Does the thought of updating and maintaining your WordPress blog give you anxiety? Do you hold your breath each time you press the Update button? And are you tired of wasting precious time keeping your blog optimized and protected?
If you can relate, read on, this post is for you!
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A self-hosted WordPress website is my first choice when it comes to blogging platforms. It’s the most affordable in terms of what you get and the freedom that WordPress allows you is incomparable to any other blogging or website platform available. There are virtually no restrictions as to what you can do when it comes to your design, content or functionality.
But with that freedom also comes responsibility. While no one can tell you what you can or can’t do with your website, it also means you are responsible for keeping your website safe from harm. What kind of harm?
Bloated or outdated code that slows down your website, servers going down, and hackers, to name a few. That means website maintenance, like performing regular backups and updates, is crucial when you run a self-hosted WordPress website.
But when you’re running a business and attempting to balance it with a family or social life, it can get a little overwhelming! WordPress maintenance takes time and effort and most solopreneurs don’t have the time, let alone the right knowledge, to take care of their websites in the manner that they should.
So what’s a blogger to do?
Enter WordPress Maintenance Plans
When I started freelance-designing websites again a few years ago, I learned about a type of service that had sprung up in recent years commonly called WordPress Maintenance or Care Plans. The tasks performed in a maintenance plan varies by the company, but most take care of these basic needs:
- Regular website and database backups
- Plugin, theme, and WordPress core updates with visual site checks to make sure nothing goes wrong after an update is performed
- Security scanning and malware removal
- Uptime monitoring (alerts you when your site goes down)
- And more…
I’ve tried a couple of these maintenance plans over the years, but they all seemed to be missing something or other: good customer support, reports, etc. Most were very automated services and impersonal.
But then I discovered WPYellowFish.*
Steve is my guy at WPYellowFish and he has been absolutely amazing to work with over the last few months. He is very knowledgeable and very attentive. He’s quick to reply to my questions and goes above and beyond to help my site perform the best it can.
Not only does he give me peace of mind, he literally saves me hours of time every month.
No more wasting time managing updates & keeping your WordPress site optimized & protected! A blogger’s peace of mind…
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When Something Goes Wrong
Have you ever updated a plugin or a theme only to have your website look all wonky afterwards? If you haven’t yet, it’s just a matter of time. Sometimes one plugin developer’s code doesn’t play nicely with another plugin or theme developer’s code and when you are mixing them all up in one website, it’s only natural that a problem should arise at some point.
That’s why the team at WPYellowFish performs something called visual testing which compares your pages pre-update versus post-update to make sure that any given update didn’t mess something up on the site.
And of course the regular backups allow the team to roll back the site to pre-update code should a problem arise. The best part is that you don’t have to do a thing, it’s all taken care of for you! When you’re running a business online, you can’t afford to waste hundreds of hours recovering a broken or hacked site, so services like these become priceless.
What WPYellowFish WordPress Maintenance Does for You
In addition to the basic services I mentioned above, WPYellowFish* also offers a lot more compared to other WordPress maintenance companies, which is amazing considering their pricing plans, which are very competitive and affordable.
Hack-proofing Your Site
Imagine for a moment that you go to your website one day and it redirects to a Russian website. You can’t even log into it without redirecting to this new, dubious website. This actually happened to me years ago. Hackers had exploited one of the vulnerable forms on this website and injected some malicious code into it.
It was a nightmare. I didn’t have proper backups and I had no knowledge of how to actually find and remove the injected code. I spent almost a week on the phone with my hosting company’s tech support trying to work it out and still didn’t.
In the end, I was lucky: I was able to get help from a developer friend at work who agreed to help in exchange for a few six-packs. But that experience left an impression on me and I never wanted to go through that again. Keep your website secure!
Weekly Client Reports
Each week you get a report, summarizing all the activity that’s related to your site: update details, security scanning results, performance metrics, site audit findings, uptime reports and more.
Database Cleanup and Optimization
This keeps your website lean and running clean.
SEO Reports and Competitor Analysis
This feature is invaluable to us bloggers and saves us a bunch of time! Each week you get a comprehensive review, where they take the keywords you want to rank for in search engine results, and compare your site performance with your competitors. Priceless!
I just discovered a way to save hours of time per month maintaining my WordPress blog!
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Monitoring of Brand Reputation and Search Engine Blacklisting
WPYellowFish continuously monitors blacklist databases to protect your reputation before it has a chance to be ruined.
And so much more. Read more about what benefits you’ll get from working with WPYellowFish.*
WordPress Maintenance: The Bottom Line
All of these things are necessary to do to keep your website running smoothly and without problems, but it’s all stuff that can take up hours of your time every single month (or week really)! What is that time worth to you?
Many companies charge $80 a month and up for this type of service. But what if I told you that you could have all this peace of mind coverage for less than $30 a month?
Steve and WPYellowFish were so kind to offer all DYOB readers who sign up here a lifetime discount of 20% off any plan. Check out their WordPress maintenance plans here* and use the code: DYOBROCKS20.
Summary
Anyone who has a WordPress self-hosted website knows that it takes regular upkeep to keep it functioning smoothly. You spend a lot of time creating your content and sharing it, don’t leave your precious blog or website to chance because it’s not a matter of if something goes wrong, it’s a matter of when.
And when it does, you want someone on your side who’s experienced and ready to handle things quickly so your site can be back up and running as quickly as possible.
With WPYellowFish, you can just set it and forget it then get back to working on the important stuff, like making money.
Here’s that 20% discount code again: DYOBROCKS20.*
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