It’s Not Optional: WordPress Maintenance Series – Part 1

Preface:

This article is the first in a multi-part series about WordPress Maintenance. How much you read depends on your interest in understanding some finer details. This first Insights article overviews WordPress Maintenance and explains the two types included as a standard in Sullivan Solutions WordPress Maintenance Plans. Our series continues with more focused Insights articles that delve deeper into Maintenance components and explain best practices for each.

An Overview of WordPress Maintenance.

It’s not optional. It’s essential. It’s non-negotiable. Period. It is highly doubtful that most individuals would skip preventive maintenance of their cars or the company fleet—from oil changes and tune-ups to examining their brakes for wear and safety. Cars are expensive assets and, when not taken care of, not only will eventually cost more to repair but also pose a risk to not only the car’s driver and passengers but also other cars and pedestrians. Similarly, launching a new or redesigned WordPress website is often the culmination of heavy investments in time and budget. As most people know, “build it, and they will come” is false—a new site needs promotion and ongoing SEO. One must renew hosting plans and domains as an ongoing expense. Further, like a car, websites also require maintenance care in perpetuity to ensure optimum performance and safety. Again, we state emphatically, “WordPress maintenance is not an option.” Unless the client has genuinely highly skilled team members who can honestly take on 100% of the site maintenance (very rare), subscribing to a maintenance care plan is simply part of the expense and due diligence in having a WordPress website. Google ultimately rewards those who invest in their content and keep their sites interesting with meaningful user information — efforts that promote and engage the brand but focus on user interest. That’s “content management” with SEO and maybe even SEM sprinkled in for good measure. However, “website maintenance” involves complex technical processes to keep it updated, secure, and performance optimized. WordPress maintenance care is not achieved by simply pressing the “update” button. It is a far more encompassing process. There are different types of WordPress Maintenance, and some requirements vary according to the complexity (standard, online store, membership, etc.) and size of the site itself. However, all WordPress websites require maintenance — whether a single landing page or hundreds of pages. While there are three types of maintenance services, Sullivan Solutions only includes the first two in our standard Maintenance services. The third requires a new Scope of Work/Deliverable to proceed.

1. Preventive
2. Corrective
3. Developmental (sometimes called Evolutionary)

1) Preventive WordPress Maintenance

When Sullivan Solutions launches a new client WordPress website, it will already be in excellent technical standing. But that’s also when we transition from a development environment to live production. We immediately begin regular preventive maintenance and optimization to ensure the site is visually appealing, displays without errors, and observe security best practices. Further, we start tweaking the performance in the live or production environment so that the site loads quickly and can achieve the highest possible scores to ensure an excellent user experience. The principle objective of preventive maintenance is to optimize website performance and ensure the environment—hosting and WordPress—does not degrade into a potentially threatening state. We work to upgrade site speed and user experience. Proper maintenance ensures up-to-date code and a site that doesn’t host any known security holes.

• Backups are critical to protecting the business’ website investment. Our recommended process includes frequent backup copies of the website to save all data and files with recommended remote storage and a process in place to restore the entire site or a portion if needed. Part 2 of this series delves into the details and options involved to stress due diligence and best practices Sullivan Solutions follows.
• Regular WordPress updates include core WordPress (primary and subversions) and installed themes and plugins. We are careful to follow a disciplined process— especially with plugins. We research the stability of new versions before we press update. And because we have backups in place, should it ever be necessary, we have methodologies to quickly restore/roll back to a previous version should an error or plugin conflict be encountered. Part 3 of this series focuses on this topic.
• Securing the website involves protecting it with firewalls and tools to monitor it for possible breaches with malware scans and taking actions to guard against malicious intrusions, spam comments, or form entries at both the base host server and WordPress levels. Keeping WordPress core, themes, and plugins updated (or replaced if necessary) when security vulnerabilities surface is vital. Part 4 of this series delves further into
• Performance optimization includes tweaking host configuration (like upgrading PHP versioning or resources) and managing caching and site loading speed that involves script compression. We examine the database for bloat and remove unnecessary revisions. We ensure all images are appropriately run through an image compression tool to serve correctly sized images and provide WebP format versions for relevant browsers and devices. Part 5 of this series addresses Performance Optimization in detail and its importance and impact on SEO and user experience.
• Prevent and remove spam comments. Many clients turn off comments on their site to avoid the potential for spam comments. But in cases where the website permits comments (and form entries), curbing spam and preventing an onslaught are action items included in our regular maintenance processes.
• Debugging: See Corrective WordPress Maintenance below.
• Monitoring Uptime: We utilize a third-party service to monitor website uptime 24/7, and if the site goes down, an email is sent to us immediately. In most cases, downtime is temporary

2) Corrective WordPress Maintenance

When Sullivan Solutions provides maintenance services on an existing site that either we did not build OR has not had our maintenance services for 90 days or more, we insist on a detailed Site Audit. The audit is especially necessary if we did not design and develop the site or if it was our project but a maintenance plan lapsed for more than 90 days. Corrective maintenance can involve fixing problems identified during an audit. However, it is also sometimes required as preventive maintenance is not always enough. Shouldn’t preventive maintenance eliminate the need to correct problems? Unfortunately, the answer is no. The following issues can surface in even the best sites we’ve either designed & developed or contracted with for ongoing maintenance of another developer’s work. It’s important to remember that as part of our preventive maintenance process, we constantly monitor security bulletins and whether they apply to any of our client sites weekly, but critical threat notices can appear at any time.

• Code errors that display in either the server or WordPress logs.
• Plugin malfunctions, aka a “bug,” may require us to engage with developers or support (especially if a premium plugin) to see if others have reported the same issue and monitor for the “patch” or “bug fix.” If a patch is unavailable, we may replace the plugin with another, providing the same functionality.
• Conflicts or incompatibility between two plugins or a plugin and the theme after an update can sometimes result in an actual system error. Other times, the impact can be more subtle, such as a front-end display issue or odd behavior.
• A security incident — Examples include a brute force or DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, which is likely unsuccessful because of existing firewalls on the server or created by plugins such as WordFence. Even when unsuccessful, these attacks can burden available host CPU resources, and it’s important to disrupt the activity to protect the hosting account limits. Once identified, we put additional blocks in place to prevent the offending IP address (or range of IPs) to be able to reach the website with server-based IP blocks) and other blocking actions.
• The momentary or long-term disappearance of content is often called the “white screen of death.” The cause can be a plugin conflict or an issue with the MySQL database reaching capacity (depending on hosting providers that impose limits on database users). Typically, we receive a notification (part of Uptime Monitoring) that the site is down. We can then pursue a remedy directly or engage with support (hosting, theme, or plugin as appropriate).
• Problems connecting to your administration interface – e.g., an authorized employee needs help logging in to the WordPress admin or performing specific tasks according to their defined role (Admin, Editor, Author, Contributor). The front-end website design is different or behaves strangely after an update or actions taken by another authorized user. Site speed or other performances
• In WooCommerce stores, the checkout page isn’t performing correctly (e.g., shipping or sales tax is not calculated, or payments are not completed).
• Non-receipt of Emails after form submissions or store transactions may involve problems with outbound SMTP. The list can go on with other issues encountered with updates or even when another employee attempts something they shouldn’t.

3) Developmental WordPress Maintenance

Developmental WordPress maintenance involves adding new features or improvements to your website to make it more efficient and matching changes in your business activity or new online practices. Generally, developmental maintenance is a new project deliverable and is not usually considered part of a standard maintenance plan. Examples of a new Development maintenance project might include the implementation of the following elements:

• An opt-in form to encourage your visitors to subscribe to your email list might be adding a connection to MailChimp or a CRM like Salesforce.
• The implementation of a forum or a members’ area to create a “private” community for your readers
• The transformation of your website into an online store using an e-commerce plugin such as WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, WPshop, or BigCommerce
• Website migration to a new, more efficient, and secure hosting server
• Design modification of crucial pages.
• Re-theming the entire website, e.g., moving from a theme that uses Elementor or another page builder to Divi and that theme’s builder
• Developing a front-end system for non-technical site administrators to enable adding content or perhaps members via forms (no need to see the more technical WordPress admin)
• Or anything else we can imagine!

Maintenance Services by Others

Sullivan Solutions invests significant time and talent in our customized, hands-on maintenance services.  We view many competitor Maintenance Services as gimmicky and overpriced for the actual value delivered.  Many are not logging into the WordPress admin dashboard or your hosting provider but instead use a centralized dashboard tool like ManageWP or others.  In such cases, we feel it’s no different than pushing the “Update” button remotely, which is usually triggered on multiple websites managed simultaneously.  It’s minimal time for a service level that is no different than asking any employee to access the WordPress dashboard to press Update.

Further, WordPress provides a setting to auto-update plugins, themes, and even WordPress core.  Hosting providers are generally anxious to install subversion updates of WordPress core on their servers since these updates are often security patches or bug fixes, and that’s typically not going to result in theme or plugin conflicts written for compatibility with the primary core versioning. We generally install the subversion updates quickly enough to beat the host trigger. Still, we provide “instructions” in the WordPress configuration files to block automatic updates of major WordPress core versions that can be trickier.  In both scenarios described, the site may go down should anything go awry, and the provider may not even notice or include a rapid correction in their contract.