WordPress Support & Retainers
Ongoing WordPress maintenance, support & development retainers from a fully in house London team.
Introduction
We maintain and support WordPress in the trickiest of high pressure environments, ensuring that it stands up to the test of time and anything that is thrown at it along the way.
Our WordPress maintenance, support & continuous improvement retainers offer our clients ultimate peace of mind that their site is running smoothly, securely and ready to scale when required. They are also a cost effective way to consistently evolve and improve a WordPress website once it has been launched.
Clients on retainers gain access to our dedicated fully in house WordPress support team and developers based in our London office, and managed through our support ticketing system.
Our support developers are separate from our main project development team, meaning they focus exclusively and full time on supporting and maintaining client projects.
We provide fast, effective, high quality and dedicated support development resource, focused on prompt and accurate response inline with a Service Level Agreement.
Why website maintenance is important for your business
Technical support & maintenance is crucial for keeping your business’ website updated and secure. Through the regular update of plugins, WordPress versions, PHP versions and conducting continuous improvements and applying vulnerability patches you can be confident that your website is running smoothly and efficiently.
How we can help with your WordPress maintenance & support needs
We build our WordPress support retainers around the needs of our clients.
These range from basic website maintenance support (4 hours / month per site) but can be extended to an enhanced support retainer arrangement of 24+ hours / month.
When building a retainer we consider:
- Level of reporting
- Required level of account management
- Skillsets & disciplines needed
- Complexity of the WordPress website
All support clients have access to our support ticketing system and we put a Service Level Agreement in place to set expectations around issues & requests raised.
We can assist with website optimisations including feature updates, addition of new functionality and the implementation of new CRM systems.
With an enhanced support and maintenance retainer you will also be assigned a dedicated project manager to assist in the planning, prioritisation and delivery of your website updates.
WordPress Updates
With our WordPress support and maintenance plans you can be assured that your website will be updated on a monthly basis. These updates include both core WordPress and plugin updates.
Regular Website Backups
Ensuring that your website is regularly backed up is a great security blanket so should the worst happen, we have a recent backup to restore.
Our usual approach would be to confirm that this is happening on your server. Our recommendation is that daily backups take place. We also take back-ups prior to any maintenance updates we make for added safety.
Website Security
In addition to maintaining your website’s plugin and WordPress updates we can help support and monitor your website’s security and performance. This can can include:
- Uptime/downtime – We can implement automated downtime reporting. This will immediately alert both us and you should your site experience downtime.
- Penetration (pen) testing – We can review and implement pen testing fixes to secure your site against known issues.
WordPress Maintenance Plans & Retainers
Our ongoing WordPress support service and maintenance retainers are tailored to the needs of our clients. They range from:
- Standard WordPress support and maintenance. This includes monthly plugin updates, WordPress core and php updates and access to our support desk ticketing service.
- Enhanced support and maintenance. This covers everything above as a minimum, but also provides a wider remit for website optimisations & improvements.
Importantly, we also offer support and maintenance services for WordPress sites which have been built by other companies. So, if you’re looking for a new agency to take on the support of your existing WordPress sites, please get in touch to see how we can help.
Support & Maintenance FAQs
Provided it’s a WordPress site, yes we can.
To support a website we haven’t built, we would first conduct a Technical Audit to explore the website’s codebase (theme) and CMS.
This will provide an understanding of ‘what’s under the hood’, so our team has the level of knowledge to respond to requests inline with a Service Level Agreement.
The technical audit will also help highlight any limitations or features the support developers will need to keep in mind to guide ongoing maintenance and enhancement optimisations.
A written audit report will be produced to highlight the key findings. This will act as a useful point of reference for all future support tasks.
Yes, absolutely!
Keeping your WordPress website up to date with the latest plugin and core updates is crucial to maintain its security and keep functionality up to date.
WordPress is an ever-evolving and improving platform. Each new version of WordPress includes security patches and fixes of newly discovered vulnerabilities and potential exploits. The open source nature of the platform has resulted in a huge and active community of developers who are continually working to improve it. By ensuring the most up to date WordPress version is being used, you stand the best chance of keeping your site safe from these security threats.
Similarly, WordPress plugins need to be regularly checked and updated to ensure the latest versions are installed to protect your website.
Although the majority of plugin and core WordPress updates don’t cause major issues to sites, they can occasionally cause conflicts which may impact website performance. By using a dedicated WordPress support agency to manage these on your behalf our team can help to troubleshoot and fix issues caused by updates.
Our monthly retainers work on a 4 hour per month minimum service level.
In our years of experience we’ve found that this is the minimum amount of time needed for us to provide a full service in order to safely update, test and troubleshoot WordPress, plugin and core updates whilst also including access to our ticketing system for high priority tickets.
Additional development hours can be secured to cover optimisations, enhancements and feature change requests.
Yes we can.
Subject to a technical audit, our developers have lots of experience of migrating WordPress sites. We recommend hosting with specialist WordPress hosting companies, our preferred choice being WP Engine.
Specialist hosts provide optimised hardware and software, as well as layers of security technology built just for WordPress that will keep your site safe. You can read about some of WP Engine security features here.
Setting up SSL certificates for your site should be a basic checklist item for every site these days. WP Engine makes this easy with ‘one click’ install of SSL certificates for all of their sites.
Configuring a web application firewall can be seen as your first line of defence against attacks by stopping traffic from suspicious IP addresses from accessing your site. There are a number of ways of doing this, but our recommended host WP Engine has a built-in firewall and Cloudflare also has a WAF that can be configured.
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