In the 19 years we have been in the web business, we have noticed a lot of the same problems happening for our website customers over and over. To help our WordPress website customers avoid these problems, we created a plan where we check on things regularly—thus “Hands-On Monthly Maintenance” (HOMM) for WordPress Websites.
Is everything showing correctly on your website?
Sometimes things break or disappear—especially if your website uses outside resources or images. Sometimes another site you have linked to gets shut down or changes their URL, and that “breaks” a link on your site.
Is the information on your website up to date?
Did your hours change, has your restaurant’s menu changed, or do you have a new product? Critically, did your email address or phone number change?
Are your contact forms working correctly and are you receiving and responding to those messages?
In the past, we have had customers come to us worried that their contact forms were not working, and that they were therefore losing potential customers. Your contact forms can stop working for many reasons. In some cases, our customers had changed the email address they were using, forgetting that their contact forms were set to send emails to the old address. In some cases, the forms themselves had broken for one reason or another. In some cases, the emails were going into spam folders and our customers just needed to “whitelist” the sending email.
Is your site’s software up to date?
Your website lives on a computer, and computers run on software. That software is always being updated and improved, but that means that sometimes “old” software gets phased out. Your website’s programming can be cutting edge when the site is built, and still need to be updated months or years later when the computer it is running on has a software update.
Is your domain registration going to expire?
We have had numerous times when a client has accidentally allowed their domain to expire, thus shutting down their entire online presence. If caught quickly, this is just a temporary inconvenience we can solve quickly for you. If the expiration is not caught right away, however, your domain can be purchased by someone else! At that point, it can be very difficult to retrieve your domain name without significant expense.
WordPress: easy to use but has a lot of moving parts
Even before WordPress became so popular and so ubiquitous, we were addressing these and other issues for our clients. Remember: just because your website is built on WordPress, that does not mean that it can be neglected.
- WordPress makes it easy for you to update the content and appearance of your website, but it is not always completely easy to figure out what is happening when something goes wrong. Sometimes different plugins on your site will conflict with each other, breaking all or part of your website. Sometimes, it can be as simple as a bad HTML tag causing the appearance of your site to break.
- Also, WordPress and its plugins are always being improved to provide new features and to keep up with changing technologies. At times, they are updated to fix newly discovered security issues, so regular updates on your website can be very important!
FireSpike’s HOMM for WordPress Websites: $30 per month ($25 per month prepaid for one year), FireSpike offers the following monthly maintenance services for your website:
- Monthly software and plugin updates
- Immediate “urgent” security software and plugin updates
- Monthly malware scanning
- FREE malware removal and search remediation should your website be hacked
- Monthly submission of site contact forms to confirm receipt
- Monthly domain monitoring
Should there be a significant programming issue in your site, there may be additional service costs required; however, we will check to make sure that any more complex programming is approved before we start it, or we will offer no-cost solutions if they exist.
Otherwise, these regular monthly services will NOT require additional hourly service costs, should we have to spend more time than usual in a given month.
Hosting Included
Your site can be hosted on your own hosting account, or, for no additional cost*, FireSpike will provide hosting for your website. That’s right: sign up for our monthly maintenance, and hosting is included at no additional cost. If you choose to host with us, your monthly maintenance also comes with:
- Website hosting with very fast serve and response time and industry-leading uptime
- Email account setup and management (on our own email server or at Gmail)
Summing up
With our constant focus on reducing our customers’ stress, we feel that our HOMM and Hosting is a great way to take a big chunk of “@#!” out of the WWW for you!
*This hosting offer does not include high-end enterprise level hosting required for extremely large websites, and covers hosting that can be run on our own existing hosting servers. For more details on enterprise-level hosting, please contact us.
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