1. Introduction
High-quality, reliable, onshore 24/7 support is easy to find offering maximum value, and once you try it, you won’t want to go back. Keep in mind when choosing a support service company, overspending and underspending can result in significant future problems. An hourly rate might be more trouble than it’s worth for a site with many issues, and offshore support can cost you your luxury and quality.
Nowadays, a small company or entrepreneur may choose to seek offshore support. With the exchange rate favorable in many cases, overseas foreign companies can offer a wide range of services suited for your budget. But, you often won’t get the quality of service you’d expect from this type of approach. Often times the support will be generic and scripted. And if it’s live chat support, there might be a language barrier and issues in communication.
Support service companies that are particularly using only one skilled worker might come short of your expectations. It’s hard to provide full coverage for all kinds of tech support without hiring a large team. With that kind of service, the company will even charge you more per job, being forced to bill you by the hour.
WordPress is the fastest growing CMS platform and hence, it’s becoming more and more important to secure your site on this platform. WordPress sites are often attacked and very vulnerable because it’s easy to find sites running outdated software. And of course, with so many plugins and themes being created by many different developers, the site needs constant analysis for compatible software and successful updates to stay secure.
Having effective site monitoring and support is often a different thought than how the site was initially created. Many people offer a low cost to really design and create the website, but then they hit with a high monthly bill for ongoing site maintenance. While throwing money down the drain is never appealing, overspending (or underspending) on website support can result in significant future problems.
Entrepreneurs and small business owners often hold back on their business website investment. They want to cut corners or find the cheapest possible option for getting the site up and running. Understandably, new businesses don’t have much money to invest in a pricey, high-tech website. But regardless of how technologically advanced the site is, if it’s built with an open-source content management system, it’s going to need ongoing site maintenance and support. With an increasing number of spam and hacking attempts happening online, this is becoming more important each month.
2. Benefits of Ongoing WordPress Support
In summary, the benefits of ongoing WordPress support are clear. It allows businesses to effectively manage their websites, ensuring they remain functional and up-to-date. By entrusting the maintenance and troubleshooting to professionals, business owners can concentrate on their primary responsibilities and avoid the stress and potential damage that can arise from attempting to handle website issues themselves.
For many small business owners who wear multiple hats, dealing with website malfunctions can be overwhelming. They often lack the time and expertise to fix issues themselves, and attempting to do so can sometimes make matters worse or even break their website entirely. This is where professional support becomes invaluable. By relying on a company that specializes in WordPress support, business owners can save time and focus on their core work instead of learning how to fix their website. Ongoing support significantly reduces the risk of website failures and prevents potential losses in business.
When it comes to the benefits of professional WordPress support, web developer Fred Khan emphasizes the importance of ongoing assistance. As WordPress has evolved from a simple blogging platform to a complex content management system, businesses have come to realize the necessity of having professional support for their websites. With a wide range of themes, plugins, and widgets available, more businesses are utilizing WordPress and understanding the need for ongoing maintenance to ensure their websites function properly.
3. Choosing the Right WordPress Support Provider
So how do you find a good maintenance provider at a price you can afford, who will not stress you out and will keep your site running well? Your best option is to contract with a WordPress support and site maintenance company. More and more are popping up as the popularity of WordPress continues to grow. Generally, these companies are made up of a small team of people who specialize in different aspects of website maintenance and who have the technical know-how to keep a website running smoothly. By contracting a company like this, you cut the risks involved in dealing with a single freelance developer. Usually, they can offer comprehensive maintenance packages for prices competitive to what you’d pay for an individual developer. This is due to the usual preventative, comprehensive nature of the services offered compared to the piecemeal, fix-it-as-it-breaks nature of service provided by most freelance developers.
Choosing the right provider for ongoing WordPress support is important to keeping your site running smoothly. This is not the time to task your niece’s boyfriend who took a web design course in high school or try to go it alone. Opening your site to multiple layers of modification can lead to inefficiency or worse, it can cause problems with functionality and security. The effort to fix these problems after hiring the wrong developer will drive up your costs in the long run and can stress you out.
4. Services Offered by WordPress Support Providers
WordPress Maintenance – This is a general term for ensuring your site runs smoothly and nothing breaks. This generally involves keeping WordPress, your themes, and your plugins up to date (very important) and then regularly checking your site to ensure that no backend or frontend errors occur. This is usually an automatic service run by companies’ tools, and they will not even realize that they are doing it. Later down the track, this usually prevents problems occurring, which in turn prevents more work occurring because the original problem was missed. This can also involve security monitoring and website backups.
Support – Main and foremost, most people want some help with their WordPress site. Plugins and themes can often conflict, and things can break. Sometimes you just want to know how to do something simple, and you want to be able to ask someone. Usually, most support providers will support just about anything to do with your website, should it be a problem or just a question. Always check this with the provider first to ensure they will offer the type of support you need.
Custom Development – If you need custom work done on your site, then having a support contract with a provider is the best way to ensure that you have a good chance of getting the work done. Most support providers are flexible, and the more reputable ones can offer you temporary services on a monthly basis and then one-off services if it’s something small. Always check with them first, though.
Here is a list of some common services offered by WordPress support providers:
WordPress support providers offer a wide variety of different services, and each provider will offer different service level agreements when you sign up with them. Services can range from a one-off service to a regular monthly service. When you consider going with a provider, you should consider what services you need and then match those with a provider that offers them.
5. Common WordPress Issues and Solutions
If these don’t solve the problem, you might want to check your Apache and Nginx configuration to ensure you’ve not got any special rewrite rules that are interfering with WordPress. If you’re still stuck, it’d be wise to get in touch with someone technical!
…there isn’t a .htaccess file. You’ll need to create one with the code that WordPress says you should have in your .htaccess.
…that your .htaccess file is not writeable, so try CHMOD it to 777. If it still doesn’t work, manually input the code that WordPress says you should have in your .htaccess, or…
Permalinks not working It’s important for your permalinks to work for the sake of both SEO and users being able to easily remember your URLs. If they’re not working, it could be a result of a new plugin you’ve installed, which could be incompatible. Try simply going to Settings -> Permalinks and hit save! If that doesn’t solve the problem, it’s possible…
There could be errors in your plugins or theme that are causing the problem, so try deactivating those. If none of those solve the problem, it would be wise to get in touch about it with someone technical to avoid making the problem worse!
White screen of death This is where WordPress looks like it’s working, but the screen is completely blank. This can be due to PHP errors, database errors, or memory limits. To determine the cause, turning on debugging will lead to a more specific error message, which hasn’t compromised security if it’s a live site. Check your log files for PHP and MySQL to help diagnose the problem. If the problem is memory limits, there are a few solutions. If you’re technically minded, you can edit your wp-config.php to increase memory. If that sounds confusing, try adding… define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);
When properly maintained, WordPress functions properly 99.9% of the time. However, since it’s so widely used, it’s not unheard of that someone, somewhere experiences an error, so there’s a good chance the problem’s been resolved by someone else already! Here’s a list of some common WordPress issues and our solutions:
6. Importance of Regular Updates and Maintenance
The first thing you’ll want to understand is how and why your site has these ‘glitches’ and unforeseen issues over time. Many people hold the belief that if you install a stable theme and a couple of plugins, your site should be good forever as long as you don’t change anything. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Think of your WordPress site as a house, and the software, themes, plugins, etc. as all things inside the house. Over time, houses break down and parts need to be replaced, just as your site will have things that need to be updated. The primary reason you ever have an issue with an update is a compatibility problem between two or more of the things ‘inside the house’. If one thing doesn’t work with another thing and the interaction between the two breaks down, this will cause glitches in a single part of your site or in an extreme case, your entire site. This is exactly why we want to avoid an overdose of updates all at once. The more things are changed at the same time, the higher the chance that you will shake things up and cause a problem. This is why frequent but small updates tend to give the best results.
Updates are a crucial thing to make sure you are doing on an ongoing basis for several reasons. First of all, not updating your site is the reason why sites get hacked. When a vulnerability is found with an older version of software, it is easy for a hacker to exploit it. Each update ‘patches’ these vulnerabilities and helps to keep your site secure. Updates can also add new features to your site. More often than not, Plugin and Theme developers are constantly releasing new updates which add new features and functionality to what you already have. Failing to update means that you’re missing out on these new things. Finally, updating your site 1-2 times a week for a few minutes is much easier and less stressful than having to do a major update all at once because you have been neglecting it for years. Trust us on this one.
WordPress can be compared to your car. If you never take it in for an oil change or tune-up, you can’t expect it to continue running smoothly. Your car won’t suddenly stop working the first time you miss a maintenance, and the same can be said for your WordPress site. But over time, things will begin to happen. Your site will start to slow down, it may start to have glitches, or it may start to have some security issues. This is no different than how you wouldn’t expect your car to continue running at its best without regular maintenance, and how your car will continue to operate even when it isn’t at its best. This is why regular updates and maintenance are crucial to the health and success of your WordPress site.
7. Security Measures for Your WordPress Site
Another thing you can do is, once again, a little bit of homework, and find a web host that is rated highly in their security. Some web hosts can do nightly scans, have server firewalls, and are quick to solve security issues and remove infected files. This may even be something you would like to contact your current web host about. Some may be willing to sort something out to keep you as a client.
If you can prevent any misuse of information or damage to your data, then it’s time well spent. This is a comprehensive security plugin, which is great for those who are not tech-savvy. It takes the thinking out of securing your site.
One that is a “must-have” is the Secure WordPress plug-in. This plugin helps to secure your WordPress site. Some of its features include: – Session management – Security of non-WordPress activity – Firewall to block most of the automatic hacking attempts – Malware scanner – Comment spam security – Database security
Because WordPress is such a popular platform, it’s a prime target for hackers. And because WordPress is so easy to work with, it makes it that much easier to damage your site when hacking it. What’s a WordPress site owner to do? Beef up your security so that it’s not so easy to break in. Do your homework and search for the best security plug-ins and features to add to your site.
8. Performance Optimization Techniques
Optimizing your WordPress database. Over time, databases can become bloated and unoptimized, which has a knock-on effect on your site’s performance. Running a database clean up at regular intervals can keep your site running smoothly. Be sure to backup your database first and be very careful in doing so. You can do this in PhpMyAdmin or by using a plugin. WP-DBManager is the safest tool available and allows you to schedule dates for optimization.
Optimizing your images. Being media rich can be a primary reason for slow page load times. Image file sizes can be the culprit here, and it is very easy to overlook that you have put up an image that is far larger in file size than it needs to be. Scale the image using width and height attributes, and don’t just put the image dimensions into the image tag. This just creates the illusion of a smaller image. If you think it’s worth it, you can even use a photo editing program to reduce the size of the images on your server. There are also plugins available that will compress the file size of the image without reducing the quality.
Enabling the cache. WordPress is dynamic, which is great in terms of ease of use, but it can be resource intensive when it comes to serving pages. Enabling cache is a process of storing the dynamically generated content in a static form so it can be served to the upcoming requests much faster. There are many popular caching plugins available for WordPress, but it depends on the user to choose the best one. W3 Total Cache is one of the most comprehensive and effective caching plugins available for WordPress. This is a bit more advanced to configure, but the default settings work very well on most sites.
9. Troubleshooting WordPress Errors and Bugs
If that is not an option then just your best memory is required. Remember the last thing you changed or the last thing you installed before the problem appeared. Circumstances are the key to the problem lies in whatever you just changed. Whether it was a setting, a customization, or a newly activated plugin, a revert back to the state of affairs before the change is going to show once and for all whether that in truth was the cause.
First and foremost, the most priceless tool in your troubleshooting armoury is the WordPress support forum. If you be able to rather than an error message displayed by a plugin, your site is in a state of “with the exception of white screen” or you are locked out of your WP Admin because of a mistake in the wp-config file, nine times out of ten you are going to find solace in the support forum.
If you are running your website, on that case you are going to have errors. There is just no way around it. It does not matter how well you code your site, how well your hosting server is, or how frequently you be able to WordPress support. You can count on running into bugs or errors at some point, if you have not already. In short, errors and bugs are triviality of web life. When you do run into an issue that is preventing your site from running accurately, there are a number of uncomplicated things you can do to troubleshoot your way to a decision.
10. Website Backup and Disaster Recovery
Data loss can occur in many different ways, and each may or may not require its own unique method of recovery. Data can be lost due to accidental deletion or overwriting. This is perhaps the easiest situation from which to recover because the data has not been gone for good, is still located on the server, and can be quickly accessed by someone who knows where to look. Issues arise when data is lost due to file corruption or SQL database damage. Oftentimes, this will result in the loss of data. Data loss could also occur as the result of website defacement or outright domain theft. In the case of the former, data will not be lost, but the website content will be ruined. Depending on the nature of the damage, it may be very hard to recover the data, and it may need to be re-entered. In the case of the latter, the website content and possibly the user’s data will be lost, and it will need to be replaced. Lastly, the worst-case scenario occurs when a website is so badly damaged or destroyed that recovery is not feasible. In all of these situations, having a recent and relevant back-up can greatly ease the recovery process. Unfortunately, for many business owners, this will serve as a hard lesson in website maintenance and preparedness.
Website back-up and disaster recovery stand as one of the most critical functions with respect to sustaining business functions over time. Each day, countless numbers of companies face a situation in which they have lost a large quantity or their entire data, resulting in them having to start over from scratch. While it is often said that WordPress is a very stable product and that it can sustain a great deal of abuse, the fact is that servers fail all the time. The absolute best way to recover from data loss is to have good back-up. This isn’t such a problem for home sites, but it is a serious concern for business sites. The question is often asked, “What would you do if you lost all of your content?”
11. WordPress Theme and Plugin Management
The term “script kiddies” is often used to describe novice hackers who use automated tools to exploit known vulnerabilities in software or scripts. Once a vulnerability is found, usually anything ranging from a small SQL injection to a full-blown site defacement can occur. Although your website is more at risk from being targeted if it’s using more popular themes or plugins, it’s actually outdated themes and plugins that can cause security issues, allowing the attacker to use a hole in an old plugin to exploit the website. More effortless than updating a plugin or theme is the simple deletion, so always use reputable plugins and keep a secure copy of your themes.
Updated software is the key to a healthy website, so where do themes and plugins come into play? A keen plugin user can often forget to check if there are regular updates for their plugins. More often than not, an outdated plugin simply will not work on the most recent version of WordPress. At this point, the plugin user will often undertake the task of finding an alternative plugin, while the plugin author simply stops updating it. In some cases, plugin users may simply prefer to use a plugin for a certain job and are not interested in any other, but this often proves to be more hassle than it’s worth. If a plugin is essential to a certain job, the plugin author will have more incentive to maintain it. A common outcome for this is that a plugin user will find something more fitting but get bored of constantly finding new plugins and lose interest in progressing the website. Similar to plugins, outdated themes can also cause compatibility issues with your website and the latest version of WordPress. Failing to update WordPress, your themes, or plugins can have catastrophic effects.
WordPress core software is updated regularly, sometimes as often as several times a month. Each update not only installs new features but also can fix security issues and bugs. As WordPress is used in various ways, a football news site will have completely different needs than a hospital website. Issues can arise on some sites while others have no issues at all. There is no way of predicting if an update will clash with a part of your site, so the best way around this is to always have a backup of your website. In the worst-case scenario in which an update has caused your site to crash, having a backup of your site means you can return to the state the site was in before the update occurred. Although all this may sound like too much effort or quite risky, the WordPress update function is vital for the security and success of your site.
12. Content Management and SEO Optimization
Static and dynamic page SEO make a world of difference in the accessibility of the internet. Though all web pages are easily accessible to the backbone of the World Wide Web, not all content is easily accessed on a search engine. With the change of content, the necessity to rebuild a page, or similar factors, a page may entirely become dynamically generated from a database. Having no content seen through the source of the page and meta tags, it will be highly inaccessible via search engine and therefore the traffic to that page will be very slim. To ensure both content access and high search engine accessibility, all pages must be made static. This would involve creating each page like an article, and its entry being accessible through links and its URL. A page would then never need to be remade and would always be directly accessible. A static page would be highly optimized for SEO. With the specified URL, meta tags, and similar content to the actual viewed page, the accessing of such a page is very simple. Denneboom has stated, “It is hard to overestimate the importance of meta tags,” and so no less has been spoken for this topic. High SEO results are so much determined by the visibility of meta tags in the site content. Static page or dynamic, all content should have well-planned meta tags and meta description for direct accessibility from search engine. Static content will become SEO optimized by a similar plan of tags and similar content.
Browsing and searching have now become second nature for computer and internet users. The modern-day society relies upon quick and easy access to the information they desire. The more time-consuming the task, the quicker they are to abandon it. Now, with easy access to vast amounts of information from the World Wide Web, the same demands are held high. A website with obscure and hard-to-find information is definitely less likely to attract high traffic. Viewing this, it should be clearly understood the importance of a search feature for a certain website. With the rise and fall of many features, one feature that has withstood the test of time is the humble site search. An easily accessible site search feature using a search engine similar to the one being used by the visitor elsewhere will indeed keep the visitor content and therefore more likely to return.
Make your content management more powerful and SEO-friendly. Post new pages or articles and make them available to your visitors. Use content scheduling on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Create content teasers for archived and search results to lure visitors to view the full article.
Efficient content management and popular SEO are the lifeline of a website. As your website fluctuates and develops over time, it is essential to ensure that the content provided by the visitor is both informative and compelling. The website should include search-appealing pages for all visitors’ needs. Continual upgrading of new pages will ensure that the visitor and the search engine keep coming back for more. In order to maintain desired SEO results, that particular page must be thoroughly linked to the subsequent pages. RuntimeMethod provides various features to manage your content.
13. WordPress Training and User Support
One common complaint about WordPress is its lack of formal support. When you’re looking for help with WordPress, consulting the Codex or forum is often your best bet. This can be quite time-consuming and possibly produce no results. If you have a hosted WordPress.com blog, support is easier to find. However, the WordPress team only provides very basic support. For many business owners, time is money. A service that provides support with a fast and reliable solution can be a very valuable investment. This is why we often end up fielding requests for our WordPress services. A user will have spent hours trying to solve a problem on their own and eventually decide it’s time to ask for help.
WordPress has grown far beyond a simple blogging platform. Many WordPress sites are businesses in themselves, featuring an online store, a members-only area, or a multilingual site. Although WordPress makes creating a website simple, it’s likely that new employees or vendors you bring on will still need some training to get up to speed. Having a centralized, documented resource available for training will go a long way in providing ongoing support. Imagine hiring an intern to manage your blog while you’re on vacation. With a good training resource, this person can learn the basics of WordPress and the blog from a few articles/jobs rather than needing extensive one-on-one training.
14. Cost Analysis: Investing in WordPress Support
Fixed costs are often cheaper than variable costs but are in place to persuade you to upgrade a support package (and thus commit to fixed costs). This is because it is simply more cost-effective to pay more each month for a better package of support. Fixed costs are often designed to cover the cost of time a support team will spend working on your website. This could be anything from monitoring time to general admin time. Fixed costs could be as cheap as $100 per month.
There are many things to consider when looking at the costs of WordPress Support. Generally speaking, WordPress Support contracts break down into two types of cost: fixed and variable. Fixed costs are what you’ll pay upfront regardless of if you use support services during that period. Variable costs are additional costs on top of fixed costs, occurring as and when you use support services.
This chapter will focus on the different aspects of paying for WordPress Support, hopefully giving you a better understanding of what exactly you are paying for. This can help you make an educated decision on what type of support is best for your situation.
15. Case Studies: Success Stories with Ongoing WordPress Support
Moving Minds considers their business to have two arms. The first arm is web design and development, and the second arm is ongoing website support and maintenance. Moving Minds engages several WordPress support services that utilize offshore staff. Unfortunately, this was a disappointing experience with language barriers and communication issues being a problem. The overseas support companies also applied changes and updates to client sites that would break functionality due to a lack of WordPress knowledge. This led to Moving Minds needing to do quality control checks and apply fixes to what the support companies had worked on. This decreased productivity and ultimately was a waste of time and money.
During the years 2004-2006, Moving Minds built a selection of static HTML websites. In 2007, they made a decision to change all new website development to the WordPress platform. As the number of WordPress sites built and managed by Moving Minds began to grow, they discovered that managing updates, security, backups, and support for all of these sites was quite time-consuming. As it turned out, it was so time-consuming that Moving Minds began to lose money on each site build. This led to Moving Minds making the decision to outsource the support and maintenance of their clients’ websites.
Moving Minds is a small digital marketing agency located in Sydney, Australia. They design and develop websites for small to medium-sized Australian businesses and provide ongoing WordPress support and website maintenance services. This is their story about finding a winning website service formula.
16. Conclusion
If you wish to keep your car for a long time, you need to protect it from rust. If you’re invested in your well-being, you will consistently exercise. If your website is important to you, it makes sense to put time into maintaining its health. With the advice given in this essay, you can ensure your site is always running smoothly and is safe from harm.
Hiring a WordPress professional to take care of maintenance is the best solution if time and/or technical knowledge is holding you back from being able to follow through with the tasks listed in this essay. A professional would be able to do these tasks in a fraction of the time that it would take an inexperienced individual and would also do a more thorough job. The lesson is that it’s much more cost-effective to maintain a site to keep its performance and security up than it is to try to revitalize it once it has become slow or been infected with malware.
The best way to have a high-performance site that is safe from security threats is to have a sound WordPress maintenance plan. I’ve discussed all of the components of this plan throughout the preceding chapters. It entails doing weekly/monthly tasks to ensure site health, using best practices during site construction all the way through to futureproofing it so that it doesn’t become outdated in a year’s time.
