WordPress Support Services & Website Maintenance

Questions to Ask a WordPress Maintenance Company

Before signing up for a WordPress maintenance package, it is important to ask the WordPress support company some questions about how their web services work. This will help you get a better idea of the relationship you will have with the WordPress site maintenance team before you give them money, provide them WordPress access, and give them complete access to your website for one of their WordPress support packages. Let's go over some simple questions to ask:

• How do you handle WordPress security? Do you run security scans of WordPress websites?
• What is the turnaround time for WordPress support and maintenance services?
• Do you outsource your WordPress support services?
• What are the costs of your WordPress site maintenance services?
• Do you have minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for website updates?
• What are your normal hours of operation?
• Will you keep me informed about new updates within WordPress?

We find it beneficial to run these WordPress questions by any WordPress support service company before subscribing to their website support packages, since it will provide much better understanding for you regarding the future relationship, the security of your WordPress site, and the expected turnaround time for important maintenance requests.

WordPress Website Maintenance Plans and Tips

We are often asked for a WordPress website maintenance plan by larger companies looking to establish routines and procedures within their IT department. We are happy to help you develop a WordPress support plan to ensure all aspects of your website, hosting, and domain name are routinely checked to ensure optimum performance and uptime. Taking care of this now will help minimize website downtime in the future, which is something all WordPress maintenance companies will be interested in for their clients.

Here are a list of annual WordPress support tasks to review:

• Ask your web hosting company if they have newer servers you can migrate to.
• Check if your WordPress website has a new major release that will require an extensive website migration.
• Attempt to restore a WordPress backup to ensure the data being stored is sufficient for full recovery.
• Look at competitor websites to see if you are missing out on new functionality for your own customers.
• Perform a full WordPress security review to ensure nothing has been compromised or left vulnerable.
• Verify structured data, open graph, and social links are all working properly.
• Verify the necessity of any 3rd party tracking, live chat, or heat map scripts that are installed.
• Remove any unnecessary WordPress development or staging websites.

Here are a list of semi-annual WordPress support tasks to review:

• Ensure you have access to your domain name and that it isn't expiring soon. This will be helpful when you have to process a domain name renewal.
• Ensure you have access to your hosting account and that it isn't expiring soon.
• Ensure you have access to your DNS in case you need to change anything.
• Check if your SSL certificate will be expiring in the near future.
• Verify your WordPress backup schedule is working properly.
• Check if you have an automated image optimization service running.
• Check if the WordPress website is throwing any console errors.

Here are a list of monthly WordPress support tasks to review:

• Check for broken links on your website, which negatively impact user experience and SEO.
• Check for WordPress performance issues from recent updates or changes on the website.
• Check Google Search Console for any coverage issues on the WordPress site.
• Provide some kind of update to your content to keep your website fresh.
• Check if there are available upgrades or updates available for WordPress core or WordPress plugins.

The Cost of WordPress Maintenance Service

The starting price for our WordPress maintenance services is $119.50/hour, but we offer discounts for pre-purchased blocks of time that bring the rate as low as $99.95/hour. We also offer WordPress management, starting at $50/month, if you'd like the peace of mind knowing a company is proactively upgrading your website.

To get started, if you are new to our WordPress maintenance company, we'll need you to pre-purchase a block of time which includes a discount on our hourly rate. If you are an existing client, you are welcome to choose monthly billing at our higher hourly rate or continue to pre-purchase time and receive discounted hourly rates for your WordPress website updates.

If you pre-purchase a block of time for your WordPress maintenance & support, you will be happy to know there are no contracts, there are no hidden fees, the time never expires, and there are no minimum deductions for small requests. Please keep in mind we rarely see tasks take less than 10 minutes, since the process of reviewing an email or taking a phone call, checking on whatever WordPress issue was asked, providing some form of feedback, and then logging the task usually takes at least 10 minutes of time. To keep you informed of the time usage on your pre-purchased block of WordPress maintenance time, you will receive a monthly email update letting you know how much time remains on your account.

What is Considered Billable Time?

When talking with prospective WordPress maintenance clients, we are often asked what is considered billable time. You will find the answers to vary greatly within the WordPress support industry. In some situations, you may find a WordPress maintenance company to charge a much higher hourly rate, but not bill out for communication and organization. Likewise, there are WordPress support companies like us, who charge a more affordable hourly rate, but also bill out for most communication and organization. To help provide clarification, let's go over some examples of what we consider billable time when it comes to maintaining and supporting your WordPress website.

Here are examples of billable WordPress support services:

• Reading through lengthy emails to understand what is being requested.
• Preparing responses to lengthy or complex email messages.
• Helping you figure out your domain name or web hosting provider.
• Scheduling your website maintenance to be completed by the best team member.
• Talking with you on the phone about ideas or tasks you want to discuss.
• Reviewing completed work for quality control purposes.
• Providing you training on how to handle administrative tasks.
• Researching unique solutions to difficult questions you present our team.
• Providing more detailed time usage reports, beyond the automated monthly update email.
• Helping you figure out email client issues within Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.
• Almost any other task not specifically mentioned in the list below.

Here are examples of non-billable WordPress support services:

• Talking with you about personal matters, such as the weather, a recent vacation, or a sporting event.
• Responding to simple email messages that don't require research or lengthy feedback.
• Handling accounting-related tasks, such as invoice generation, payment confirmations, etc.