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WordPress Management – What’s Involved?

Many folks come to us with website problems. One thing that makes BlizzardPress different is our commitment to long-term maintenance and upkeep of your website. In fact, we have no interest in designing your website and sending you on your way! Our goal is to maintain a relationship, updating your website every month to ensure maximum uptime and security. WordPress is the most popular content management system, therefore it is also the most targeted. Security loopholes are commonly forged through the backdoor via themes and plugins. It’s imperative to perform regular updates.

Typical WordPress management is comprised of the following:

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress requires constant care to maintain optimal health. Just like your iPhone or Windows computer, the core software team pushes out regular updates. The risk of ignoring these updates are also the same: security and obsolescence. We set up your website on a stellar host like Flywheel or WPengine who performs WP core updates automatically. There were 11 WordPress such updates in 2018! We make sure nothing is broken after core updates are complete.

Plugin Updates

Plugin updates are handled manually, typically twice a month. On average, we update nearly 10 plugins a month!  The average client will see 100+ plugin updates over the year.  At the beginning of each month we will send you a report of these updates.

Theme Updates

Theme updates can be quite involved. They occur every 2 or 3 months and have to be completed with care. Manual backups are performed pre-update in case reversion is necessary. Once your theme has successfully been updated, we visually scan your site to make sure everything is working. Sometimes… frequently… a few fixes are necessary. We use nearly two dozen different themes on behalf of our customers. Avada is one of the most popular themes in the WordPress universe and it pushed out 11 themes updates in 2018. Here is an example:

Backups

We make sure our clients have a full site backup, every single day! They can really save your bacon. These backups are created at the server level, which makes them more reliable. We do not employ a backup plugin. Here is an example from Flywheel, one of the website hosts we use.

Security Scans

We employ a daily website scanning service to alert us of any potential security issues on your website. The results are part of your monthly report.

Uptime Scans

Our scanning service also keeps track of your overall daily, monthly and annual uptime. If your site goes down, we get an alert and track down the culprit. Sometimes it’s as simple as a client forgetting to pay the hosting bill or renew their domain. This is also part of your monthly report.

Proactive Updates

This is where we shine. Every year a few technology changes happen that require a pro-active update.  In 2018, for example, three were four events that required us to update every website:

  • Updated copyright year in January
  • Added privacy page in June (to comply with new privacy requirements)
  • Added Google Maps API in July (Google Maps changed their rules and required websites to register an API and attach a credit card for over-usage)
  • Updated to newer versions of PHP database (7.1 or 7.2)

Customer Requested Updates

We work hard to quickly update our client websites whenever changes are requested. We 100% know that clients want us to do these updates in a timely and professional manner. One of our top priorities is to answer phone calls and emails as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Monthly Reporting

Each month we send a report detailing updates performed in the previous month. See sample report >

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