One of the simpler things I do is limit the login attempts. This keeps bots from trying to login and guess passwords and login credentials. I usually set it to 3 attempts and if they go through those limitations, I block the IP address so that can’t even access the site.
WordFence
Another popular plugin that I install on my client’s WordPress sites is WordFence. It is basically a software firewall. It has a lot of other features with it as well. It does the job and gives a report of what is going on behind the scenes.
Other Security Fixes
Another solution I’ve added to the mix was whitelisting IPs that could even access the login screen, just because I got tired of so many attempts being made on one of our client’s websites. What this does is it makes it so anyone who does not have an assigned IP address, simply can’t even access the login screen at all.
Maintenance Mode
One of the benefits of using WordPress is maintenance mode. Say for example you’re working on the site, or maybe you are experimenting with some ideas on your live server. You can simply put it in maintenance mode and from there, anyone who comes to the site is welcomed by a screen of your choice. Maybe it suggests that the site is under construction, or whatever you want. This just keeps everything hidden while you or maybe we work on your site.
WordPress maintenance mode manually is configured and set up usually. Either a splash page, maybe an image, or a simple message telling people you’ll be down for an hour or three.
Maintenance Mode Plugins
There are quite a few plugins out there for maintenance mode and WordPress has one natively. I usually use a third-party plugin because I like the features it provides. Again, the sole purpose of maintenance mode is just to keep your site from being visible while it’s being worked on. If you’re updating content on the home page or doing some more complex updates and changes to your site, maybe a complete overhaul in the design, it’s probably best to just put it in maintenance mode and work on it late at night when traffic is low.
That being said, just wanted to throw this out there. When you need someone to update your site at a low traffic time, like midnight or whatever time. We do and have done that for our clients. On-Call, On-Demand, Tech Guru.
What is WordPress Maintenance?
This is a difficult question to answer in a straightforward way. It’s basically whatever you need it to be. We work with clients that need significant and complicated changes made to their WordPress’s function.php file, implementing new features. Sometimes I find myself just simply doing backups. Other times, I’m running some reports to discover broken links and issues with SEO (search engine optimization) compliances.
What Are We?
We would like to say we offer a premium website maintenance service. Other WordPress maintenance companies may keep things up to date and do very simple and mundane tasks. We do that too, but what separates us from that, is the fact that we do anything and everything when it comes to running a website. Again, anything and everything. From coding, programming, backups, updating content, and even creating and adding content and pages.
We Do It All
You need a landing page created, we got you. You need to change your address on your site, we handle that too. If you want to implement HubSpot forms for marketing purposes on your WordPress site, we got you covered. We are a WordPress maintenance and support “team”. We want to see your business succeed, so anything and everything that we need to do to assist you in accomplishing that, that’s what we do.
WordPress Support and Maintenance Services
WordPress website maintenance services that we provide are quite vast. If you need a legitimate tech guru to assist you with your online presence, then TECH-Butlers is where it’s at. Always by your side. On-call, On-Demand, Tech Guru.
We can provide WordPress website maintenance packages if you have a lot of the same stuff going on each month, but more often than not, we’re just on-call support. I think the normal routine thing we provide our clients is a WordPress maintenance report. Basically a report on the site’s health, broken links, SEO issues, etc.
It’s more of a premium WordPress maintenance service that we provide. Being that we take care of everything you could imagine. We certainly don’t want to place ourselves in a box or limit how we can help you. That being said, we think we offer the best WordPress maintenance services out there. Maybe we’re biased, but that’s what we do and that’s who we are.
WordPress Hosting
When it comes to hosting your site. Personally, I shy away from Shared Hosting packages. They are cheap and inexpensive, but most of our clients are professionals or entrepreneurs doing startups. Speed is such an important aspect of site health, and just the overall user experience when it comes to having a website.
The problem I have with shared hosting and why I rarely recommend it, the resources of the server are being shared. It’s slow as Christmas sometimes and for someone running a website, a business for that matter, it’s important that that site load ASAP.
If a site takes 9 seconds to load… Well, there’s a good chance that the user is going to presume the site doesn’t even exist and just leave before it even has a chance to load.
That being said I usually recommend a VPS, virtual private server or something along those lines. Most of our clients are small enough that they don’t need their own dedicated server, but with the added speed of having their own virtual machine on a server out there, they get to have their own ram and CPUs for processing. Not to get too technical at this time, but what that means is that they have the resources at their disposal to push and process the data for their website.
Website Cost
Here’s the thing though, it costs more. You’re looking at 20-30 dollars a month, minimum. While doing shared hosting you’re looking at 2-10 dollars a month. So the price is significantly higher. But if you are running a business, I truly believe that you need that boost of speed.
I know for this site, as well as some others I personally own, I spend over $25 dollars a month just to host my sites. I just take it for what it is. An expense of doing business. Sure I could go the cheap route, but I’d be paying for it. Loss of customers, loss of the good metrics I have with hosting a site the way I do, the site health, the benefits when it comes to SEO, and how Google perceives me.
Overall, having a decent hosting provider is imperative, at least in my mind, to have a functional website, especially for a business.
How much do you charge for WordPress maintenance?
That all depends on what you need and what your expectations are. We can help you with anything and everything, so it’s just a matter of how much you want to delegate to us so that you can focus on more important matters than maintaining your website. For example, you could be focusing on acquiring more clients and customers. Producing and developing new products and services that your market demands. Handling customer service and support in order to retain your current customer base.
Our attempt here to is save you time; save you from the frustrations, the hassles, and the burden of having a website for your business, so that you can work on your business instead of in your business. From this vantage point, you’ll be able to get more done, be more productive, and serve your customers and clients at a higher level which in turn, leads to growing your business.
Conclusion:
If you need help with your WordPress site or any site for that matter, we would love to be your tech guru. On-Call, On-Demand. We’re always just an email, message, or phone call away. If this sounds like something that interests you, I’d highly encourage you to schedule a call with us, so we can discuss and discover together how we can be in alignment with your goals, with your business, and how we can be of service to you.
