Making a website takes time, especially because we're sticklers when it comes to creating high-quality content and building beautifully-designed sites. This is a rough guideline for each of the steps involved.
WordPress is one of the most widely used website software platforms in the world, but that also means it’s susceptible to attacks.
WordPress fixes those security gaps quickly but in order to benefit from those fixes, the core website software needs to be checked for updates regularly.
It’s equally important to update any plugins as they are a common place where hackers will look for and exploit security flaws.
We check daily for core website and plugin updates.
Most of the time when you update, everything will continue to work properly, but it is possible that an update will break a website. Also, despite our best efforts, your website may still get hacked.
In those cases, you’ll be glad we have a previous version of your website that we can restore. It’s best to keep the backups of your website off-site in case of disasters like fire where the copy might be destroyed; creating online backups is how we do that.
We back up both the database, which is all of the collected information that makes up the website; as well as the server, which is the software that runs the website. We do weekly database backups with 90-week retention and weekly server back-ups with four-week retention.
An SSL certificate encrypts the information being shared between the website’s server and your computer.
Ensuring your site has an SSL certificate and it’s up to date not only protects visitors to your site, but it’s also good for search engine optimization because Google now prefers websites with an SSL certificate.
Regularly scanning your website for security issues and performance standards allows us to measure the health of your website. Most of the time, the scans we perform comes out clean, which is good news!
But regular scans do sometimes find problems that need to be addressed, and it’s best to get those fixed as quickly as possible. We scan our websites daily.
Fixing a security issue will likely fall under the parameters of the care plan, but if it's a bigger issue that will take more time and cost extra, we'll give you a heads up before we do that work.
Websites are like a storefront that your visitors expect to be open 24/7. If it’s down, they’ll leave disappointed. Websites do go down, though, and getting an alert for when your website goes down helps us get it back up more quickly.
Monitoring the website’s uptime can also point to problems with the server — if the site is going down a lot you may want to consider choosing a different hosting provider.
Websites are usually designed to be changed: We update photographs, write new blog posts, remove old blog posts, add new pages, remove old pages, etc.
These types of changes and leave behind information in the database that doesn’t need to be there anymore. Removing that old data can help your website run faster.
We do database cleaning and optimization weekly.
Our website care plans include everything listed here, plus dedicated hosting based in Toronto, 30 minutes of design and content updates (that does not roll over), and a monthly report outlining the management tasks and results. If you want to stick with your current host that's cool, too.
Book a free one-hour consultation with Vireo-co-owner Ashleigh Mattern to chat about your ideas and how we might be able to help with website design and marketing.
Book a meeting
Signing up for our fully managed website care plans means you don’t have to worry about your website at all.
The Internet is not static
As soon as your website goes live, it enters into a dynamic space and it needs to be kept up to date in order to keep running smoothly. Plus, there’s a very real possibility that your website might get hacked.
The base care plan costs $1,200 per year and includes daily tasks to protect the site from hackers and to ensure everything continues to work properly. The price also includes SEO keyword monitoring, and 30 minutes per month of design and content updates, as well as support. You'll also get a monthly report with stats about the site.
The price is based on the amount of time we expect to spend updating and monitoring your site, and the price is slightly cheaper than our competitors. We’re able to charge a bit less because as a small business our overhead is lower.