WORDPRESS WEBSITE MAINTENANCE: WHAT IT COVERS AND WHAT IT COSTS

A WordPress site without maintenance is a site that will go down. Not maybe: when. The question is whether it will be a busy Saturday or during a planned update on a Tuesday morning.

What breaks when nobody is watching

WordPress, the theme and every extension publish updates every week. Some fix known vulnerabilities, exploited by bots within hours. Others break a feature of the site if applied without testing. Without maintenance, you get to choose between hacking and outage.

This summer, a simple PHP version upgrade at the host put five sites in error at once. One hour of work for whoever is watching, days of closure for whoever finds out.

What a contract must cover

• Tested updates of the core, the theme and the extensions, with rollback possible.
• Daily backups off the server, and a restore tested at least once a year. A backup never restored is not a backup.
• Security : firewall, protected login, monitoring of modified files, alerts.
• Speed : cache, images, cleaned database.
• Monitoring : someone is alerted if the site stops responding, before your customers.
• A little time each month for small evolutions: a text, a photo, a page.

How much

With me: from €79 per month for the essentials (updates, backups, security, monitoring) and from €190 per month with evolution time included. An e-commerce site or a business tool is priced separately. It is less than one day of outage.

And if you already have a provider

Ask them three questions: when was the last backup restore, what PHP version runs the site, who gets the alert if the site goes down at 3 am. If the answers are vague, the free audit will at least tell you what state the site is in today.

Frequently asked questions