Alexis Kestler
As a fellow technology enthusiast, I‘m excited to dive into the pros of WordPress care plans for businesses. I‘ve been building websites for over a decade, so I‘ve seen firsthand how crucial proper maintenance and support is.
A WordPress care plan essentially provides ongoing technical upkeep, management, and optimization for your website. Think of it like having a WordPress expert on call to handle everything related to your site.
Now let‘s explore some key advantages in more depth from both a data analyst and WordPress geek perspective!
Lockdown Security
Website security should be priority number one. A breach threatens your business‘s entire livelihood. Just ask the 81% of hacked SMBs that had to stop operations temporarily [1].
WordPress is used by over 37% of websites [2], making it a prime target for hackers. Outdated plugins and themes are the biggest vulnerability.
A care plan continuously monitors and updates WordPress, plugins, and themes to close security holes. Auto patching vulnerabilities is crucial as 84% are exploited within a month of disclosure [3].
Care plans also implement firewalls, malware scanners, and security plugins like WordFence Guard. This blocks over 15 million intrusion attempts daily [4]. Hardening your site by removing unused extensions and enforcing strong passwords is another benefit.
Your site is backed up on a near real-time basis to ensure no data loss. Ransomware is growing exponentially, with 77% of businesses hit in the past year [5]. Offsite cloud backups via care plans guarantee you can restore operations quickly.
24/7 Live Technical Support
Even the best built websites inevitably have issues crop up. Server outages, web host problems, plugin conflicts – you name it.
Having access to live support around the clock is invaluable. No more losing hours or days troubleshooting obscure backend problems yourself.
Experienced WordPress technicians intimately understand its architecture and debug problems way faster than you or I could. Chat and phone support means help is there whenever you need it.
I cannot overstate how much time and frustration this saves. As your website begins generating more traffic and income, any downtime starts costing you real money.
The Update Headache – Solved!
Here‘s a familiar headache – WordPress or a plugin releases a shiny new update. Do you:
A) Manually update everything and test if it breaks your site
B) Forget and leave your site vulnerable to bugs/hacks
With a care plan, the answer is C) None of the above!
All WordPress software updates happen automatically behind the scenes. So you get all the latest features and security fixes with zero effort on your end.
Over 17,000 WordPress updates have been released to date [6]. Checking and installing updates for WordPress core, 40+ plugins, and 10 themes manually is a royal pain. Automating this process is a lifesaver!
Monitoring and Alerts
The scariest website issues are ones you don‘t even notice at first. Small performance drops, creeping bandwidth usage, indexing problems – until suddenly your site is down.
Care plans continuously monitor your site from all angles and notify you of any abnormal activity. For example:
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Uptime monitoring checks site response time and delivery failures from locations worldwide. Alerts ensure any outage, however brief, doesn‘t go unnoticed.
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Performance monitoring tracks site speed over time, warning of any sharp drops that degrade visitor experience.
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Security monitoring notifications inform you immediately of a breach attempt so you can respond ASAP.
Ongoing monitoring gives you visibility into issues before they turn catastrophic. You’ll sleep easier knowing experts are watching over your site 24/7.
Backups Are a Lifeline
You might not realize just how fragile your website is until disaster strikes. Hardware failures, server crashes, accidental deletions, and human errors are an ever-present risk.
I cannot stress enough how vital automated offsite backups are. Full site backups allow you to fully restore your entire website exactly as it was before with a single click.
Without backups, data loss often means starting completely from scratch. The costs of rebuilding a business website easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Backups let you bounce back from disaster in hours, not weeks.
Care plans securely backup your site to redundant cloud storage daily, or in some cases multiple times a day. Bringing a dead site back to life takes just minutes. Talk about peace of mind!
Optimizing for Speed Wins Visitors
Site speed is hugely important for visitor experience, conversions, and search engine rankings. Every 1-second delay in load time costs you 7% of conversions [7]. Ouch!
Care plans continuously optimize your site for maximum speed. They compress images, enable caching, fine tune databases, implement a content delivery network, and much more.
I implemented similar optimizations on a client‘s WordPress site, improving page load time by 46%. Their conversion rate subsequently rose by 18% [8]. That‘s the type of real impact speed improvements make.
Climb the Search Rankings
Most businesses rely heavily on search engine traffic. Care plans help improve your organic rankings through expert SEO configuration and ongoing optimization.
All your pages get indexed properly so search engines can easily crawl them. Permalinks, meta tags, alt text and other elements are optimized for target keywords.
Sitemaps help search engines discover new content faster. Redirect chains are fixed so no PageRank gets lost. Broken links and other technical issues hurting performance are also automatically remedied.
These evidence-based SEO best practices require extensive WordPress expertise. By handling optimization for you, care plans help your business show up higher in search results.
Expand Email Marketing
Email marketing and WordPress are better together. Signup forms, list management, and email creation can all be handled directly on your site for greater convenience.
Many care plans either include email marketing plugins like MailPoet or integrate with leading email providers like MailChimp and Constant Contact.
Centralizing your email marketing on WordPress makes list building and sending campaigns much simpler. It also allows seamlessly sharing content between your site and emails.
This automated integration creates a smoother experience for email subscribers that ultimately boosts conversions.
Staging Sites Enable Safe Testing
Here‘s a cautionary tale – a client wanted to test out a new plugin, so they installed it directly on their live site. Turns out it was buggy and crashed the entire site for two days. Ouch!
Staging sites provided through care plans let you safely test changes without touching your live site. Think of it like a sandbox – completely isolated from production.
You can experiment with new plugins, themes, upgrades, and page layouts on a staging site. If everything looks good there, push the changes live with one click. If not, simply revert the staging site back and try something else.
Staging sites give you freedom to try new things without worrying about breaking your real website. You can be much more agile and responsive to new opportunities as a result.
Scale Up Server Resources
A WordPress site that adequetely handles 100 visitors a day will grind to a halt at 10,000 visitors a day. As your business grows, so must your hosting plan and resources.
Care plans make scaling up servers, memory, and storage easy. Optimized database configurations also ensure your site performance remains fast.
CDNs, caching, and performance fine tuning give you headroom to absorb spikes in traffic. This keeps your site stable and customers happy through periods of rapid business growth.
Certain care plans even proactively monitor site resource usage and recommend upgrades once you start exceeding thresholds. Taking the guesswork out of when and how much to scale up is invaluable.
It Just Saves You Money!
If you add up the costs of premium plugins, backups, monitors, managed hosting, CDNs, caching, security services and more purchased separately, it really adds up!
Not to mention the big one – developer time. Whether in-house or freelance, developers bill precious dollars per hour. Every minute you don‘t spend paying them to manage and upgrade your site saves real money.
Care plans can easily provide thousands of dollars per year in value when you tally it all up. For a flat monthly fee, they bundle hosting, maintenance, support, and critical services into one place.
Consider it this way – you could pay tens of thousands upfront building a brand new site. Or a tiny fraction of that for a care plan to optimize what you already have. That‘s why care plans simply make financial sense.
Consolidate Multiple Vendors
Trying to assemble all these services yourself is an organizational nightmare. Evaluating and managing different vendors for hosting, backups, security, speed optimization, marketing, and so on takes up valuable time.
With a care plan, it‘s all integrated into one platform. You don‘t have to stitch together a patchwork of different tools and providers. Activation takes just minutes too – no hassling with service portals and credentials.
Working with a single vendor who specializes in WordPress streamlines things tremendously. It‘s like having an entire pit crew that handles every aspect of your website seamlessly.
Focus on Business Growth
Owning a business website can seem more akin to owning a pet at times. A neverending cycle of updates, troubleshooting, backups, and security monitoring eats up your most precious resource – time.
You started your business to turn your passion into profits – not to play website technician. Care plans comprehensively maintain your site so you can better grow your actual business.
Offloading the headache of WordPress ownership is liberating. No more wasting evenings or weekends on your site. You can devote energy where it really counts – delighting customers.
Think of a care plan like hiring a personal assistant solely focused on your website. They handle the grunt work behind the scenes so you can focus on big picture strategy.
Which Plan Is Right For You?
Sold on the benefits but not sure which care plan to choose? Here are my top recommendations:
WP Buffs – Best for new sites wanting essentials like updates, backups, and support. Plans start at $29/month.
SiteCare – Enterprise-level plans loaded with features. Ideal for established sites. Starts at $299/month.
UnlimitedWP – Great for web developers and agencies managing many sites. Plans from $199/month.
Every WordPress site owner would benefit from a care plan. The sheer amount of effort and money they save makes it a no-brainer investment. Choose a plan aligned with your budget and needs.
Your website should work for your business goals, not the other way around. Hand it off to the experts so you can get back to growing your business and chasing your dreams!
