WordPress Website Maintenance

Keep your site secure, compatible, and up to date with regular care

Our award-winning web development services

Your website is one of your most valuable assets – let us take care of it for you...

WordPress

The Ethical Agency are WordPress website development specialists – WordPress is used by 40% of all websites globally. Some of the biggest organisations in the world use WordPress – you are in good company with a WordPress website, but it also means that WordPress is a major hacking target. We take security very seriously, and your website is safe with us – we implement three independent security layers to your website. WordPress itself is secure, but it is the extensions and plugins where vulnerabilities are found – that is the main reason why regular maintenance is essential for WordPress websites, once a month in our case.

WordPress is constantly updated as a platform and provides thousands of plug-ins to enhance/expand your website’s capabilities, which makes WordPress a suitable choice in relation to scalability.

WordPress is also very well suited for responsiveness – providing for seamless user experiences on mobile and tablets as well as Desktop computers and laptops.

With contiguous updates and changes to CMS platforms, browsers and browser standards, WordPress helps to extend the longevity of your website, making it more forward-compatible and responsive than traditional hand-coded websites could ever be – for a portion of the effort (and cost).

WordPress provides an intuitive CMS (Content Management System), which is well known globally by clients needing to edit aspects of their website – another reason why WordPress is a good choice – many of your staff will have had some experience with WordPress. Not every aspect of the website will be editable by the client – we usually plan at the start of the web development process what areas you do need to be able to edit so that we can build the website around your needs. We can provide training for WordPress back-end editing of content on your website.

Being WordPress specialists, we are able to provide your website with ongoing best practice improvements through ongoing discovery, research and implementation from all other ongoing projects.

You can feel rest assured that WordPress development is widely practised, should the need arise to change suppliers.

Other platforms

Whilst we are WordPress specialists, we do have experience working in other platforms for certain clients, including Wix, Squarespace, Drupal and Shopify.

Websites are like cars with thousands of moving parts that connect in the back-end to make your website work well. Just like cars – we undertake mandatory monthly maintenance on all websites. At The Ethical Agency we take security and maintenance very seriously and our maintenance process includes the running of security scans and the provision of a monthly report of the specific maintenance work undertaken.

The reasons for maintenance are two fold:

A WordPress website is made up of the WordPress platform, PHP framework, theme, and plug-ins. These four elements are continually being updated and it is essential to update these all regularly and together to ensure compatibility.
In addition as a result of WordPress being the most widely used platform on earth, it is also the most susceptible framework to hacking. It is therefore essential to keep WordPress, the theme, and plug-ins up to date to mitigate security threats. A hacked website can have a costly effect on your brand’s reputation as well as be a potentially expensive exercise to fix.

Our WordPress maintenance plans are a fixed monthly cost to ensure the software behind your website is secure, compatible and up to date.

Our monthly WordPress maintenance plan includes:

WordPress core software updates when applicable
WordPress plugin updates when applicable
PHP update when required
Theme updates when applicable
Security scan
Uptime monitoring
Daily backups (saved for three months)
Delete spam content
Testing user submitted forms
Website Optimisation
Maintenance report

Website maintenance includes a specific set of technical tasks that are all related to website maintenance, and therefore does not include content updates. Content updates can be provided before or after maintenance but does not form part of a maintenance contract or SLA.

Monthly maintenance is a mandatory service that we provide and is included in the price of monthly website hosting.

Maintenance includes firstly research to ensure the proposed updates will not break the website, then backing-up of the site, updating of software, and then checking the website once completed.

We receive regular updates from three independent industry sources on all WordPress eco-system vulnerabilities (plug-ins, themes, WordPress itself)(of which there are dozens each month), from which we use to update our client’s websites on a monthly basis, or make emergency updates where required.

The theme and plugins are being updated by their own developers, on a regular basis, and often monthly for various reasons, not limited to plugging vulnerabilities and increasing security. Not all software developers will have the same standards and often vulnerabilities are found.