Managed hosting, automatic updates and plugins with support teams all sound like they’d make WordPress website ownership a breeze. They can certainly take the burden of site ownership off the user, until a bug or error emerges.
Our care plans have been built after experiencing the issues of running WordPress websites first-hand. The goal of our care plans is to make your website ownership as smooth and simple as possible, so that you can, well, focus on running your own business.
Onboarding new sites
I use SpinupWP to help spin up new websites on my Digital Ocean Droplets (servers). It takes care of setting up a new WordPress site with the correct file permissions, and applying additional security hardening to WordPress.
It also takes care of installing SSL certificates, created using Lets Encrypt.
Performing security updates
WordPress, its themes and plugins receive regular updates to fix bugs and patch security issues. I manually perform these updates to minimise the chance of them breaking your website.
I use SpinupWP to take a backup of the site (which gets stored on another server, provided by Amazon Web Services), put the site into maintenance mode and install the update.
Once the update is installed, I manually visit the website and check that the pages load as expected and other functionality is still working fine.
Updating the servers
The server operating system and other tools such as nginx require occasional updates too. These get carried at times when websites receive minimal traffic.
Taking offsite backups
I use the 3-2-1 backup strategy to ensure we have multiple copies of each website. Although all sites automatically back up to Amazon Web Services, we like to take extra copies and store them on an encrypted USB storage drive.
Analysing website performance
I like to be proactive and look for trends in your website data. It’s good to understand how people are finding a website, how long they spend on each page and how they interact with your site.
Checking emails are getting delivered
Contact forms have a bad reputation for not working. This is why I like to monitor email logs to ensure that submissions get delivered and opened. I’ll also test contact forms each month.
Making content changes
A big part of our care plans is carrying out regular content updates. Regular text and image changes prove that you’re actively trading to search engines and website visitors.
