It can be challenging for a non-technical website owner to envision just what a WordPress maintenance plan is good for. After all, website budget is a precious resource, and isn’t the most-used website management system on the planet easy enough for anyone to manage and update? Well, yes and no. If things go well, WordPress is designed so that anyone can press a button to update a plugin. As you can imagine, things don’t always go well, so it is helpful to have a team of experts on your side, proactively solving problems so that you’re not “swimming naked when the tide goes out”.
Website security and keeping the bad guys out
We have so much confidence in our WordPress maintenance plan’s ability to keep your site safe that if your site is hacked while on our plan, we fix the damage and patch the vulnerability at no cost to you whatsoever. As you can imagine, our maintenance plan is one of the very best ways to keep your site from being hacked in the first place.
Keeping your site loading quickly
Site speed is one of those magical variables that positively affects absolutely everything when it is good (no more than a second or so to load the site). Google recognizes your site’s speed as being so important that they use it as a factor in how to rank your site in search results. Site speed is front and center for every one of our WordPress website maintenance periods. Our servers are optimized for WordPress, and we have yet to encounter a sluggish site that we can’t fix. It has become something of a sport at Watermelon.
Your WordPress website’s healthy relationship with the Goog…
The Google Webmasters platform gives website owners lots of ways to keep tabs on site health – Google gives feedback on everything from whether your site contains malware to the number of “not found” pages identified. Our maintenance plan addresses each of those items and also makes sure that your site maintains a healthy relationship with Google.
Troublesome plugins and the conflicts they create
Plugins are miniature software packages that give your site its (added) functionality. Contact forms, security packages and caching are all common functionality implemented via a plugin. They are revised and updated fairly often, sometimes to add features or correct bugs, but sometimes, most importantly, to patch security issues that have been identified. There is a button that says “Update” next to each plugin, and oh the temptation to just click that little sucker and be done with it. Unfortunately, and especially if your site has more than a few plugins, this can cause some big problems. This is because some plugins don’t play well with others. The result can be a white screen of death (WSOD) on your site, or more subtle, like products not being added to the cart correctly, or some aspect of the site suddenly becomes slower.
Swimming in your website’s keyphrase pool. Is the water warm?
Is your conversion rate working for you? If you have traffic to your site, but that isn’t turning into requests, purchases or other reasons that you may have a website in the first place, the pool of key phrases (think of this as the group of words and phrases that Google associates with your site) and / or the way that they’re implemented may need help.
One problem that we often come across is what I call the “Home Title Facepalm (HTF)” problem. The thing about your home page is that you only get one of them, and in order for your site to perform to its potential, that is one page that must be done correctly. Home Title Facepalm occurs when the title of your site’s home page says “Home” or “Home Page” or similar. I’m always amazed when I come across a multi-million dollar business that has this sort of thing happening, but I assure you that this happens frequently. The thing about the word “home” is that it just doesn’t convey any valuable information about you, your site or what its about (yes, even if you sell or buy homes!). It is sort of like putting a sign that says “house” on the front of your house instead of the numerals of your street address.
As you can imagine, if your site has the HTF problem or if it is similarly not targeted to your products / services and audience, it is akin to a sputtering engine – that is, it will not get you where you want to go. The person in charge of your site’s monthly maintenance looks at ongoing key phrase performance every month and makes small or large course corrections as indicated. We communicate everything to you ahead of time so that you understand what we’re suggesting and why we’re suggesting it.
If you’d like us to evaluate your WordPress website, please drop us a line. Plans start at just 2 maintenance hours per quarter.