Security & Optimisation Service
Daily and Weekly Backups, Update WordPress/Plugins, Regular Security Scans, Optimise Your Site Speed, Website Visitor Statistics
Our Security & Optimisation Service (SOS) package gives you peace of mind knowing your site is in good hands and well taken care of. You work hard to keep your business moving forward. Our SOS makes sure technology doesn’t stand in your way. We do everything we can to make technology an asset, not a barrier.
Your site will be monitored, updated and backed up. Take a look at our SOS offering and choose the best payment plan that best suits your business. WordPress Maintenance Made Easy! We’ll do the dirty work, so you can focus on what you do best.
WordPress plugins we install and modifications we make to your website
- Install/configure the Google XML Sitemaps plugin
To get your website indexed faster by Google and showing up in the search results. - Install/configure the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin and setting your home page SEO tags
To ensure your website is properly described within the Google search results.
(Note: This does not include Search Engine Optimisation} - Check if your website is ‘mobile-friendly’
We use Google’s own mobile-test tool and will let you know if your site is NOT ‘mobile friendly’. Sites that are not ‘mobile friendly’ get penalized in the Google search results. - Install/configure the BackWPup plugin to schedule regular backups
Backups are your first line of defence against potential disaster. We configure the plugin to schedule daily database backups and weekly full (database and files) backups of your website. - Optional Add-On – Offsite Backups to Dropbox
Keeping website backups is a thought that’s in the back of most of our minds, but it’s not something we act on until it’s too late. We’ve heard horror stories of people who have lost their entire website and all their backups because their hosting server crashed. That’s why we highly recommend off-site back-ups. We offer a backup to Dropbox at an additional fee of R20 a quarter. - Security tweaks to improve WordPress security
We modify your website ‘.htaccess’ file to protect key WordPress files from hackers. - Optimise your website for faster Load Times
A few tweaks can make a big difference to how fast you website loads, and we enable GZIP compression and leverage browser caching which can makes a huge difference to your site’s loading speed. - Install/configure the Wordfence Security plugin
This plugin performs a daily scan of all your website’s files looking for malware and viruses, and sends us an email notification if infected files are found. If we get an email informing us that a site is infected, we then go and fix/clean these security issues (e.g. removing malware scripts). ‘Wordfence’ also provides ‘brute-force’ login attack protection. - Install/configure the Google Analytics Dashboard for WP plugin
This plugin displays detailed information and statistics about the number of visitors viewing your website, where they came from and exactly what they are viewing on your website. These statistics are vital to determine how your website is performing.
(Note: A Google Analytics account is required to use this plugin – if you don’t have a GA account, we will create one for you)
We update WordPress, all your plugins and your theme every quarter!
- Perform a full site backup prior to updates
Always recommended before updating the entire website. This is a full backup including the database and all the website files. - Update all your WordPress plugins to their latest versions
- Update your WordPress theme to its latest version
- Update your version of WordPress to its latest version
- View the entire website within a browser to determine if there are any issues because of these updates made
Occasionally performing site updates may cause issues. For example a plugin to display upcoming events may not display as it should in the latest version of WordPress. These kind of issues rarely happen, but when they do we investigate and resolve these issues or find a suitable workaround.
Why it’s important to update WordPress Regularly
Just like any software that you have on your computer or phone, WordPress needs to be updated on a regular basis. WordPress releases updates for three reasons:
- For security reasons – new security features prevent hackers from breaking into your website and inserting malicious code.
- To fix bugs – new updates can fix functionality bugs in your site. So if something is not working properly, you may just need an update.
- To improve features – new features make WordPress easier to use or more useful.
Regularly updating your plugins is just as important as updating WordPress.
This can prevent your plugins from breaking, because developers do their best to adapt to the newest versions of WordPress.
Out-of-date plugins are vulnerable to security attacks.
Plugins that are out-of-date are even more vulnerable to security attacks than outdated WordPress versions.
