In the coming weeks, we will be moving all of our sites onto new servers with WP Engine and ensuring all of your sites have the latest WordPress Upgrade. We have ordered 3 new Google Dedicated Servers for our customers. This should increase the performance as we will also be moving to PHP 7x which again should see an increase in performance for our customers.
With this expansion obviously, we will dedicate more resources both financially and through our team for this transition.
There should be no downtime, although we will need to update some IP Addresses through your DNS Accounts. We will contact you if we need to add this extra process to the migration for you.
As per our Terms and Conditions, we will be updating our annual fees for each of our clients. Each 2 years we increase our fees by 2.5% per annum, so that will mean this year our ongoing fees will increase by 5%
As always you receive the same awesome support from our team. Just in the first 6 months this year we have upgraded each sites WordPress core 6 times. Our plugins 36 times. Each update requires a 3 step process.
The 3 Step WordPress Upgrade Process
- backing up your website
- upgrading the site
- then testing your site
Remember your site is backup up daily off site. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us.
WordPress Core
WordPress as a core needs to be upgraded on a continual basis for new features and just as importantly security and stability reasons. The WordPress Organization release major updates approximately 4 times per year. Within each upgrade cycle, there are normally 3-4 security and bugfix releases. Each time we upgrade a site we perform a backup and test cycle that takes approximately 1 hour per website. So if a site just sat there and did nothing all year, we would dedicate a minimum of 16 hours per website/per annum, just for this support feature.
Please do not at any stage upgrade WordPress on your own. We have a set of protocols we follow with each upgrade to ensure your site is running smoothly. If you upgrade your website you will be billed a minimum of 3 hours for us to review and fix your site if there are any problems and rectify those issues
WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins add functionality to the core of WordPress, from Spam Protection to SEO, to Embedded Forms and much more. Each website we manage has an average of 10 plugins, some are free but mostly premium. The reason we choose popular premium plugins over free is that they are better supported, have more features and through upgrades and security releases. The free versions we use are highly regarded by the WordPress community and in most cases, we donate annually to the developer. All of our plugins are upgraded on a regular basis. Each time we upgrade a site we perform a backup and test cycle that takes approximately 15 minutes per plugin. If a site just sat there and did nothing all year, we would still dedicate a minimum of 20 hours per website/per annum, just for this support feature.
Please do not at any stage upgrade WordPress plugins on your own. We have a set of protocols we follow with each upgrade to ensure your site is running smoothly. If you upgrade any WordPress plugin you will be billed a minimum of 3 hours for us to review and fix your site if there are any problems and rectify those issues
