WordPress Website Support and Maintenance

My website is now live. What happens next?

All websites and web applications need looking after. Rouge is a team of plain-speaking designers, developers and support professionals; here to back you up and keep a beady eye on your valuable digital asset.

Our WordPress website maintenance and support agreements are designed to take away the worry of keeping your business-critical website live and secure – leaving you to focus on what’s important to you.

Keeping a website fresh, relevant and secure

Almost all websites suffer a decline in relevance and effectiveness from the day they are launched, albeit subtly first. Over time, these small things become obsolescence, meaning major overhauls are needed to keep up with customers and competitors.

A Maintenance and Support Agreement from Rouge will keep you and your team moving and the website secure, live and functioning, well into the future. Keeping a website codebase well maintained reduces the risk of hacking, ensures the user experience is optimised and will extend the lifespan of your website.

But a robust support and maintenance agreement is more than just keeping the lights on. Clients that engage and partner with us benefit from regular reviews of marketing plans, user needs, technology advances, content management suitability and training, technical SEO, accessibility, security – whatever your organisation needs to keep your site firing on all cylinders and in line with your plans and objectives.

What makes up a Maintenance and Support Agreement?

Our support is based on two simple principles:

• We support you and your team and look after the website code
• We understand that every website is different, as are the needs of the team that supports it.

Our support agreements are based on what your website needs to stay live and up-to-date. During the first month, after a Rouge website’s launch, we establish what needs to be included in a bespoke Maintenance and Support Agreement. We tailor these agreements to fit your business and specific circumstances.

Content Management Support
Once we have trained your team and they get going with content editing, they may need the occasional reminder. You might even need someone to help with content while they are away on holiday. Just give us a call or drop us an email – we are here to help.

Security Updates
If your website has been built using a content management system like WordPress, it will need to have security updates applied to it when they become available. We will manage this process and ensure that the website has the latest security patches applied. Out-of-date code is one of the main ways hackers gain access to a site. But, with a Rouge support agreement, you won’t even have to think about it.

Website Backups
We will back up and archive the website files and databases regularly. We will do this off the web server so that even in the highly unlikely event of a hosting disaster there is a recent backup to restore quickly.

Intrusion Monitoring
We will know the minute there is suspicious activity on your website. We will jump into action if we are alerted to any of the following:

• Any unusual activity within the WordPress admin area
• If any new user profiles have been created
• Potential hacking of a username and password combination
• If any malicious code has been inserted into any of the website files

Visual Review
We will visually check your website to make sure the site stays as beautiful as the day it was launched. These checks could include: The use of images (type, size, quality, etc.), content and page layout, copy length and alignment or any other content that affects the design and presentation.

Website page load speed
Having a fast-loading website is no longer a luxury if you want good search rankings and good user engagement. Google rates site speed as a very important factor in its algorithm. This from Google:

“Longer page load times have a severe effect on bounce rates. For example:

If page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, bounce rate increases 32%
If page load time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds, bounce rate increases by 106%”
Google is even considering visually badging websites in its Chrome browser. No business is going to be happy with a ‘slow site’ badge being shown to potential customers. At Rouge, we build sites to be fast, but keeping them fast takes regular maintenance and review. Hence this service being key to business website owners.

Functional Review
We will check the critical functionality of the website. These checks could include Broken links, eCommerce functionality, contact forms, search functionality or any other essential functions of the website.

Law, Best Practices and Recommendations
From time to time, Rouge is made aware of things that may affect website owners. These could be changes in the law, new browser releases, new technology, GDPR data changes, the depreciation of old technology or new best practices, etc. We keep our ear to the ground and will let you know if there’s anything that needs to change on your website.

Accessibility
At Rouge, we have a long history of designing and building accessible websites. If we have designed, built and tested your website to a specific WAI rating, we would run regular checks to make sure that the site stays accessible and allows the best possible browsing experience for those with limited access.

Hosting
Our enterprise level hosting is provided by trusted 3rd party providers here in the UK. The key reasons we partner with these providers is because they deliver outstanding customer support, their platforms are tuned for performance, and they work with us to maintain high levels of security. Having a close partnership with them makes maintenance slick and efficient, removing a headache from your desk.

Rouge Media: The Full Service Creative Digital WordPress Development Agency

Explore some of the WordPress websites we look after, or give us a call to kick-start your high-performing WordPress website project.