Website’s, whether they are WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla based, all require a form of a maintenance plan. We here at SERT Media have dubbed this as website insurance. Website insurance essentially does a couple of important tasks for your website to make sure you stay in business whether it’s delivering the latest news or selling your new eBook online.
What Does Website Insurance Do For You?
Your website even after it has been optimized, setup and is live still requires proper maintenance to keep it running. Every seasoned developer would agree that websites need routine work in order to keep them up to par. If your site is being actively updated (or just sitting on the side) it still can use routine maintenance to keep it in top shape.
For instance, you have purchased one of our performance packages and your site is blazing fast, one month down the line your website begins to come to a crawl, in this month long period you could have added posts, pages, other content on the website even new plugins and its slowly but surely going up.
Website maintenance allows your site to receive routine repairs and updates. If your site is running outdated plugins, themes, or WordPress versions you will be vulnerable to both hacking and performance issues. Many times developers such as myself will focus entire updates in order to improve the performance of our plugins/themes.
In addition to the performance aspect, your site is able to get routine checks for malware and/or hacking attempts. In fact, when you purchase our website insurance the first thing we do is lock down your website in the form of rule sets for ht access, checking file permissions, running a security audit on the site and overall simply lock the site down. The objective being to prevent hacking attempts from the start. Then if anything is found during our monitoring we will remove the threat, and then patch the hole used to enter.
You will also receive backups for your website, even if your host provides backups (unless they are provided through our hosting or our partners) are likely not done on a regular basis. Website insurance does allow a copy of your site to be maintained in a backup (off of your own server) in order to keep your site fully protected in the case of a serious fault.
What It Doesn’t Do
While website maintenance takes care of your site in the event of a serious issue it’s important to realize what website maintenance doesn’t do.
Website maintenance is not 24/7 support for certain issues tied to plugins or themes. If a theme or plugin has made your site go down we will attempt to disable the offending plugin or theme (if it was recently activated) but we will not fix the issue within said plugin or theme to make it work. You would need to hire us for an additional task.
Website insurance does not give you access to 24/7 developer to ask random questions too. While we love to answer questions and this can be done in our forum we will not change the color of your header, or “add a Facebook like button” to your site because of the insurance plan. That being said questions like that can be answered in our forum by other community members or one of our developers in their spare time (if they are willing).
Website insurance can be thought of as car insurance but we also make sure your car is running properly and that we have an on-call mechanic who can make sure your site is up in the event of it going down.
For more information about what is offered on our website insurance service please consult our service page.