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WordPress Maintenance, Support & Aftercare

We're WordPress specialists in East Kent

Ensure your WordPress website is performing, secured and optimised with fully managed WordPress maintenance, discounted hourly rates and on-tap support when you need us

All plans come with a free site audit and migration service to our hosting platform if you choose to host with us.

Bundled Time Packages
Service Only Packages

Let us look after your website so you can look after your business with the added knowledge you can contact us at any time you need support or just a few content updates, we’re there for you as much as you need us to be and at reduced hourly rates.

We specialise in WordPress and around 70% of all the websites that we design and develop are based on the WordPress framework so you can be sure we know a thing or two about its inner workings and how to keep it secured and running smoothly.

Startup Favourite
  • Core Updates+
  • £44.95/ monthly

    • MANAGED ‘CORE UPDATES+’ 
    • Pro-active WordPress upgrades
    • Plugins updated for additional functionality and security
    • Carry out any fixes necessary as a result of updates (rollback if required)
    • Weekly secure offsite website and database backups to Amazon S3 storage
    • Unlimited site restores on request
    • 72 hours average job response time
    • Monthly Maintenance Report
    • 24/7 Uptime Monitoring

    • 1 Hour of Development or Updates Included
      ( unused hours roll over for 12 months )

    • No contract – cancel anytime (payment by Direct Debit)
    • Automatic £200 Monthly Credit Limit

    • Access to on demand development & maintenance

      @£35 per hour (Discounted Hourly Rate)

  • Enquire Today
Serious About Security
  • Total Security+
  • £89.95/ monthly

    • MANAGED ‘CORE UPDATES+’ PLUS PROFESSIONALLY HARDENED, SECURED & MONITORED
    • Pro-active WordPress upgrades
    • Plugins updated for additional functionality and security
    • Carry out any fixes necessary as a result of updates (rollback if required)
    • Daily secure offsite website and database backups to Amazon S3 storage
    • Unlimited site restores on request
    • 48 hours average job response time
    • Full site security audit and hardening worth over £100
    • Daily comprehensive Malware/Blacklist Monitoring and Scanning
    • Two-Factor Login Authentication
    • Monthly Maintenance Reports
    • 24/7 Uptime Monitoring

    • 2 Hours of Development or Updates Included
      ( unused hours roll over for 12 months )

    • Pro-active web regulation compliance advice as online legislation develops and changes
    • No contract – cancel anytime (payment by Direct Debit)
    • Automatic £200 Monthly Credit Limit

    • Access to on demand development & maintenance

      @£30 per hour (Discounted Level II Hourly Rate)

  • Enquire Today
Business Choice & Best Value
  • WP Enhanced+
  • £149.95/ monthly

    • MANAGED ‘CORE UPDATES’, ‘TOTAL SECURITY’ PLUS ‘VELOCITY PACK’ SPEED OPTIMISATION
    • Pro-active WordPress upgrades
    • Plugins updated for additional functionality and security
    • Carry out any fixes necessary as a result of updates (rollback if required)
    • Daily secure offsite website and 12 hourly database backups to Amazon S3 storage
    • Unlimited site restores on request
    • 24 hours average job response time
    • Full site security audit and hardening worth over £100
    • Daily comprehensive Malware/Blacklist Monitoring and Scanning
    • Free Recovery Malware Removal & Hack Repair should the worst ever happen worth over £250
    • Two-Factor Login Authentication
    • WP Speed Optimisation
    • Auto Image Smushing
    • Monthly Maintenance Reports
    • 24/7 Uptime Monitoring

    • 4 Hours Of Development or Updates Included
             ( unused hours roll over for 12 months )

    • Pro-active web regulation compliance advice as online legislation develops and changes
    • Your own unique priority support email directly into our support system
    • No contract – cancel anytime (payment by Direct Debit)
    • Free website hosting package upgrade when you sign up before the 1st December
    • Automatic £200 Monthly Credit Limit

    • Access to on demand development & maintenance

      @£25 per hour (Discounted Level III Hourly Rate – biggest discount)

  • Enquire Today

Like the idea of a managed WordPress but don’t need the extra time bundles?

No problem – Our bare WordPress services start from only £22.95 per month.

Service Only Packages

Got questions? Let’s talk web – get in touch

Website Maintenance FAQ’s

What are WordPress core updates and why do I need them?

WordPress, like the internet continues to evolve at an amazing rate, this means new features, faster performance and ongoing development to keep it at the head of the game, in addition, and most importantly this means security patches.

As exploits are discovered WordPress has a very active security team that will immediately patch any newly discovered exploit keeping your site from being hacked or hijacked, but these patches can only be effective if they’re applied. The same applies to WordPress plugins, that can be as vulnerable if not more so than WordPress itself.

Most businesses are terrible at updating their own software and often simply don’t understand the importance, besides, who has the time? The clever guys over at WordPress came up with an automatic solution and some of these patches can now automatically be applied by WordPress itself, the trouble is they don’t always work for your particular site and can on occasion bring your site down or stop features on your site working with no notification or warning.

Our manually managed approach  keeps your site updated, safe and humming along without any interruptions and safe in the knowledge that if an update does damage your site, it can safely be rolled back and the problems ironed out before the update is attempted again.

Can I just do all this myself?

Good question! Well in truth, if you have the time and the inclination you can run the equivalent of our Core Updates package yourself, it only takes a few clicks and will work without issue most of the time. But here are some hard truths about being a website owner:

  • The updates don’t always work as expected and can leave your site broken or completely offline, taking a complete backup before an update and knowing how to restore it quickly is essential.
  • There is always a chance a vulnerability may be exploited in your website (aka a hack).
  • If your website is hacked, a range of things could happen including losing data such as the website itself and records in your databases (sales, users etc).
  • If your website is found to be compromised and causes an issue on our servers (which is a likely outcome of a hack) then we may shut it down to limit damage on our servers.
  • Without a contract it is up to you to fix your website, and we will not allow it back on our servers until we are sure it is secure.
  • If you need us to make emergency changes to your website, you will be charged at our emergency development rate of £70/hour to work on it as a priority (due to the impact this has on our regular workflow).
  • We are available to work on your site at our regular hourly rate but there will be a lead time on this depending on our workload at the time.

How does on demand Development & Maintenance work?

Simple really, once we have used up your included hours, if you require further work, we will charge for any additional time at the reduced maintenance rate, this will either be £35, £30 or £25 per hour depending on your maintenance package.

You are free to pick the maintenance package that works best for your needs. In essence, we offer discounted prices for quantity.

Do I lose my hours if I don't use them?

No, we understand that you don’t always require changes to your site each month so your hours roll over for 12 months.

It’s important to note that if you don’t have any work carried out for more than 12 months you would start to lose paid for hours, but if you don’t have any work carried out within 12 months we would probably suggest you consider a lower maintenance package.

The whole point of included hours is to offer hourly discounting in return for a commitment of time, not to charge you for time you don’t need.

How will I know how many hours I have available to me?

We maintain a spreadsheet that will be emailed to you once a month with a break down of used time, what it was used on and when plus a statement of your current available unused hours.

Any overage of time will be invoice to you separately.

I've never updated my WordPress installation, can I still sign up?

Sometimes your WordPress installation may have been neglected for a very long time, this may mean you are running on an old major WordPress release.

Unfortunately once you are off the upgrade path it can take some time to bring the site up to date and sometimes it simply isn’t possible without further coding work to make your theme or plugins compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

In these instances we will carry out a site evaluation to see if it will be possible to upgrade your current site to the latest WordPress version, we charge a fixed fee of £70 for this evaluation service. This fee also includes recommendations for alternative plugins if your current plugin developer no longer updates their code. At the end of the on-boarding process you will receive a report that will confirm if further work is required to update the site to the latest version and an estimate of costs, or, if it’s fine to go ahead and upgrade and welcome you aboard one of our WordPress maintenance packages.

What does professionally hardened, secured & monitored mean?

This is our very own combination of over 50+ techniques and changes developed over time that we implement to your site to further secure WordPress from the standard install to a setup that is very much more difficult to penetrate by people with malicious intent.

In the online security marketplace no one can ever claim to be impenetrable, however once we’ve hardened and secured your website one thing is for certain, you’re almost certainly ahead of your competitors on the security front.

In addition, we actively monitor your website for attempts on common exploits so we can adapt your security setup if needed.

How do you make my website go faster and what's included in the Velocity Package?

We’ve put together our own ‘Velocity’ package just for WordPress. This involves enabling and then optimising a number of speed enhancing techniques that the big guys are now using to speed up their sites and in turn improve user experience and gain better SERPS positioning with Google and other search engines as speed is now an important factor in SEO.

These factors currently include the following: 

  • Page Caching
  • Cache Preloading
  • Sitemap Preloading
  • GZIP Compression
  • Browser Caching & Cache Header Optimisation
  • Database Optimisation
  • Google Fonts Optimisation
  • Removing Query Strings from Static Resources
  • LazyLoading of images
  • Minification/Concatenation
  • Defer JS Loading
  • CDN configuration if on our global hosting package
  • DNS Prefetching
  • HTTP/2
  • and we’ll add to this list as new techniques become available

Not sure what all of these things are? Don’t worry, we do and we’ll configure and optimise them for you.

We then configure your site to automatically ‘smush’ every image you upload with the most effective image smushing service currently available. Not sure what this is? It’s when every image you upload is automatically run through an algorithm to optimise image size with minimal image degradation.  One of the largest causes of slow page load speeds after a site has been handed over to a client are under optimised images, running your images through an off server Smushing service handles all of this for you without the need to individually optimise and resize each image in Photoshop or similar. Should you not be happy with the optimised image and feel it is over optimised you can always restore the original image for up to 30 days after the optimisation took place.

Each month we include 1000 image optimisation (smushing) credits, this credit is renewed on the first of each month.

Another great feature is if you like to upload images directly from your camera they are often much too large for the web, our Smush service will automatically set this to a maximum size that you decide. We recommend 2048 pixels or even a little less depending on your website design.

How does 24/7 Uptime Monitoring work?

We automatically check your website is online every 5 minutes, if for any reason your site isn’t online we will automatically be notified allowing us to look into the issue before you or your customers were ever aware there was a problem.

WordPress Maintenance Terms & Conditions

A maintenance contract keeps your site up to date, which has all sorts of positive impacts, and it protects you from potential threats. From our point of view it keeps our servers better protected, and keeps our customers (you) online and happy.

We would like to be clear that if we developed your website you are in no way obligated to get a contract with us. The chances of your site being compromised are low. If it is compromised, the result is usually nothing more than a bit of spam or site defacement, and can be fixed with a couple of hours of development work providing adequate backups are in place. But it could result in catastrophic and irretrievable loss of data. The result is likely to include downtime, so if your website is very important (such as your catalogue, brochure, store front, or primary means of contact) you should definitely think about getting one.

Oh and when we say ‘contract’, we mean we will set it up as a monthly rollover payment for the sake of convenience, but you can cancel at any time and we will stop taking payments there and then (not including any payment you have already made).

Our Maintenance terms are as follows:

  1. If we created your website, we are not obligated to fix issues with your site due to 3rd party software that we have installed for you.
  2. Zero-day exploitation of a website (when a vulnerability is exploited and there is no solution for it yet) is not something we, or anyone else, can protect against. We can in no way be considered at fault in this event.
  3. We will email you when an update has been made. However it is up to you to confirm or deny that this is satisfactory. i.e. we will check it has worked, but will not test every single page of your website or payment gateways.
  4. Website maintenance will be performed during the first working week of every calendar month, or as soon as possible thereafter.
  5. We will back up and update the site’s WordPress installation. If there is an issue we will roll it back to before the update and spend up to 2 hours researching alternatives and various options based on your particular site. We will then give you some detail and consultation on what the best way forward is to get your site up to date and secure.
  6. Maintenance contracts do not cover you for any actual development work. We will not edit your website data or change any plugins or functionality, although some packages come bundled with development time that can be used for this purpose should you choose.
  7. On any contract, your site will be prioritised in the event of an issue, and we will provide high priority development at our standard development rate (as opposed to an emergency rate or lead time).
  8. In the event you update WordPress yourself without our knowledge and encounter a problem, benefits of being on a maintenance contract are void.
  9. In the event of a backup failure, hack or other exploitation we cannot be held financially liable for any loss or damages, our service is offered on a best effort basis and no guarantee is expressed or implied.
  10. Unused bundled maintenance hours roll over and remain valid for 12 months, at which time they can no longer be used against any work carried out.
  11. Maintenance packages when combined with the setup of a direct debit agreement include a small credit agreement to the value of £200 to allow small updates and alterations to be made without a delay. This credit can be used as an hourly itemised invoice of works carried out at your request above those hours included within your maintenance package and invoiced separately from your normal monthly subscriptions. All hours will be charged at your prevailing maintenance rate depending on the maintenance package you have chosen. Any used credit will be automatically collected by Direct Debit on the 1st of the month.
  12. If you wish to setup a higher credit limit, or to pay at your discretion with credit terms you will need to contact us to setup a separate credit agreement.
  13. Cancellation of your Direct Debit agreement will be taken as a cancellation of your maintenance contract and any unused hours will be lost, if there is any outstanding balance on your account we will request payment by alternative method to clear the balance.

 

 

The provision of work, services or products by ISLE CREATIVE is only undertaken on the understanding that you have read and accept these terms and conditions in full.

Right to Assign

This Agreement is personal to you and you may not assign it without our prior express written consent. Should you transfer ownership of the website as part of a transfer of ownership of a business then the new owners will need to come to a new agreement with Isle Creative.

Company Details

Isle Creative, a trading name of WebCentriX Ltd. Montpelier Villa, 6 Vicarage Crescent, Margate, Kent CT9 1LH

Company Number Registered in England and Wales: 07957490

These terms shall be subject to English Law. Any and all matters pursuant to this agreement are governed by English Law and are under exclusive jurisdiction of the English Courts.

By agreeing to these terms and conditions your statutory rights are not affected.

You can view our full terms of business here

Last Updated: 05/10/2017
(Next Review: 10/2018)

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