The Essentials!
WordPress Essential Support represents the minimum level of support we recommend for every WordPress site.
This package is designed with simple marketing sites in mind. If you’re not running an eCommerce, or socially active site, then Essential Support may be a good fit.
Here are the details about this package.
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.
We keep your backups for a minimum of 90 days.
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: Smoke Testing
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. The Essential level of support does not include extensive testing, but we do visually inspect the home page just to make sure there is no obvious sign of breakage.
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 test plan for you for additional cost.
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 also offer discounts on some premium plugins.
As part of our onboarding process, we will perform basic site hardening. We will install and configure software that includes a few tricks to help thwart potential hackers.
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.
Every month, we’ll generate a report to keep you up to date on what we did with your site.
Your security is very important to us, and as an incentive to get your site under the best security protection available, we are offering a discount on Sucuri’s Basic Security plan.
Sucuri Basic $149.99/yr — you save $50!
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 $50 credit toward that version.
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.
