What To Look For When Hiring A WordPress Maintenance Service Provider?

WordPress is huge. According to a study, WordPress powers 35% of all the websites available on the Internet. And the reason behind this is quite simple. WordPress is extremely easy to use and its wide-ended functionality can allow you to leverage it for creating any type of website.

These websites can be operating in different industries and markets with various business models, including selling products or services online, running blogs, teaching professional skills or courses, and delivering some form of entertainment with subscription-based membership websites.

However, despite the fact that creating a WordPress website is relatively easy, its maintenance is a complex task that requires in-depth technical expertise. For small businesses and enterprises alike, this becomes a major task that just cannot be ignored or the website’s performance will falter. But having an in-house maintenance team solely for this task can create an unnecessary financial and operations burden on an already over-tasked team.

So what’s the solution to this issue?

Hiring A WordPress Maintenance Service Provider:

If you want your website always to be updated, effective, and delivering the desired customer experience, then you should take a lot of your website tasks to a professional WordPress Support services provider.

WordPress support and maintenance services will include core WordPress updates, theme updates, plugin updates, security measures, website backups, uptime monitoring, and more.

WordPress Support services including helping you with plugin and theme errors, website downtime, theme modifications, WordPress advice, and consultation and they also help you with troubleshooting problems.

What Services To Look For In WordPress Maintenance Solutions?

From performance checks and security measures to regular backups, your website needs constant reviews and audits to stay productive in its purpose to engage the customers in any capacity and support your competitiveness.

Complete WordPress maintenance and support solutions are more extensive than a lot of businesses understand them to be. They include a range of services that help businesses and companies to continually maintain their websites and ensure it performs optimally at all times.

If you are looking to hire a service like this for the very first time then here is a list of services that you should look for in your WordPress maintenance service provider.

Necessary Security Provisions:

Your WordPress maintenance service provider will configure the best available security plugins, along with taking several other security measures to provide additional security for your website. From incorporating SSL certification, making software updates, creating strong passwords, using file permissions to conducting malware scanning, and IP blocking, all these tactics keep your website away from possible threats and online attacks. You need someone expert in the tech world to provide absolute protection for your website.

When hiring one, you will need to ensure that the provider offers all modern-day cybersecurity-related services or you will leave a gaping hole in your website that can become seriously problematic for you down the road.

Proactive support

According to research, 51% of consumers want the brands to be available to them 24 into 7.

All websites powered by WordPress are different work on different business models. However, online businesses that offer services and even some that sell products require a capable and proactive support team that can keep their website healthy and running to help ensure customer satisfaction. This enables them to deliver the kind of customer service their audience has come to expect from them.

WordPress Maintenance service providers are available around the clock. They are always available to solve any technical issues and make necessary updates in the run time. So when trying to find one for your needs, scrutinize the level of support they offer and the various avenues through which they offer it.

It’s preferable if they offer a live chat support option but even if they don’t offer one, then email support can be acceptable as long as it’s fast and reliable.

SEO expertise

Inadequate on-page SEO strategy and execution is not always the only reason for lower ranking on search engines, but Google also negatively affects websites with performance and security issues. Your search engine optimization efforts directly affect the online visibility and reach of your website on search engines. Lack of professional WordPress maintenance solutions is one of the many reasons why a lot of many WordPress websites are unable to improve their search ranking.

If not directly, your maintenance service helps further optimize your website’s SEO. They help your website visibility by making the site free of any malware and virus, optimizing the overall loading speed, and keeping the site updated and error-free. They help improve your search engine ranking more organically by ensuring the website performs well, fast, and is secure.

Ask maintenance providers whether they optimize sites for SEO and if they do, then what techniques they follow and what kind of services they offer in this regard. It also makes sense to ask them for some sort of a portfolio of any previous noteworthy work they have pulled off for other brands in the past to just get an idea of how well they can pull of this job if you get them on board.

Regular website updates

You regularly see new versions of WordPress core, plugins, and themes being released, and some of these updates may not always smoothly integrate with your site. Sometimes they may result in causing malfunction or simply crashing components within your existing website.

Your WordPress maintenance solutions should include check up on all available updates and effectively incorporate them on your website. And in case your website doesn’t work well with any specific update, they should also be able to help you revert to the safer version.

Data backups

Anyone with a basic understanding of the WordPress platform can help you set up plugins that automatically backup your data, but only your maintenance service providers can tell you how useful these plugins are for your website.

They focus on regularly checking how well the plugins are working to make backups. Moreover, for any reason, if you accidentally end up losing your website data because of a database crash, a mischievous plugin, or hardware failure, it will fall upon the shoulders of your maintenance service to get the website up and running once again.

Website edits

The digital landscape changes faster than a lot of businesses can keep up. You have to continually update and improve your website content or make adjustments to follow the industry trends and deliver the customer experience your audiences expect.

Your WordPress maintenance solutions should also include website edits, which should consist of small tasks like changing the brand logo or update any image or text. If you are selling products or services, then one of the regular website edits would include adding new products to the list. Updating blogs regularly and fixing minor bugs are other examples that your maintenance service should facilitate.

Some service providers also offer unlimited website edits, depending on which package you sign up for and how frequently you require making website edits.

Regular Reports

It is imperative to adopt a business-wide culture of accountability with weekly and monthly reports. Your service provider will provide regular reports helping you keep track of all the changes, updates, and edits that are done to the website in a given period. These reports give valuable insights into how your website is working and what changes you will have to make soon to improve the overall performance further.

These reports will also give you a detailed analysis of the total number of backups done, the views on your website, the number of times the site faced downtime, any suffered security threats, etc.

Conclusion

The fundamental purpose of hiring WordPress maintenance services is to assist and guide businesses and companies in delivering their best through their website. Entrepreneurs cannot do everything themselves, and they need a good team with technical expertise to help ensure their websites are always on the top of their game.

And to guarantee you get the best experience out there, make sure to understand the needs of your website and business structure to hire the right WordPress maintenance service provider for your business.