Now that you have your shiny new WordPress website (complete with an SEO package, to help get your site found on Google for your target market’s most likely profitable keywords), your web designer has now mentioned “updating your WordPress files” and “keeping your WordPress files to the current version” and “updating your plugins and theme files”. You may be wondering ‘Why do I need to update my WordPress website?” and “How Much Will it Cost?”
The reason you need to budget for WordPress updates and backups and plug in updates and PHP updates (about $300 a year, includes 4 updates) is that many hackers across the world are busy writing evil scripts to try to “mess up” WordPress websites.
Somehow, it’s fun for them to try to write a script that will attack your login page, try to guess the ‘Admin’ password, and corrupt your site and sites perhaps throughout the server of your hosting company.
Yuck!
When a website gets attacked this way (server-script-hacker types also try the same infiltration through plugin weaknesses), strange links to Viagra and weird banks and strange fake Prada handbags will start popping up over your site.
Your customers will not be happy, and your website may go down because your hosting company will not like a site with a virus or malware on it. Then, you will have to call us… you’re looking at a headache and a bill for possibly 4 hours of our emergency time ($100 an hour) to roll back the website to the previously stored version, rescan it, clean it, put it back up, re-test it in a few days.
In 2014, we started a procedure whereby Sucuri Free and Wordfence are put on all our clients’ sites (they are security plugins) – these plugins help alert us of a) hackers trying to crack into your site using scripts (you wouldn’t believe how often these scripts try passwords! I’ve had one site hit 2000x in one night! – that’s a lot of alert emails to my inbox by the way!) and b) when other plugins and WordPress need updating.
So, let’s start with what is involved in WordPress site maintenance/updates. What will be done and what is the purpose?
What will be done:
- Website will be backed up (this is so we have a current backup in case something goes haywire!)
- WordPress itself will be updated
- Plugins will be updated
- The theme files will be updated
- Testing of the website will be done.
The main reasons for this maintenance are:
- Security updates – preventing WordPress hacks, as noted above.
- Bug fixes – there may be little glitches in how the system functions on the back end or customer facing. Sometimes bugs are getting fixed that you or your customers haven’t even encountered yet.
- New features and functionality – sometimes these can be a big wow for the developer such as the addition of short codes to make programming faster and easier. Or, some new functionality that will make your a little more slick, or easier (less expensive!) for us to maintain.
WordPress moves to new versions relatively frequently.
Don’t worry, not every update is ‘critical’ and sometimes Wordpess doesn’t have security updates included at all. We recommend you update your plugins and theme files at least four times a year. This should provide adequate protection for your website and generally catch the critical updates in a timely manner.
At Lara Spence Web Design, a Vancouver locally owned and operated web design and SEO company, we offer WordPress site maintenance Vancouver at about $50-100 per update, so budget about $300 per year for this work (plus GST!)
If you have any questions or would like to schedule your WordPress site maintenance Vancouver, please Contact Us! You can book a meeting with Lara to discuss this at https://www.calendly.com/laraspence.