Wordpress maintenance.

Too often, website owners have a common misconception about website security and the need for maintenance thinking that no one would have a reason to steal information from their site or attack their website. But if updates are ignored and vulnerabilities are not resolved, you are an important target for malicious attacks.

For hackers, it's not so much about stealing information, but hijacking your site to use the server as a hosting environment to send spam emails or attack other servers. Hackers often create bots to search for vulnerable sites. Once an access point is detected, the hackers enter and take control of the server. The server is then used to send spam to huge email lists. This will severely damage the reputation of your site with search engines and lead to your IP address being blocked, so that your site will hardly appear in search results.

Hacks and infections can lurk for a long time, while the hacker infects other websites and builds an army of exploited servers, also known as botnets. Hackers use infected servers to perform a DDoS attack on other networks. Botnets broadcast a swarm of spam bots to infect other sites, set up phishing scams, and / or facilitate DDoS attacks. So do not leave your website unattended, this will prevent damage.

While it is possible to do the updates yourself, it is quite time consuming and risky to get it right. It is important to have updates performed regularly by a developer who knows what he is doing and can monitor and address any issues that may arise from the update. Software updates usually run smoothly, but sometimes they clash, functions of various techniques and disciplines may conflict, or a new update may contain errors and lead to malfunctions that can cause a bad experience for your visitors, or even worse, bring your site down completely.

I carry out maintenance in a structured and controlled manner so that nothing is missed and I like to follow the latest developments around security, performance and WordPress. In addition, I offer many other extra services with maintenance to ensure that your website continues to work stably, for which you normally spend a lot of time.

In special cases, WordPress, plugin or theme updates can cause problems. This is partly due to various factors. For example, a website may contain many plugins and functions of various techniques and disciplines which may conflict or a new update may contain errors. Compatibility in this case means the extent to which plugins and techniques can be used together.

If an update to your WordPress website is causing problems, I will roll back the update, fix it on the staging server and then make the change on your live website. With the basic package you get 1 hour free compatibility support, which in most cases can be enough, if it takes longer, the work will be discussed with you in advance and then charged separately at my regular hourly rate. In some cases, the WordPress plugin or theme may no longer be supported by the developer, in which case I may not be able to provide a solution. In such cases I will propose alternative solutions.

No one can guarantee that your website will never experience a hack or infection. This is partly due to the various factors and techniques that come together. Every new update to the WordPress core, theme or plugin may contain new security vulnerabilities. This may also have to do with the way in which the customer keeps his data, how the website is structured or what security measures the hosting provider implements.

When your website is hacked, I immediately start working on identifying harmful files and find out the cause. With the full-service package I make a daily safe backup of your website on an off-site server, in which case your data will never be lost and I can easily roll back a version.

My basic security measures include configuring a free WordPress security plugin to receive attacks and security issues in my mail and setting up a Firewall, running a malware scan and deleting malicious files, actively tracking unsupported plugins and themes, as well as ongoing recommendations and advice on security best practices to keep your site safe.

With the full-service package I perform the above actively and monthly. With the basic package I can execute it on request and the hours are paid with my regular hourly rate.

Depending on the degree of the issue, a support issue can be submitted by email or by Skype / Slack / Chat. Because I sometimes have to deal with multiple support requests, the workload can increase. In that case, the classification table below can be assumed during office hours. In other cases I try to respond asap and immediately in case of urgency.

Classification	Response time	Contact
Urgent	Within 1 hour	By Skype, chat or email
High	Within 1-8 hours	By Skype, chat or email
Average	Within 48 hours	Email
Low	Within 3-5 days	Email

Versioning is a method I use to take extra care of any changes made to your website's codebase. I can make small, step-by-step changes that can then be tracked, documented, and easily rolled back if bugs or issues occur after I make changes to your website. This ensures, among other things, that the code remains transferable and sustainable. GitHub is one of the popular Git version control system on which it can run which is already used by over 40 million programmers worldwide.

Maintenance is mainly focused on stability, safety and performance. What is not included, among other things, are changes to the content of the website, including text, images, pages, menus, etc, additions of new functionality to the website or changes to existing functionality (further developments and feature requests), changes to the design of the website, installation of new WordPress plugins, installation of a new WordPress theme, hosting, server or email related issues and SEO / Search Engine optimizations.

I offer a separately service for this type of jobs.

During the onboarding process, I request an administrative user account for WordPress and a login for your web hosting dashboard. With these two types of information, I can allow myself access to different places on the server and website and set up routine site management such as plugin and theme updates, malware and security scans, as well as my daily remote backups. I keep all customer data in a 256-bit AES encrypted vault for ultimate security.

Hell yes! I give bulk discounts, please send your request to me for details. I also like to work with agencies. As soon as I know more details about your specific needs, I am happy to prepare a proposal with some clever incentives.