WordPress is a rapidly evolving open-source project. If you already have a WordPress website then you would have noticed lots of update notifications popping up from time to time.
These updates are important as they offer bug fixes, new features, security patches and more. So you should try to keep your website up to date. It would be very time-consuming to check every day, so maybe just once a week or month.
There are 3 areas that need to be updated: plugins, themes and the WordPress core.
The only problem with this is that sometimes a plugin or theme might be a side project for a developer or a product that doesn’t get much love from the developer anymore. So by updating the WordPress core it might mean a plugin will no longer work or will display an ugly, unprofessional error on your website. And likewise, with themes, I often find that themes are far behind when it comes to offering an update inline with plugin and WordPress core updates. And when they do quite often it will change the look and feel of your website which you definitely don’t want when customers are browsing your website.
WordPress has recently introduced an ‘Auto-update’ feature, but I would use this will caution. I feel it is important to understand what has changed in a plugin by reading the change log just in case the change is significant and can potential damage you website and business.
How can we help?
We can help by taking away this burden from you. The first thing we would do is take daily backups.
Then we would periodically (the frequency is up to you) check the available update and process them if we decide it is safe to do so. Sometimes it may be clear that updating a major plugin is going to stop another plugin from working so it would be wise to wait until the plugin develop has issued an update first.
On occasion it is impossible to predict some issues as your website may be complex. However, by creating daily backups we can always very quickly revert the site back to how it was before the updates and then come up with a plan of action.
How much will this cost?
It will depend on your site. For example, an eCommerce store will take longer to update and test than a simple website (like this one).
But generally, I would say £50 – £100 a month is a realistic figure.
This would include monthly updates, daily backups, an alert if you site is down and a monthly report detailing what has been updated. While we are working on the website we would also make suggestions on what you can do to improve your website and ultimately get more happy customers using your website.