You wouldn’t get on a boat without a life jacket, so why would you launch your website without a support plan? A WordPress Support Plan Check out our WordPress Maintenance Service is like a life jacket; if you fall overboard, it’ll keep you breathing easy. If you get hit by a tsunami, that life jacket isn’t going to do much. Using a life jacket, much like a support plan, is more about safety and preparation than it is about disaster-proofing. Disasters happen, but many small disasters are simply avoidable. That’s where a support plan shines.

In this new era of the wild wild web, having your website up for your customers to visit is crucial. Ensuring your customers feel safe while browsing is the most important task of your website. WordPress is great in many ways How WordPress Makes Our Sites Better , but with anything popular and awesome, it becomes a major target for hackers worldwide. A WordPress support plan is essential to ensuring your website is up and running, your customer’s experience isn’t hindered, and you can sleep easy knowing your website is safe.

• The Bad News: On an annual basis, hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites are hacked.
• The Good News: Most website hacks are entirely preventable by updating plugins, themes, WordPress core, and backing up your website regularly. That’s where a WordPress support plan comes in.

A WordPress support plan is for anyone who owns a WordPress website, and it doesn’t matter what industry, organization, or business you’re in. This post will cover what a WordPress support plan is, why you need one, and 5 Must-Haves In A WordPress Support Plan (Jump To List) Jump straight into the list! for your business.

What Is A WordPress Support Plan?

A WordPress support plan is a series of regularly scheduled tasks performed by a developer to ensure your website is secure, backed up, and functioning correctly. These tasks are typically conducted daily, weekly, and monthly and are completed regularly on a schedule set out in the plan.

Why Do I Need A WordPress Support Plan?

Has your website ever been hacked? Has one of your beloved customers ever emailed you, “Hey, I tried to go to your website, and it looks like it’s down”? Have you ever been in a meeting where you typed your website into the browser to find that you couldn’t access it?

If any of these scenarios sound vaguely familiar, it’s probably why you’re reading this post. WordPress is the most popular CMS (content management system) on the market today, making it a beacon for hackers around the world. Having your website down can have massive business implications like loss of revenue, brand distrust from your customers, and difficulties running your day-to-day operations, to name a few.

To top that off, here’s an uninspiring statistic from Sucuri’s 2021 Website Threat Research Report (check out the full report). Read Sucuri's full Website Threat Research Report for 2021 WordPress makes up approximately 95.62% of all CMS infections recorded in 2021 and a 5.62% increase from 2019 when we first wrote this post. This stat doesn’t imply that one platform is more or less secure than another but instead reflects the overall popularity of the CMS. Seeing a stat like this can be scary, but it illuminates the importance of a WordPress support plan.

So how do you stand up to these threats? How do you get armed and ready to fight the good fight on the digital battlefield? For starters, you need to get educated on the topic and accept that you must be prepared for anything.

At this point, you might ask yourself, “is WordPress even secure” and it’s safe to say it is. WordFence, a leader in WordPress security, wrote a thorough post on WordPress security Read WordFence's Full Post and how they handle WordPress-related vulnerabilities actively. In the image below, WordFence outlines how a vulnerability is typically handled and how its firewall protects your website against known hack attempts. So you’re a bit more armed, we’ve created a list of 5 Must-Haves In A WordPress support plan below.

5 Must-Haves In A WordPress Support Plan

1. Monitoring

It’s important to know when your website is down, regardless of the time of day. Unless you’re an insomniac, watching your site all hours of the day is next to impossible. We’ve created a WordPress support plan called the CareKit Learn More About The CareKit (shameless plug here, don’t mind me) that automatically monitors your website minute by minute, so we’ll know your website is down and take action well before you do.

2. Updates

Keeping your plugins up-to-date is a crucial step in your website support plan. With our CareKit, we ensure websites receive the latest well-tested updates. We check for plugin updates, theme updates, and WordPress core updates every week to make sure we address any vulnerabilities discovered. The majority of updates, especially WordPress core updates, are security fixes. Neglecting updates is one of the main reasons WordPress websites get hacked so often, and older versions of plugins, themes, and WordPress core can pose significant security concerns for your website.

3. Human Checks

Some WordPress support plans ignore this critical component of ensuring your website is safe. In those plans, developers and robots will blindly perform updates without checking to see if those updates are compatible and if your site is functioning correctly afterwards. You know, the “update all” function? Clicking that can be a real problem. For all of our CareKit customers, we have a dedicated developer check the sites weekly after scheduled updates to ensure that updates to the website haven’t broken anything and the website is functioning as intended. Human checks are a heavily overlooked task in most support plans simply because of the cost of resources needed.

4. Backups

Speaking of heavily overlooked tasks, please do not take this lightly: backup, backup, backup! I cannot stress this enough. To be safe, we take backups in 3 ways: hourly, daily, and weekly to a remote server. If we conduct a plugin, theme, or WordPress core update and in our human check, we find that it broke the site and it’s not functioning correctly, instead of panicking, we rely on backups to restore the site to a previously working state. Tripling the backups means triple the means to restore a fully-functional website. Having backups is absolutely mandatory in any good WordPress support pan.

5. Support & Report

This rhymes and sounds cool, but that’s not the only reason I’ve mentioned it. When a website goes down or isn’t functioning correctly, our CareKit Medic (dedicated developer) investigates and addresses the issue when our monitoring system picks it up. We also provide a monthly CareKit Insights Report outlining the number of website hack attempts prevented, uptime, plugin updates, and more.

Look at our website’s July 2022 CareKit Insights Report: 74 hack attempts! WOW, that’s a lot. We’re protected, so it’s time to kick back, relax, and take a much-deserved coffee break.

Takeaway

All of this can seem overwhelming, but with some education and the right team, you can conquer the wild wild web (get it WWW?) with grace. Take your WordPress website security seriously and use the 5 Must-Haves list above to pick the best WordPress support plan for you. WordPress website hackers are ruthless, and it’s your job to ensure you’re ready for the battle. Thinking about the cost? Check out our blog post on Website Maintenance Costs. Check out our website maintenance cost post

This post was originally posted on October 7, 2019, and was updated on August 14, 2022.