WordPress is by far the world’s most-used content management system (CMS) for building websites. It’s estimated that over 25% of sites are WordPress websites. The good news to the business owner is that most web designers are familiar with it and that it’s easy to find help or plugins or themes if you do it yourself.

The downside of WordPress being so prevalent is that it’s a big target for hackers, viruses, and other people with bad intentions. Keeping your site secure and up-to-date is becoming more and more important. There are numerous plugins to choose from for you or your webmaster to combat threats. I will share some of the ones that I recommend.

Website Maintenance Plans
Many designers now offer bundled packages to ensure that your site stays online and doesn’t crash. Simply not installing WordPress updates, Theme updates and Plugin updates can make your site vulnerable or could cause it to stop functioning. Typical plans cost anywhere from $100-800/year, depending on how many features they include. WordPress software updates and regular backups of your site are important for security and site performance. Features include any combination of:

• Regular backup of content (text, images, documents)
• Regular backup of WordPress theme (site structure and design)
• Installation of software updates
• Installation of plugin updates
• Removal of comment spam
• Security & Malware Scans
• Free Malware Cleanups
• Website Support
• Monitoring of your site for alerts or issues

Hosting Plans and Security
Some designers bundle maintenance plans with the yearly or monthly hosting fee. They may jack up the price by showing you the long list of features. Hosting alone is typically $60-120/yr for small business shared hosting, but adding the maintenance package can bring it to $50+ per month or $600+ per year. To pay just a fraction of that, see my Attraction LLC WordPress Care Plan and Web Hosting prices.

Support & Content Edits Included!
I even include Website Support (email & phone) and 4 minor content updates per year (1-2 images, 1-5 lines of text, spelling corrections, 1-5 price changes, embed one YouTube video, add links, edit page footer, additional administrator instruction, etc) in my low cost. This has the added benefit of encouraging business owners to at least update their content a bit, which helps google rank as well as human visitors.

Maintenance & Security Terms
Core updates – WordPress provides core updates periodically for the entire platform. Always check the website afterward, to ensure that nothing has been corrupted or made non-operational.
Plugin updates – Plugins can be broken or degraded after updates, so don’t allow revisions to pile up.
Theme updates – Themes and theme frameworks need updating on a regular basis.
Content backups – Data should be backed up daily, weekly or monthly, depending on how actively the site is managed. The entire website should be backed up on weekly or monthly, should  there be a need to revert to an earlier version.
Security monitoring – The extraordinary popularity of WordPress has made it a very inviting target for hackers, so more and more hackers are being drawn to WordPress sites.
Uptime monitoring – Software should be used, to be aware of weekly and monthly uptime.

Best Security & Backup Plugins
You can install and maintain these yourself, search for alternatives, or just contact Webmaster Ray to integrate them for you:

• Wordfence Security – Secure your website with the most comprehensive WordPress security plugin. Firewall, malware scan, blocking, live traffic, login security & more.
• UpdraftPlus – Backup and restoration made easy. Complete backups; manual or scheduled (backup to Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, email + others).
• W3 Total Cache – improves server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times
• Email Encoder Bundle – an obfuscator to encode mailto links, email addresses, phone numbers and any text to hide them from (spam)bots. Mailto links protected automatically.

Secure your site today!
If your small business website runs on wordpress, log in to the control panel to update your plugins and install security measures — or call me at 302-633-1482 and I’ll start my WordPress Care Plan to keep you protected right away.