The problems with DIY website maintenance

Most website owners don’t know about what tools they need to monitor and backup their website, they may not know how an issue has arisen and when they do, they may not have a recent backup to restore. This means losing any content and data (including sales and products for eCommerce sites) that was input after the last update. The issues usually arise from problems with update conflicts, but if it is a security problem, most website owners won’t have the knowledge to be able to mitigate against future attacks. And as a website owner you will quickly find that DIY maintenance will lose you valuable time and money, hindering the growth of your business.

Think of WordPress maintenance like car maintenance. You have to do maintenance services every once and a while to keep your car running. Your WordPress site is no different. If you want your site to live a long and healthy life, like you want your car to, you have to put in some extra care. And seeing as you would take your car to the garage for its service you should also get a professional to take care of your website.

It costs more to fix a broken site than to maintain it so let a professional take care of it.

Things move fast in the world of web design & development. Keeping up-to-date with the latest developments in browser technology and device usage trends means simply updating your website every few years will no longer keep your business at the forefront of your industry.

Bramhall Web Designs has years of experience with web development work, so let us take care of what we know best. By hiring our professional team, you will save yourself the time and stress of keeping your website up to date, secure and operational. You’ll also reduce the chance of lost potential leads and sales due to website issues and downtime. Spend your time growing your business rather than troubleshooting, and leave all the technical problems to us!

Having complete control over your plugins and themes is important for managing your WordPress websites. Thankfully, we will both install and manage your plugins and themes for all of your WordPress websites with ease. We can install themes and plugins from the WordPress repository, create favourites, and even transfer plugins and themes from one site to another. Taking the hassle away from you, saving you hours which would otherwise get spent installing and updating plugins and themes across all of your individual websites.

Effortless Upgrades Dreading the work you’ll be putting into upgrading to the latest version of WordPress? No more! We’ve made it as simple as possible. By taking care of it all for you, your WordPress site will be updated to the latest version. For extra safety safe we normally wait a few days after a major update as these often have bugfixes in their wake. This way we make sure your site is stable.

Uptime Monitoring With our premium uptime monitoring tools, we’ll ensure that your WordPress sites will continue to run smoothly so that your business can continue to function at full capacity. But if something does go wrong, we’ll be the first to know. It’s important that your website stays up at all times. If your site goes down you could lose business and customers. Not only that, but it makes you look unprofessional. Or tools checks every 5 minutes to see whether your site is up or not. If your site fails the check, we will receive an SMS and an email, telling you that your site is down and we will take immediate action to take the necessary steps to get your site up and running as quickly as possible. In such a way, we offers you carefree time. Knowing you can rely on the fact that we are monitoring your WordPress sites. No more checking, no more worries!

Powerful Notifications We are the first to know when there is a theme, plugin, backup, WordPress, or other updates available for the website. We get immediate notifications whenever there is an update waiting, so you can enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing your sites are up to date.

Broken Links We Check Your WordPress Website for Broken Links Broken links lead to pages that do not exist and create 404 errors. These can be annoying for your website visitors and create an unprofessional impression. And that’s not the only negative effect of broken links, they can also be a problem for your SEO. Google recommends that webmasters check their sites for broken links – and if Google is telling you to do it, you can guarantee that it’s a ranking factor.

Optimize Your WordPress Database Keeping an optimized database is an important part of running your WordPress website. Over time, your MySQL database will build up overhead that slows down your websites and compromises performance. With our management plan, your databases can be kept in tip-top shape by scheduling all database optimization tasks for you.

Clean Up WordPress Post Revisions and Spam Comments. We will tidy up your websites’ post revisions and spam comments. Having too much spam, and/or post revisions, can increase the weight on your database which will slow down your website over time. This should make sure that your sites remain nice and fast!

Speed up your site. Page loading speed is a must, and in Google's eyes it is also a ranking factor. We use the latest in caching technology and can also set you site up with a CDN (Content Delivery Network). We are using CloudFlare and W3 total Cache to speed up the site. With CloudFlare you will also get an extra layer of security as it's network is constantly monitoring the traffic and automatically filter out and block all known harmful IP addresses that is trying to access your website. Speed Check. We check the site using Google's own Speedcheck analytics tool and Pingdom and make all the necessary improvements for you.

Reliable Backups Your WordPress data is really valuable — you’re only a moment away from complete disaster. So we make sure it is done right! Use our service and enjoy premium-quality backup services for all of your WordPress sites. Backing up your sites is an important part of managing your websites, and we makes that job a whole lot easier. Having a good backup process in place helps you keep your site secured. If the worst should happen you’ll always have a backup that you can restore your site from. Without a backup you could spend days trying to fix your site, spend hundreds of pounds on help to fix it, or even completely lose your website. We protect you from that! We automate the process and back everything up to an offsite location.

Automated Scheduling We automate your backups on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, and then rest assured knowing that your data will be safe and retrievable.

Manage Backups Backups are the cornerstone of maintaining ongoing security for your websites. There are plenty of reasons you could need them – your site could get hacked, your server could fail or your database could get corrupted. It’s always a good idea to carry out regular backups of your site. If your site does fail and you don’t have a backup, you will have lost your entire site, a truly nightmare situation. With a proper backup system in place you’ll be able to get your site up in a matter of minutes. There could be times when you want to manage your backups. You can manage your backups by visiting the Backup page in WP-Admin Backups. Here you’ll see a list of all of your backup tasks.

Security Focused Securing the sites we interact with has always been our highest priority. We use state-of-the-art encryption and security standards that go above and beyond what WordPress, itself, offers, to ensure that your sites are protected.

WordFence and iThemes Security Integration Our integration will ensure that all of your sites are free of malware and other harmful viruses. With these tools, you can also easily check the health of your sites.

Cloak the Login URL We hide the default login URL and give you a completely new one. This will make it impossible for automatic hacker-bots to gain access. This extra security ensures that you are the only one who can log into your WordPress dashboard.

How to Check Your WordPress Website for Malware As well as udsing WordFence we also use Google’s safe browsing tool to check your websites for malware. This tool checks your website against Google’s constantly updated list of malware pages and suspected phishing sites. By using this service, we're able to check if there are any links to known phishing sites on your website. These could either be in the comments or you may have had a link injection attack without knowing it. Having links to sites with malware, or links to phishing sites, are a real danger for your visitors. If they click on one of these links they could be redirected to a site that infects their computer.

Restrict Access to your website by IP Address Blocking For additional security, anyone who unsuccessfully tries to log in repeatedly will have their IP address automatically blocked. The time of this block can be set from a five minute block to a permanent block. This additional layer of protection will even further tighten your security.

How to Check Your WordPress Websites’ Security We are using Sucuri’s SiteCheck tools to scan your website. Sucuri provides web-based integrity monitoring and malware scanning of your website. It may be the case that your site is infected with malware or spam and you know nothing about it. A link injection, for example, operates by injecting spam links into your website that are hidden on the front end. This type of tactic is used by Black Hat SEOs to create link farms. You may be a victim of this and not even know it.