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Over the years websites have become extremely complex beasts. They now consist of many plugins and other software libraries from 3rd parties that require constant updating to remain secure. If you have ever come across a hacked website, chances are someone hasn’t updated it for a while, and a vulnerability was discovered and exploited.
If you’re using Wordpress, running updates can be as simple as logging in once a month and hitting the update button… But if it’s a major update this could break your theme. Running updates on a regular basis helps solve issues as they crop up – if there are breaking changes, the plugin developer will usually state this in the release notes. If you let them all pile up it can become a fatal combination and require a lot of hours to fix, test and resolve as it can be hard to pin point the issue as several releases might have been rolled out since the software was first installed.
Having your website break or get hacked can be quite damaging for your business or brand. It can also be a nightmare to fix when it happens. Quite often when this happens traffic will be redirected to pornography or gambling websites which is not a very good look.
Don’t want to worry about it? Get us to manage it for you.
If you would like to avoid these issues, we offer maintenance support which proactively looks for any issues and solves them as soon as we come across them.
We do much more than just click the update button however. To avoid any website down time we clone your site to a testing copy. The updates are then run for any plugins or software libraries your site uses. We then test for any issues caused by the updates. Any issues would be fixed promptly up to a maximum of 1 hour of work per month. Once everything is working we then roll out the same updates on your live site.
We also manage your:
- Software License Management – The best plugins are usually paid ones. We would acquire and manage software licenses for WordPress plugins, fonts, cloud apps, etc.
- Backups - Backups of your database and site files.
- Monitoring – We will monitor the online status of your website. We will be notified your site is down and fix the issue if possible. Only during business hours. If the fix is going to take a while or the problem is out of our hands (e.g. web host having an outage), we will let you know.
- SSL renewal and management – The purchase, install and configuring of the SSL certificate and update and renewal upon expiry. Implement and maintain an SSL certificate for the site which encrypts any traffic going to/from the server.
- Website hosting – Having issues with web hosts? We talk their language and can resolve any hosting issues.
- DNS management – Updating or managing your DNS records.
- Security Monitoring – We review security logs and try to identify any possible issues before they occur.
- Reporting – We will give you a monthly report of the health of your site and what we have updated.
What does it cost?
It depends on how much of the above you would like us to manage for you but fees generally start at: $299 plus GST per month.