Comprehensive WordPress maintenance for a secure and high-performance website

It is crucial to always keep your WordPress installation up to date. Version updates not only improve stability and expand functions, but also close security gaps. These gaps can be exploited by hackers to access your website, steal data or infect the site with viruses. Regular updates protect both your website and your visitors from such threats. A non-updated system can have serious consequences, including data loss and claims for damages. It is therefore essential to ensure that your WordPress version is always up to date as part of maintenance.

It is important to update plugins for WordPress regularly as these updates contain bug fixes and security improvements. Outdated plugins can pose security risks, as vulnerabilities can be exploited to compromise your website. In addition, many updates bring new functions or improve existing ones, which can increase the user-friendliness of your site. Updating plugins ensures better compatibility with the current WordPress version and helps to avoid conflicts with other plugins or the theme. As with the main WordPress software, it is crucial to keep plugins up to date to ensure the security and performance of your website. Updating is done either automatically via the WordPress dashboard or manually by downloading and installing the latest versions of the plugins. Therefore, keep both your plugins and your WordPress installation regularly up to date to optimally protect and optimise your website.

A website often accumulates unused plugins that only take up memory space. These outdated plugins can slow down the loading time of your website and pose security risks, as they are often no longer updated and offer attackers a target. To ensure the performance and security of your website, you should regularly delete unused plugins. This not only prevents potential security vulnerabilities, but also ensures better loading speed, which improves the user experience and reduces the likelihood of visitors avoiding your site due to slow loading times. If you need a deleted plugin again later, you can easily reinstall it. Installing new plugins quickly is straightforward these days, so occasionally removing unneeded plugins is not a major hurdle. Regularly cleaning your WordPress site of superfluous plugins is therefore an important part of maintenance and helps to optimise the security and performance of your website.

Regular backups are essential for the operation of WordPress websites, especially for commercial sites. An up-to-date backup makes it possible to restore the website quickly in the event of an attack or data corruption. Although many web space providers offer backup services, these are often only once a month and therefore not always sufficient for business-critical sites. Storing backups on external servers offers additional security. By outsourcing backups to separate, secure servers or to the cloud, the risk of data loss caused by a server failure or hacker attack on the main server is minimised. External backup servers are often better protected and offer redundant storage solutions that ensure data protection and availability. It is therefore advisable to make regular external backups and ideally have them monitored by a specialised service provider. This not only ensures data integrity, but also ensures that the website can be put back into operation quickly in the event of an incident.

Protecting your website from malware and malicious software is essential to ensure both your own systems and the safety of your visitors. An infected website can not only harm the operator itself, but also the users who visit your site. This can significantly affect trust in your website if visitors catch viruses or other malware. Regular checks and maintenance, especially for WordPress installations, are therefore crucial. Both the website itself and all connected computers and servers should be scanned for malware. There are numerous virus scanners on the internet, some of which are free. However, make sure you choose a reliable programme that offers the protection you need. Insufficient protection can lead to double costs: once for the programme and then possibly due to the consequences of a security breach on your website.

The server should always be checked during WordPress maintenance, as server provider downtimes can have significant consequences for your website. If your website is unavailable, you will lose potential new visitors who will not return. Irregular visitors may also assume that the site is permanently offline and stay away. Even regular visitors could be put off. At best, such downtimes lead to a short-term drop in user numbers, but at worst to a permanent loss of a significant proportion of your visitors. To prevent these risks, our WordPress maintenance contracts provide detailed statistics on the downtime of your website so that you are always informed and can take action at an early stage. Certain PHP functionalities are customised in PHP.ini or the PHP version and caching are set in the hoster. DNS entries are adjusted to optimise email traffic, among other things.

Maintenance is not an absolute guarantee against hacker attacks or other threats. There is no such thing as one hundred per cent security in the IT sector, which is why I cannot give any security guarantees. However, the regular care, maintenance and updating of a WordPress website contributes significantly to minimising the risk of security vulnerabilities. By installing updates, checking plugins and monitoring the website, potential vulnerabilities are recognised and closed at an early stage. This reduces the attack surface for hackers and increases the general security of your website. Nevertheless, there is still a residual risk that cannot be completely eliminated even with the most careful maintenance.

So that no faulty updates are installed. Under certain circumstances, errors can occur on some websites after an update has been published. The developers of WordPress, plugins or themes are informed of these as quickly as possible, so that they often provide another update hours later. This measure therefore also increases the security of your website.

A WordPress user with administrator rights is generally sufficient for the maintenance of your WordPress website. However, in order to be able to react quickly in an emergency, the following additional accesses are required:

1. WordPress user with administrator rights: Enables full administration of the website, including the installation and management of plugins, themes and users.
2. FTP access: Enables direct access to the file structure of the website. This is useful for making manual changes to files, for example when uploading files or troubleshooting.
3. Access to the MySQL database (and PhpMyAdmin if applicable): Allows direct access to the database, which is useful when restoring data or making manual database changes. PhpMyAdmin is a web interface that facilitates the administration of the MySQL database.
4. SSH access: Provides a secure connection to the server and allows advanced commands and scripts to be executed. This is particularly useful for managing server settings and performing tasks that are not possible via FTP.
5. Access to the web host: All the above-mentioned accesses can be managed via the customer account with the web host. Other important settings can often be found here, such as backup options, domain management and server settings.

These accesses enable a comprehensive and rapid response in the event of problems or emergencies.

Unless individually agreed, payment is always due 6, 12 or 24 months in advance. Of course, you will also receive an invoice with VAT shown. Payments can be made by bank transfer.