WP Care

A WordPress site is software, not a finished object

The day your site goes live is the day it starts ageing. WordPress, its theme and every plugin on it get updated constantly — often to close a security hole somebody has already found. Leave that for a year and you do not have an old website, you have an open door.

This is the least exciting thing we sell and quite possibly the most useful. Most of what you are paying for is nothing happening.

What looking after a site actually involves

• Updates that are checked afterwards. Anyone can automate an update. The value is a person loading the site once it has run — because an update that silently breaks your contact form is worse than the update you never applied.
• Backups you could actually restore. A backup nobody has ever tested is a hope, not a backup. Ours are taken off the server and periodically restored to prove they work.
• Watching it, not waiting for you to notice. Uptime monitoring, an SSL certificate that never quietly expires, and an eye on the forms still sending.
• Security housekeeping. Scanning, locking down the login, and removing the plugins nobody has used for two years — the most common way a small business site gets hacked is a plugin that was abandoned by its author.
• Somebody to call. Small text and image changes done for you, and a known number to ring when something looks wrong.

Being straight about it

Plenty of “maintenance” plans are an automated script and a monthly PDF. If nobody looks at the site and nobody answers when it breaks, that is a subscription rather than a service. Ask any provider — including us — what happens at 9am on the morning the site is down.

This keeps the site healthy. It does not grow it. Care is protection, not marketing. If what you actually want is more enquiries, spend the money on being found first and keep the site maintained afterwards.

Some sites need fixing before they can be maintained. If yours has been left for years, is on a theme no longer supported, or was built in a way that breaks on update, we will say so and quote the repair separately rather than signing you up to a monthly fee that cannot help.

The plans below are a starting point. Tell us the site and how much you change it month to month, and we will come back with a recommendation and an exact price.