WordPress Website Maintenance Services

WordPress Website Maintenance Services & Plans On Domain Name Sanity

Regular maintenance is a must to keep your WordPress website running smoothly. This includes regular plugin, theme, and WordPress core updates. It also means fixing any issues as they come along, lest they snowball and start causing you headaches. Still, website maintenance is crucial so as to stay up-to-date with the latest security and functionality standards.

Unfortunately, regular maintenance takes a lot of time. All these tasks add up, so in the end, you may end up feeling more like an IT tech and less like the loving owner of your website. And certainly, you didn’t start a website or blog to consistently deal with maintenance - you did it to expand your business or share your ideas.

Luckily, there’s a way to do both. In order for you to pay attention to the content and design of your website - the things that really matter to you - you may wish to outsource maintenance to a third party. At Domain Name Sanity, we provide website maintenance services that will keep your website healthy and running smoothly, and you - worry-free. We’ll manage the maintenance, so you can focus on the bigger picture.

What Is a WordPress Website Maintenance Service?

Let’s say you own a hotel. You will decide on its architecture, aesthetics, and atmosphere; you will decide on your pricing; you will be in charge of whether you’re going for quantity or quality. But a hotel is a big business endeavor, so while you’re making all these managerial decisions, you can’t also tidy the rooms, check guests in, fix clogged toilets and old piping, or cook meals. In other words, you need help to run it smoothly.

Running a website certainly isn’t as demanding as running a hotel, but it still requires a lot of upkeep, even if you’re not aware of it yet. A website needs constant attention so that nothing puts its security or functionality at risk

Let’s take updates as an example. Putting off updating various aspects of your site can put your website at risk in several ways. First, as we mentioned - there’s security. If a plugin or theme isn’t regularly updated to the latest security standards, it can be the doorway for breaches to your website. This is especially problematic if you’re running an e-commerce store, because your customers and their banking details would be at risk, as well.

Another issue when you put off updates is comprising functionality. If a plugin or theme is incompatible with your WordPress version, it will cause glitches. And if you don’t update regularly, but try to bulk-update all your themes and plugins in one sitting, this can also cause problems, like your website getting stuck in maintenance mode. When this happens, visitors will see a "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute" rather than your website. You’ll have to do some light programming yourself to fix it, but how often do you have time for that?

In a nutshell, website maintenance requires that someone takes care of the updates, fixes minor glitches, and safeguards any changes on a monthly, weekly, and even daily basis. This is the only way that your site can reliably maintain high quality and performance.

A website maintenance plan can do just this. When you sign on with a website maintenance service like ours, everything will be taken care of for you and your WordPress website. Updates, minor fixes, and changes will go back to being abstract terms in your mind that someone else is dealing with.

But this is all put in general terms. Here’s how a maintenance service can help you specifically. In the next section, we’ll go over each type of task that we will do for you as a part of our WordPress maintenance service. You can do the math yourself on how much time and effort it will save you.

What We Offer

To give you a better idea of what exactly a maintenance service does - what we do - here’s a detailed list of the services we offer to make sure your WordPress website is at its best, both security and performance-wise.

• Regular daily site backups: we will regularly create and save a copy of your website off-site each day and retain 30 days worth of backups. This means that even if there’s a security breach, or you delete your site’s files by accident, there will be an unscathed copies of your WordPress website from before the incident existing elsewhere. These copies are saved on a server in a different data center to your web site, where they’ll be secure and ready for you to use them to restore your website and bring it back up and running.
• Regular WordPress core updates: The folks at WordPress themselves will tell you that you should always update your WordPress website to the latest version. WordPress is great - in fact it’s one of our favorite CMSs - but it’s still far from perfect. Luckily, the WordPress team is constantly working to make it better, and that’s why there are frequent updates. The updates are meant to fix all sorts of glitches and bugs; in other words, everything from security vulnerabilities to functionality issues. We will make sure that your website is always updated to the latest version of WordPress, so performance and security stay top-of-the-line.
• Regular theme and plugin updates: Just as WordPress needs to be regularly updated, so do the themes and plugins on your website - for mainly the same reasons: fixing bugs, improving functionality and security, as well as bringing on some new, added features. Another issue of outdated themes/plugins is that they may be incompatible with your WordPress version, which can cause problems. You don’t have to always keep an eye out for updates, we’ll do this for you, too!
• Clearing your website’s cache: website caches store data to allow future requests for the same data to be provided (returned) faster. In a word, they allow your site to load and respond more quickly. However, an overwhelmed cache with lots of outdated data can make your site slower and cause some performance issues and error codes. This is why you need your website’s cache to be cleared regularly. We know exactly when your cache needs to be cleared, and we’ll take care of it for you.
• Optimizing site performance and database: Similarly to the cache, your WordPress website has a database which contains all the data pertaining to your site, including posts and post details, user roles, themes, plugins, and so on. Same as with the cache, over time, the site’s database may be filled with unnecessary, outdated information that will decrease the performance of your website. We help remedy this by optimizing your database and thus optimizing your site’s performance. When the database is kept neat and clean, your website will load faster and occupy less space (i.e. bandwidth). A lighter website and faster loading speeds will help your website rank higher in Google.
• Website monitoring: It’s not just a cleaning service, we also help boost your security. We monitor your website regularly and detect hacking or malware attacks on your website, informing you if anything suspicious happens.
• Uptime monitoring: Sometimes, issues with WordPress or your web host can cause website downtime. This means that your website is unavailable for visitors. Downtime is an issue because: a. It can lose you customers, and b. It can lose you rank in the SERPs. We monitor your website regularly and contact you if we discover that your website is experiencing downtime. It’s also why we offer to include hosting as part of the service, so that we can ensure that your site remains online and loading fast.
• Monthly reports: We will keep you regularly up-to-date on the goings-on of your website, its health status, and updates.
• 24/7 support: Our support team is available 24/7. Just submit a ticket if you’re experiencing any maintenance issues, and we’ll help you resolve it promptly. For changes to your WordPress site, these will be performed by our WordPress designers during business hours only.

Why You Need a Maintenance Service for Your WordPress Site

All this maintenance work - backups, updates, database and cache optimizations - result mainly in three things: better security, better speed, and better performance.

When all elements are kept up-to-date and all databases are cleared of outdated information, your website’s functionality improves, and the loading speed becomes significantly faster.

Optimized websites with fast loading speeds usually have a way better chance at ranking higher in search engine results. What’s more, fast loading speeds help keep your customers interested. Customers have short attention spans according to countless research. If your website takes longer than even 2 seconds to load, about 47% of users are likely to simply leave.

So - to boost your SEO and customer satisfaction while reducing the amount of problems you encounter, you need to regularly maintain your website.

But this takes time, and that’s exactly why you need a maintenance service. We’ll do the grunt work for you, so you can deal with the bigger picture.