Keeping your WordPress or Drupal website up to date is crucial because it ensures your site remains secure, stable, and performs optimally. Outdated content management system (CMS) software can make your website vulnerable to security breaches and may also cause performance issues.
Doing this work can be time consuming and takes you away from the other important, mission-critical work you do. Let us keep your site up to date for you! For an annual fee, we will keep your site’s core WordPress or Drupal software up to date, as well as any supported third party plug-ins or themes.
What Is Included?
WordPress or Drupal core software updates for one site. Both WordPress and Drupal have a baseline set of software (“core software”) that is the backbone of your site. This software has frequent updates and must be kept up to date. Sometimes, significant changes in this core software can change the authoring experience and introduce incompatibilities with third party plug-ins, themes, or custom enhancements and we will bring these to your attention as we notice them.
Updates to supported third-party plug-ins/modules and themes. Most WordPress and Drupal sites rely on plug-ins or modules (WordPress calls them plug-ins, and Drupal cause them modules) that extend what your website can do. These plug-ins are not part of the core software and are usually provided by a separate individual or organization. Like core software, these plugins/modules have frequent updates, sometimes as often as weekly or more. Likewise, your website’s theme, which controls how your site looks and the experience your visitors have, is often provided by a third party and requires periodic updates. We will regularly scan your site for pending updates and apply the changes as needed.
Backups, testing, and site restoration. In the process of updating your website’s plug-ins/modules, themes, and core-software, we will take regular backups. Sometimes updates introduce problems or incompatibilities with your existing site software, including other plug-ins, themes, etc. Should one of these updates introduce a change that causes your website to break, we will restore it from a backup and consult with you about your options.
Best practices recommendations. In the course of maintaining your site, we may notice inefficiencies or inconsistencies, or opportunities to help your site grow or enhance security. We will bring these to your attention, along with recommended next steps.
Limited Disaster Recovery. It is important to note that, even with the best security practices in place, it is still possible for a site to be compromised. In the event that happens, as part of our site restoration services, we will place a high priority on getting your site back online (to the most recent backup checkpoint) and helping identify how your site was exploited in the first place. Long-term fixes to these vulnerabilities may not be included, however; see below.
What Is NOT Included (Usually)
Code changes to core CMS software, third-party plug-ins/modules, or themes. While we WILL ensure your site stays online should we discover an incompatibility while performing regular maintenance updates, it may mean needing to find an alternative plug-in/module or theme, or building a new one from scratch. While we will gladly help you with this, it is outside of the regular scope of maintenance and support. In this case, we would provide an estimate for the cost of any new work.
Hosting costs. While we maintain the software, the software needs to run somewhere to make your site reachable on the internet. This is the "host" of your site. Examples might be WordPress.com, GoDaddy, or Pantheon. Hosting is typically billed-for separately by the provider.
Domain purchase or renewal. As the site owner, you will be responsible for acquiring any domain (e.g. example.com) and renewing it periodically with the registrar.
Content updates. Our goal is to enable you to write your own content, spending as little time as possible on technical tasks like maintenance. While we are happy to assist you with placing content you have written on your website, this would be billed separately as it is not included as a maintenance activity.
Other Infrastructure. As mentioned above, we will make "best practices" recommendations to how your website functions "under the hood." This may involve additional work or third party services that are out of scope of our regular maintenance services. We will provide an estimate for the cost of any new work or services, in this case.
Why Is WordPress and Drupal Maintenance Important?
The risks associated with not maintaining your site can be high. For instance, in 2014, the Forbes website, which at the time used WordPress, was hacked, exposing user accounts and data.
Forbes was targeted in a digital attack and our website was compromised. We are looking into the matter closely: http://t.co/ruldZDCQyO
— Forbes (@Forbes) February 14, 2014
Software updates typically address website security vulnerabilities and software bugs, or may simply add new features. By keeping WordPress and Drupal up to date, you ensure that the your website remains accessible to users, search engines, and is less likely to encounter technical issues.
What is the cost for Drupal or WordPress maintenance?
As is often the case, price varies depending on the size and complexity of the site, such as how many third party plugins/modules are used. For most sites, the price is usually less than $100 per month when paid annually. Please contact us for an estimate.