Totally. They are like a car, whether used as a performance vehicle or runaround.

Backups: If you’re site is changing by the hour or day with blogs, news or e-commerce transactions, losing even a day’s data could cause more than a shoulder shrug. Make sure you have copies in different places and ready to go quickly.

Security. Outdated sites are vulnerable to code injection, spam comments, toxic links, brute force attack, DDOS, squatting and all manner of grief that punishes you in all kinds of ways.

Performance. You’ll need to constantly tweak the site to keep the page speed up. Your server company might downgrade you without knowing if you’re on a shared IP. Google will change its algorithm, other themes will come out with new functionality and performance boosters.

Don’t leave it to chance. Get in touch!

Older themes, plug-ins and versions of WordPress carry old code that can be exploited by hackers. Over 80% of hacked WordPress sites weren’t updated.

New functionality. Keep up with web trends by keeping updated. 

Would you prefer not to worry about website software updates? We offer on-demand website maintenance to help keep your site up-to-date and maximise its performance. Get in touch for more information or to discuss your requirements. 

Over a third of the internet’s sites are on WordPress and it caters well for the small to medium size user. Because of it’s structure, you can quickly and cheaply build and deploy a website within a couple of hours. It also has countless builders and themes so no particularly coding knowledge is necessary

Page speed is how quickly your web pages are displayed to users, and Google PageSpeed is a collection of tools designed to measure this. Google PageSpeed analyses performance on both mobile and desktop devices, and offers recommendations for improvement, identifying any problems or flaws which are preventing your website from working at the optimal speed.

It’s well known that most visitors give up after two seconds wait. Google also looks unfavourably upon excessively slow loading sites. Also, if your page speed was good a while back, it doesn’t mean it’s still that way. There’s a natural degrading as new technologies arrive and competitor site themes and hosts up their game.

Compress images. The best way to do this is in Photoshop if you can. There’s a great plugin called TinyPNG. You can also use WebP protocol. Failing that try Shortpixel or one of the other on-site plug-ins.

Compress code. This means combining CSS and JS, minifying HTML and removing some of the unnecessary commands not used in your build. If you’re not using Google fonts, maps, Tag Manager or Fontawesome or other icons, you can remove all this as well.

Video. If you’re hosting, you might want to consider a CDN. If you’re using YouTube or Vimeo, it may be worth loading into a modal widget rather than loading off page.

Caching. Enable this to let browsers to cache (remember/store) things like styles, images, icons etc if someone is a returning visitor.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). This is a Google function that delivers only raw text. It’s fast but a design killer of your beautiful website.

Normally, you would require a website audit of the theme, plug-ins, images, videos, structure, hosting company and server location.

The results of the audit will start to give you clues – usually in the form of the big easy things like server response time (hosting company), TTFB (Time to First Byte) and Full Paint.

One of the speed testing websites will give useful waterfall chart information and recommendations on code fixes.

If you want to know just how fast your website is loading, Google has a free tool called PageSpeeds, which will give you a pretty good indication.

This basically means making sure that nothing is busted on your website, both from a user perspective and at the back end.

There’s a whole host of stuff including structure, data, toxic and broken links, search boxes, browser compatibility, 404’s. Always check your key payment and other processes.

Keep an eye out for suspicious log-ins, user behaviour, comments, spam, brute force attacks.

The list goes on….

A broken link is a link to a webpage that doesn’t work. If a user types in or clicks on the link, they will be directed to a 404 page (find out more below) or error message. Links may be broken for a variety of reasons, including the URL being mistyped, the webpage no longer being online, the page’s URL having changed, or the linked page having restricted access (such as by being behind a password or firewall).

Metadata is a summary of the title and excerpt of your web page. It’s the brief description you get under the page name on search engines.

Use your most important key words in each meta tag but don’t duplicate on other pages – you get penalised.  

Keep the title to 60 characters and meta data box to 300 and be relevant.

There are five main browsers: Chrome, Internet Explorer/Edge, Firefox, Safari and Opera. They all work a little differently on mobile/PC/Mac and websites need to be rendered for each.

The aim should be to have cross browser compatibility so the site experience is the same before visitors drop off, thinking they’re on a broken or fake site.

As long as you have quality content that the user likes and finds useful and appealing, you’re off to the races. After that, you have to make Google happy with intelligent, correct and well structured data with good writing style and keyword discipline. 

A backup is like an insurance plan for your website, enabling you to maintain your company’s online presence even if disaster strikes. Whether your site is hacked or infected with a virus, an integral file is accidentally deleted, your server crashes, or an update goes wrong, you’ll be able to get your site up and running again quickly with a backup. Without a backup, your site might be lost forever and need to be recreated from scratch.

1. Backup regularly: If you’re updating your site frequently, you should be backing up your site frequently too. If you only back up occasionally and disaster strikes, you may lose a lot of data (such as new blog posts, page edits etc) when you revert to the most recent backup.
2. Use different locations: Ideally, you should have three versions of your site – the live site itself, a local backup (on your computer or external hard drive), and another backup in a different location (offsite or in the cloud). This will ensure that even if one backup fails, you still have another backup version available.
3. Date your backups: Ensure you label all backup files with their date so you can easily find the one you need and don’t have to guess which one is the most recent.
4. Check backups: Just making a backup isn’t enough – make sure to check your backups regularly to ensure files are being stored effectively and are not corrupt

Our website maintenance and management plan has three levels. The Essentials services gives you full backups, constant monitoring for spam and security breaches and a guide to the performance benchmarks with recommendations for you to improve.

Our Performance service gives you all that plus a full performance makeover and sets you up for social, search and analytics. Our Performance Plus is like having your own website marketing team.

A simple website should cost you around £350 a year for a good quality basic service.

A regularly updated business site or popular blog will probably cost over £1,000 a year while a fully functioning e-commerce or high traffic site will probably cost upwards of £3,000 to £10,000 a year.

We use the latest tools but buy in bulk and negotiate on your behalf. We automate and work to scale.