Our WordPress Management Service

Perfecting security, performance and reliability for WordPress
Managed WordPress
Our Managed WordPress service has taken quite a transformation since we started it a few years ago. It started off as a way to protect our own sites and development sites for backups and keeping them up to date. The service performed so well we turned it into a service offering that we extended to our customers and provided them with the same protection we gave ourselves. As time went on we invested heavily in development and always looking for new ways of either backing systems up, protecting systems or updating plugins and themes to ensure maximum web compatibility without compromising on speed or breaking websites. We now have full development licenses with some major wordpress software and systems and can backup even some of the larger websites that we have created and inherited from the web ecosystem.

So… How do we do it?

Yes were going to tell you how we accomplish our managed WordPress service and all the costs associated to it We use a wordpress management engine that connects all our websites that we have built and that we have managed to our central wordpress server that’s located onsite at our office. This is the brain of our managed wordpress system that helps us with pre-scheduled updates and auto-trust rules to push the latest security updates the second they arrive instead of waiting for our maintenance schedules to pick them up. This service also houses our backup and security systems. Right now we have a development license with all our software and we pass on all those licenses for you to use on your wordpress managed site for free provided you are a member of our service.

Backups

We used to use a backup engine native to our control system, we no have migrated to updraft plus which allows us much more flexibility and provides some excellent replication and migration services to help us deploy and protect websites. The free version can be found in the WordPress plugin repository but the main plugin can be found here

WordPress Backup

Theme Framework

We use a developer backed theme framework from a few developers but our main source is Elegant Themes. They provide what we feel is some of the best framework out there and the easiest to customize so we can create a unique look for each site we build. The web is changing so rapidly we learn a new technique or skill related to WordPress development probably every week! This is achieved by reading blog’s, attending training and investing in some good-ol-fashioned development time to test, break and rebuild our designs.

Theme Framework

Forms

In all our sites we have developed up until about 6 months ago we have used a variety of form building plugins. Now we have brought all our sites we have built from 2015 and have used Gravity Forms to build the forms and contact pages on our sites. Gravity Forms is a relatively easy to use interface and is extremely robust and with some Custom CSS (again with the above investment of time and resources) we can customize most forms to provide an elegant match to your theme with ease. Gravity Forms is included FOR FREE with our managed wordpress but you can get it here if you want to do it all yourself.

Gravity Forms

Security

Up until this year, we have invested on our hosting company which we buy all our servers from and its firewall capabilities and some free blocking plugins such as akismet (for spam) and wordfence free. With the growing threats and how fast WordPress has started developing, holes and vulnerabilities appear in plugins and themes overnight which has led us to start providing fully paid WordFence Premium subscriptions to our managed wordpress customers. We have used WordFence premium on a few sites and the results have been fantastic and have provided much needed security and stopped many attacks that you thought may not even exist. You can get a WordFence premium key here if you want to do it all yourself

WordFence

Maintenance and Management

We have several other systems built into our management service such as link checking applications, Google page speed loggers and a direct link into Google Webmasters and Google Analytics to ensure that your site data is being monitored and piped into the largest search engine in the universe. The data all gets summarized into a nice report which we email you every month that summarizes everything that happened on your site. To get Google Webmaster and Google Analytics you need to head to here and here respectively if you want to do it all yourself.

Google Analytics
Google

Do it yourself!

Here is what you will be paying for these licenses if you want to do it yourself

Updraft Plus

Elegant Themes

First Year

Recurring

1st Year

Recurring

Gravity Forms

WordFence

First Year

Recurring

1st Year

Recurring

*Business License with basic Add-On’s

Let’s sum up the license costs

First Year

First Year

Every year after that

Recurring

All of these numbers are in US Dollars too!

* All of these numbers are at time of writing and are subject to change on the respective sites

Don’t forget the numbers above don’t tally up hosting, backup storage, domain registration, SSL certificates etc.

Are you ready to have us take care of it?

Licensing aside, you need the time to learn all the products you want to use, plus deal with any troubles that come up with using WordPress and the hosting environment. Nothing is perfect and things go wrong, how much do you want to work ON your business VS. working IN your business?

Let us help you
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