When you need a little more!
WordPress Advanced Support is our recommended level for more active sites, and sites requiring more hands-on management.
This package is designed with eCommerce and membership sites in mind, for site owners that are a little more risk-averse, and for those that want regular help with their site content.
Backing up your site is the single most important thing you can do to minimize your risk.
Backing it up offsite means that we keep a copy of your files and data on a different server than your web server. If your site gets hacked or your web server goes down for some reason, we can restore your site quickly from a backup.
Backing up sites hourly means that you have more restore points available for active sites.
Hourly backups are stored for up to 90 days.
Real-Time Backups Available!
Want even more safety? For an additional $25/mo, we will configure your site for real-time backups with unlimited storage.
Whenever a change happens on your site, such as a new post being published, the event will trigger creation of a new restore point.
This is the maximum safety available in the industry.
Probably the second most important thing you can do to minimize risk is to update WordPress core, your plugins, and your theme.
The publishers of WordPress and the pieces that go into your site are constantly coming out with updates. Some of these updates add new features, but many of them also include fixes for bugs and security exploits.
While seeing new features is always nice, and adds value to your site, the security and bug fixes are critical to managing risk on your site, even if you never make changes to it (and you should be making frequent changes to it!).
Quality Control: System Testing on Staging
Whenever we update your site, we perform a quality control procedure called a smoke test. The name comes from the idea of turning something on briefly just to make sure it doesn’t start smoking.
When we update your site, we are deploying code changes made by the publishers of that code. Any time you make a change to code, there is a risk of introducing a new bug.
Usually, sites under the Advanced Support package merit a little more in-depth testing. eCommerce sites and other, more complex types of sites have a higher likelihood of seeing a new issue from an update. To help manage this risk, we ensure there is a staging, or other test instance of the site. Before updating the Production instance, we perform updates on the staging site, and run a few extra tests to ensure a modicum of functionality has not been affected.
Want us to do more extensive testing? Sure, happy to do it! We have a ton of experience with formal testing practices, and we’re happy to design and execute a more comprehensive test plan for you for additional cost. If you want, you can apply your monthly retainer to additional testing.
Premium Plugins and Themes
Some plugins and themes require a license to keep them up to date. We can only update plugins and themes that are licensed. If your license has expired, we will inform you so you can take care of it, and of course we’re happy to facilitate purchasing a license at our standard hourly rate.
We offer licenses for a few premium plugins as part of advanced support.
We can’t respond to a problem if we don’t know it exists.
Our uptime monitoring service watches your site every minute of the day. If your site becomes unresponsive for more than a few minutes, our staff is notified so we can take action.
Similarly, our malware scanner checks your site daily, and will inform us of any vulnerabilities or malware detected. Protecting your site may be as simple as updating to the latest version of a plugin a little ahead of schedule, or we may need to submit your site to a more careful malware audit. Either way, knowing there’s a problem is the first step to taking action.
If something does go wrong, we’ll take care of it.
If we receive a notification that your site is down, or that there is a security issue, we’ll respond to it in one of two ways. It’s your choice how you want us to proceed.
- We take up to 2 hours to troubleshoot and fix the issue (Recommended!)
- We contact you for approval to take action.
We want to make sure you’re in control, so it’s your choice. Our recommendation is that you pre-approve up to 2 hours of troubleshooting and emergency response. This lets us act to resolve the issue immediately without waiting for further approval.
If we resolve the issue within that time (we usually do), then we’ll contact you once it’s resolved to let you know what happened, and what we did to resolve it.
If we haven’t resolved it in that time. We will stop work, contact you with a status report, and wait for authorization to continue working. If you want to pre-approve more time, that’s okay too!
This practice offers the best of both worlds: a speedy response and keeping a handle on the budget.
The Essential Support package does not include a retainer for labor, so any work we do will be billed at our standard hourly rate.
If something does go wrong, we’ll take care of it.
If we receive a notification that your site is down, or that there is a security issue, we’ll respond to it in one of two ways. It’s your choice how you want us to proceed.
- We start troubleshooting immediately with a 2-hour cap (Recommended!)
- We start troubleshooting immediately, and stop when your monthly retainer is exhausted.
- We contact you for approval before we take action.
We want to make sure you’re in control, so it’s your choice. Our recommendation is that you pre-approve up to 2 hours of troubleshooting and emergency response. This lets us act to resolve the issue immediately without waiting for further approval. If you choose this option, we’ll use any balance on your monthly retainer before accruing additional cost.
If we resolve the issue within the approved time, then we’ll contact you once it’s resolved to let you know what happened, and what we did to resolve it.
If we haven’t resolved it in the approved time. We will stop work, contact you with a status report, and wait for authorization to continue working. If you want to pre-approve more than 2 hours, that’s okay too!
This practice offers the best of both worlds: a speedy response and keeping a handle on the budget.
Every month, we’ll generate a report to keep you up to date on what we did with your site.
Sucuri Basic is included!
Sucuri is an industry leader in website security. Under their basic security plan you get the following.
- Malware removal & hack response
- Continuous malware scanning
- Brand reputation & blacklist monitoring
- Stop hackers before they reach your site (virtual patching / hardening)
- Advanced DDoS mitigation
- CDN performance enhancement
- Firewall
If you need their Pro or Business version, no problem! We’ll put your $200 credit toward that version. So, Pro will cost an additional $99.99 and Business will cost an additional $199.99.
Note that Sucuri bills in yearly increments, so we cannot prorate this service. You do, however, have 30 days to request a refund. If you discontinue your Support subscription before the end of your Sucuri subscription, we will continue to maintain your Sucuri service unless you ask us not to. If you paid for a full year of support, we will prorate all but the Sucuri membership.
We want to be sure you are seeing a lot of value for our service, so we’ll include access to the following plugins.
One of the main ways we add value with our Advanced Support package is to include up to 30 minutes of manual testing when we update the software on your site.
Any time software is updated on your site, new bugs may be introduced. Sometimes, pre-existing bugs may have gone unnoticed. With Advanced Support, one of our developers will spend up to 30 minutes testing your site, looking for bugs.
If we find any bugs or see other opportunities to improve your site, we will report these, and include an estimate to fix them. If you approve the fixes, they will be performed at our standard hourly rate.
When you have a more complicated, busier site, it’s much more important to test your changes in a safe environment before pushing them live.
A staging instance is a duplicate of your website that is not accessible to the public. Its purpose is to be used for testing and review by stakeholders.
The “Production” or “Live” instance is the one your visitors see publicly.
We consider it a critical piece of a risk management plan to use a staging instance, so if you don’t already have one, we’ll configure it for you as part of your onboarding process, and even host it for you if necessary.
For our Advanced clients, we’ll perform updates and tests on staging before performing them on production as an extra safety measure.
Keeping the staging instance up to date, and synchronized with production may incur additional time and expense. We call the process of synchronizing staging with production, “Refreshing” the staging instance. Depending on your site, it may only need to be refreshed infrequently.
