Website Care Plans

If you're on WordPress, yes, you need to be doing regular maintenance. WordPress is an amazingly expansive and collaborative ecosystem with 55,000+ plugins, thousands of themes, and endless opportunities to customize, add, and tweak code. Its open source nature makes it one of the most powerful and scalable website content management systems on the planet. However, as the saying goes, "with great power comes great responsibility."

WordPress powers roughly 34% of the internet, but accounts for 90% of website hacks. Out-of-date plugins, poorly coded themes, plugin update conflicts, and poor host security opens you up to a whole slew of issues, from poor performance to security risks to downtime. 

Think of it like a car. It's tempting to stick your head in the sand and assume all is well — and maybe all will be well, for a while. However, the longer you neglect it, the more likely it will be that something catastrophic (and costly) will happen. Just like regular oil changes and tire rotations for your car, simple maintenance tasks for your website will keep it running smoothly and extend the value of your investment. A little TLC now safes you a load of pain down the road.

That being said, if you feel like you can't afford a professional care plan right now, make sure you turn on "enable auto updates" for most of your plugins and installed themes. This is now available in the WordPress dashboard, and many hosts offer this feature, as well. Log into your website at least once per month and check for any updates that were missed, and make sure that your most important pages are still looking great and running smoothly. Limit the number of plugins you use and only install new ones if they're absolutely necessary for the functioning of your website. When possible, stick to well-reviewed, high quality, well coded plugins and themes. They're less likely to cause bugs and plugin conflicts. In general, more plugins invite more problems.

A quick note: while it's super important to keep plugins updated, sometimes those updates can cause plugin conflicts and break your site — especially if you have a ton of different plugins installed. This is why frequent backups are so important. 

It's also incredibly important to be on a quality, well-secured Managed WordPress website host. They will help you to keep your site safe. My top suggestions are Flywheel, Siteground, and Cloudways. Flywheel actually offers free malware cleanup if you do get hacked, which is super helpful if you don't have a web professional caring for your site.

Unfortunately, no one can promise you 100% uptime or guarantee that your website won't get hacked. Sometimes, these things just happen. However, being on a care plan will ensure that you have a recent backup to roll back to and professional support to get back up and running quickly. A care plan and quality hosting will also serve as your best line of defense against downtime and hacking, so while the chances are never 0%, they'll be much, much lower.

We love to support websites we built because we know them inside and out and know the care that we put into development. However, we're always open to supported new and existing clients who had their websites built by someone else. Before we select a plan for you, we'll request to do a full audit of your website and hosting environment. This helps us to get a feel for how it's set up, if/how long it's been neglected, and what it will take to keep it well maintained. This audit will be performed at our current hourly rate, and an onboarding fee may apply if we decide to move forward.

We do! However, these websites are much more complex and will likely need more time and attention to care for properly. We want to make sure that you don't lose transactional history or experience downtime during standard plugin updates and routine maintenance. As a result, an additional fee will likely apply. We're happy to provide a quote :)

Maintenance tasks will be performed on a set schedule, likely weekly or monthly (depending on the task). We will aim to warn you 48 hours beforehand in the event that you'd like to postpone due to a special promotion or heightened activity on your website during that time. When you request content updates, we'll strive to address them in 48-72 hours — sometimes sooner if we're able. Our response time does not include evenings, weekends, or holidays.

Yes! We included a minimum number of content updates in the standard package for those who won't need as much support with content, but every plan is customizable. If you know you'll want more help with content, we can add more to your monthly package. This guarantees you more of our time each month. If you just have a month or two when you have more content requests, we're always happy to accommodate them as our availability permits. Additional requests will be completed at our current hourly rate and billed separately.

As much as we'd love to offer the ability to rollover unused content updates, it makes scheduling too tricky month-to-month. Think of it more like a retainer. That space is reserved for you each month, and resets at the start of the next month. We'll aim to get you on a plan that "fits just right" and maximizes the value for you.

If you're on an active care plan, email support@emberand.co. Please start a new email for each request (rather than responding to an old thread) and provide a subject in the title of the email. Describe your concern or request in as much detail as possible so that we can address it right away, rather than going back and forth for clarification. We strive to respond within 24 hours. You will also be provided with a phone number that you can call or text in the event of a true emergency. 

We bill for care plans on a month-to-month basis. When you sign up, you'll enter your credit card information into our secure payment system. Your card will get auto-billed once per month until either party requests in writing to suspend/cancel the care plan. You will have full coverage until your plan expires.

We will need login credentials for your WordPress admin, hosting provider, and domain registrar. We store this information securely in LastPass. If your website is new to Ember & Co, we may need to perform a one-time audit to ensure that your website is eligible for a care plan. If we decide that it is, we'll recommend a care plan package and there may be a one-time onboarding fee. If you're an existing Ember & Co client and we already have the credentials for your website, we may not need anything else from you!