Website Maintenance & Support Program - Helpful FAQs
Please contact us if you have any questions that have not been addressed within the following:
Our monthly Website Maintenance Services program caters specifically for WordPress websites – If you have a WordPress site then yes, we can definitely help with keeping your website’s software and content up-to-date and secure.
Apart from maintaining your website’s WordPress CMS and Plugin software we also ensure your website is compatible with the latest version of internet browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc), and test and debug your website’s mobile responsiveness. As an added bonus, we also carry out basic updates to your website pages / content – such as updating or replacing a PDF file, or adding some text &/or an image on a page, updating your FAQs etc … We encourage our clients to update their websites so that when Google visits periodically, to re-index your website pages, there will be something new for Google to register and this in turn may help with your Google listings for keyword-search… And of course these updates help keep your online visitors informed through your website having latest, up-to-date information.
Applying WordPress updates helps keep your site secure. If you don’t keep your WordPress software up-to-date then the likelihood of your site getting hacked is a very real one – that’s because hacking programs, by design, endlessly troll the internet, “poking & prodding” websites, testing for the security loop-holes that appear when software updates haven’t been applied, this leaves your site very vulnerable to getting hacked or hi-jacked.
Relying on the WordPress auto-update function can cause problems when the update fails, or when the auto-update ‘breaks’ your website’s code, or causes your website’s code to no longer ‘talk’ properly to the software that runs internet browsers (such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge) and other online systems. Our website maintenance program takes care of these and other considerations, such as doing full backups prior to applying updates.
Plugins are little programs, or packets of code, that can ‘plugin’ to or be added to a website to make something specific happen, or work, on that site… Such as a Slideshow of scrolling images, an Image Gallery, the anti-spam function on a Contact form, or a Shipping Calculator. Quite often a website will have several plugins that cater for a range of functions that essentially people expect from websites these days. Keeping plugins up-to-date ensures your plugins and your website software continue to ‘talk to each other’ properly, which means your site looks great and works properly for your online visitors, ie functions work, pages display properly and no broken links.
Click here to learn more about using plugins.
A mobile-friendly website is software that’s made up of various programs, these programs cater for the ‘mobile responsive’ way that your website works on smart phones, tablets, iPads, laptops and computers… Like any software, your website needs updating and sometimes, when updates are applied, there can be glitches that cause your website’s mobile responsiveness to no longer work the way it was before the updates. Regular checks and adjustments ensure your web pages, menu system, clickable phone and email links, Google map and other functionality all work the way they should for people visiting your site on mobile devices.
Websites are software systems that run on the Internet… Internet browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer (Microsoft Edge) and Safari are also software systems that run on the Internet – Like any other software, browsers have regular software updates and sometimes a browser update can cause a slight conflict with a website’s software – this can result in that website needing adjustments to its code &/or pages, so that it continues to work properly on that browsers.