You may be wondering what exactly is a Website Care Plan. For those who currently host their website with us, we previously called this a “maintenance plan” which we rolled into our hosting fee. However, the old maintenance plan was just a “bare bones” set of features in which we updated the WordPress core and plugins and kept the site backed up. We are calling our new plans “Care Plans” because they offer so much more than the old maintenance plans. Continue reading to learn why you need to have a plan in place for maintaining the health of your website and what our new plans have in store for you.

Essentials of maintaining a WordPress website

Most modern websites these days are powered by content management systems (CMS) like WordPress. This enables you to make content updates to the site with ease and without ever having to touch code. These content management systems are basically software that need to be regularly updated. Just like your computer software, the developers constantly release security patches and new features in updates so it’s very important to keep everything current and up-to-date. Without these updates, things on the website can break and no longer function. Even worse, it can open the door to hackers who want to take control of your site for their own spammy use. Having a website maintenance plan is a necessity these days to ensure your website stays secure and working properly. Regular software updates are just a minor feature in our new care plans.

Other essentials in keeping your website healthy include scheduled backups, schedule malware and security scans, uptime monitoring and database optimization—these are included in all of our new Care Plans.  In addition to these features, our new Care Plans offer monthly time for content updates and graphics creation. Our basic plan offers 30 minutes per month in which we can update text and photos on the site for you or create new graphics for the website. This ensures that your website stays fresh and current and your website visitors have a reason for returning. Fresh content can also a big plus for SEO.

Also included in our Care Plans is licenses for Premium Plugins used on your website. When building your website, we have preferred tools and plugins we like to use based on our experience and trust in the developers. These tools and plugins cost money to purchase and we must renew the licenses yearly or monthly to continue to receive updates to the plugin software. We buy developer licenses in order to save you money from having to purchase your own individual license.

Another new addition to our Care Plans is our Monthly Care Plan Report. At the end of each month, you will receive a detailed report of all the maintenance performed on your website, from WordPress core and plugin updates and backups performed to current status of security scans and optimization as wells as an overview of your Google Analytics.

Finally, our Care Plans are now billed monthly automatically via credit card, instead of annually. There are no long-term commitments and you can cancel anytime.

Can I just do it myself?

Keeping your website up-to-date, backed up, secure, and properly functioning can be a time-consuming and daunting task for someone inexperienced with WordPress and server structure. Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as just just clicking a button to update your plugins. Sure, you can update them from the WordPress admin, but there will be times when a plugin or theme conflict will break your site. Often times, plugin and theme developers will rewrite some of the plugin or theme code used to provide functionality in your website. If this newly rewritten code conflicts with another plugin on your site, it could take the site down. You would need to have current backups of your website and know how to restore the site from a previous backup.

In the end, maintaining your own website takes you away from what you should be doing, which is building relationships with your customers, employees and partners. The technology and strategies continue to evolve and it’s a full-time job to keep abreast of all the trends and developments. By signing up for a Care Plan with us, you allow us, the experts, to manage and care for your website so you can focus on your business.

If you’re interested in securing a Care Plan for your web site, contact us to learn how you can have a professional web designer keep your site in proper working order. Learn more about our Website Care Plans here.