WordPress Maintenance

Many small business owners view the website development process with some trepidation, mainly because they’re only familiar with the Internet as end-user.

Just because you’re responsible for your organization’s web presence doesn’t mean you know how to build a website. The job of planning, launching, and managing a site often falls to people who have little or no experience in web design or development. Website Owner’s Manual is a book for the thousands of marketers, IT managers, project leaders, and business owners who need to put a website in place and keep it running with a minimum of trouble.

about the book

Website Owner’s Manual helps you form a vision for your site, guides you through the process of selecting a web design agency, and gives you enough background information to make intelligent decisions throughout the development process. This book provides a jargon-free overview of web design, including accessibility, usability, online marketing, and web development techniques. You’ll gain a practical understanding of the technologies, processes, and ideas that drive a successful website.

The Website Owners Manual, yours free when you become a J&M Group client, introduces basic processes, concepts, and terms that you will encounter when working with designers/developers.

This excellent and compact (260 pages) guide targets individuals responsible for managing their business website.

You will be provided with all the information needed for the proper care and website maintenance. This includes technical details (like your host, domain registrar, DNS records, logins, & more), a maintenance schedule (for daily, weekly, monthly & annual tasks), and a troubleshooting guide for common WordPress problems.

The WOM does a sterling job of defining roles for owners, designers, and users. For small business owners who have fingers in a lot of pies and know little about website development, this concept is crucial to the success of your project.

The WOM includes:

Important Website Details
All the important records like hosting, domain registrar, login credentials,
and more all in one comprehensive document.

Maintenance Overview Schedule
Explains all the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual tasks of website owners
are now responsible for ensuring a properly maintained website.

Troubleshooting Guide
Useful tips on the common problems they might face now that they are
responsible for the upkeep of their entire website.

Along with your website, we’ll include a customized copy of The Website Owner’s Manual.

Website Maintenance by Yoast
Keeping your website and content up-to-date is important. Your visitors like that and search engines do too! Don’t forget old content. Don’t forget to redirect when deleting old posts, and prevent duplicate content. Our posts will help keep your website clean and fresh!

To get started on your new website, contact us or call Marcia at 561-906-3436.

So you’re considering handling the upkeep of your website all by yourself? That’s wonderful, even brave. For DIY WordPress maintenance, you need to know those tasks that ensure your website investment provides a healthy ROI.

Start with regular backups! But you do need to know those things required to ensure your website investment continues to provide a return.

Here are the things that need to be monitored 24/7, daily, weekly and monthly.

24/7 Monitoring

Tasks in this category can be critical to your website’s health. Failure to fix these issues could lead to costly repairs or lost visitors and sales.

Choosing a good host is crucial. But no matter who you choose, your website could still go down from time to time.

You can use a service like Uptime Robot which will check your website (up to every 5 minutes on the free plan, or every minute on a paid plan) to make sure it is online.

Good SECURITY Saves Websites

You need to have suitable security protection on your WordPress website. To get started with a free installation, you can install a plugin such as
WordFence or iThemes Security. These both have quick start guides to help you get setup.

The most important effort you can make for the health of your website is to keep regular backups in place. You will want to have daily backups of your website.

If your website is hacked, gets a virus, or a software update causes an issue, you can restore a backup copy of your website and having things working again in no time.

Your host may provide daily backups for you, which is great but they aren’t always reliable. It is always smart to have two forms of backup.

Weekly Tasks

While it can be annoying to take these tasks on each week (as they are less automated), skipping them can lead to bigger headaches.

Plugin Updates

Just like any piece of software, third party plugins are regularly updated for both functionality and security purposes. It’s important (especially for security reasons) to keep your plugins updated.

Just like any piece of software, your website can be vulnerable to website hackers or viruses that seek to use your resources for their own benefit. This can often be things like redirecting your traffic to their site, placing ads on your site, or even infecting visitors with a virus if they visit your site.

Check For Plugin Redundancies

Another tip I have for you is less about protecting your site but more about making sure that everything is cleaned up and running smoothly. It’s so easy to jump into your site and add multiple plugins that do the same thing.

To avoid ending up with 30 plugins and half of them being duplicates, I recommend taking a look over what you have installed and what you’re actually using every couple of months.

SSL Certificate

An SSL Certificate is crucial for your website visitors security as well as your rankings. This means if your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, Google will display a ‘Not Secure’ in the URL bar.

The SSL ensures that the information transmitted over your website (like customer details from a form, payment information, or login information) is encrypted.

While these certificates are free (from Let’s Encrypt or from your website host), they do have to be renewed often and updates to your website could affect their validity.

What Happens to A WordPress Site if You Don’t Maintain It?

Don’t Leave BACKUPS To Chance

These are mission critical! To ensure the health of your website you need to keep regular backups in place. You’ll want to have daily backups of your website (though some sites with lots of traffic, or eCommerce stores will want to do this more frequently).

If your website is hacked, gets a virus, or a software update causes an issue,
you can restore a backup copy of your website and having things working again in no time.

Your host may provide daily backups for you, which is great, but they aren’t always reliable. In fact, I don’t recommend having one form of backup no matter what it is.

Check out our WordPress Maintenance Service and comprehensive plans. Services include automated monthly security scans, daily security monitoring, plugin & theme updates, secure cloud backups, client reports, free SSL certificates, and SEO ranking.

For many of you keeping your WordPress site secure is not a top priority. Small business owners often think their site is just not big enough to be a threat from hackers. But it is easier than you think to have a hacked website.

But, hackers typically don’t care how big or small your business is. There is always money to be made from selling personal information!

As a result of the theft of customer information, the damage to your company’s reputation could also mean the loss of future income, as you will need to invest extra money to rebuild your reputation and restore customer confidence.

The Cost of A Hacked Website

WordPress is known for being one of the most user-friendly content management systems for websites. It is also a popular target for hackers and spammers. Hackers don’t spend time trying to hack platforms that no one uses – right? With a whopping 61% market share – it is a big target!

7 Types of Security Attacks and How to Prevent Them

A security attack is an unauthorized attempt to steal, damage, or expose data from an information system such as your website. Malicious hackers can go about this in a variety of ways:

1. Malware
   Malicious software – ‘malware’ – infects devices without users realizing it’s there. Variations include Trojan horses, spyware, ransomware, and viruses.
   
   Secretly infected files or software can further introduce malware to your site. You could also trigger a malware download by clicking on a link in a pop-up window or an email attachment.
   
   To prevent malware infections, you’ll want to install a security scanner. Our own security scanning feature is a low-cost and highly effective choice.
   
   If your server is compromised, you can restore your files from a backup. Tools such as our backup feature enable you to schedule copies and save them to an external destination. This way you’ll have one handy should your site become compromised.
   
   
2. Drive-by downloads
   A drive-by download is a method of distributing malware and occurs when a malicious script is inserted into a page’s PHP or HTTP. When a person visits the infected site, the malware is downloaded and silently infects, the device.
   
   The best action you can take to prevent drive-by download attacks is to keep your security systems updated and remove any unnecessary software.
   
   
3. Phishing
   Phishing is among the oldest and most common types of security attacks. These attacks have increased by 65 percent in the last year, and account for 90 percent of data breaches.
   
   This form of social engineering deceives users into clicking on a link or disclosing sensitive information. It’s often accomplished by posing as a trusted source via email.
   
   
4. Spearphising
   Spearphishing’ is a targeted attack on an individual.
   
   A high-profile example is the 2016 case of Hillary Clinton. Staff members were tricked into sharing sensitive information and credentials which led to stolen data.
   
   To minimize risk:
   Never click on or download a file that seems suspicious.
   Be wary of emails addressed generally, such as to “Dear Friend” rather than to you specifically.
   Notice any glaring spelling or grammatical mistakes in emails. These are particularly important to pay attention to when an email is asking for payment or personal information.
   
   
5. Brute-force attacks
   In brute-force security attacks, hackers often use dictionary software to repeatedly and systematically attempt password combinations until they find one that works. Once the cybercriminal has access, he can wreak major havoc on your site.
   
   Users should always choose strong passwords that include a combination of letters, symbols, and numbers.
   
   
6. SQL Injections
   Structured Query Language (SQL) injections are when an attacker injects malicious code into a server to manipulate back end databases. The goal is to reveal private data such as user lists, customer details, and credit card numbers.
   
   SQL injection attacks can cause severe damage to businesses. Attackers can delete tables and gain administrative rights, although the most devastating aspect is the loss of your customers’ trust and loyalty.
   
   Injections can occur through any form element on your site, including contact forms, blog comments, and search bars. Therefore, it’s important to review your forms to ensure each field is configured for the correct entry type.
   
   
7. Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) Attacks
   With these attacks, the criminal positions themselves between your device and the server. They eavesdrop on, intercept, and manipulate communication between two parties – this often happens on unsecured wireless networks such as public WiFi,
   
   Detection of these attacks is difficult, but prevention is possible. Always use secure WiFi connections.
   
   Always install a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate on your site. This ensures communication between your website and a visitor’s browser is encrypted and inaccessible to MITM attackers. You can acquire a free SSL certificate through a provider such as BlueHost.
   

As you can see, there are many different methods cybercriminals can use to infect your site. These threats require a multi-layer approach to site security.

Our Maintenance Package includes security tools that make it easier to detect and stop attacks on your WordPress site. We also backup your site regularly. Our security scans help keep your content and users safe.

Google Blacklisting: What It Is & How to Avoid It

If you’re looking for a partner to manage your website and do what it takes to keep your WordPress site secure and humming along, check out our WordPress Maintenance Plans or contact us.