Maintenance plan services
Backups
There are two backup routines offered by The WP Butler:
- Full weekly backups with daily database backups, and
- Full daily backups
Backups are sent off-site to a secure Amazon S3 bucket so that if there is ever a failure on your website server, your backups are still safe and can be used to get your website back up and running.
If your hosting company provides backups at least to the level of service offered by The WP Butler, we will not duplicate that effort, and will instead utilise the backups maintained by your hosting company (as they are typically more reliable).
See all plans offering Backups
Updates
Updates include WordPress itself, all plugins and all themes that can be updated through the standard update process. Updates requiring a manual reinstall or a manual update are not included in this service.
Weekly updates are typically performed on a Monday. Twice-weekly updates are usually performed on Mondays and Fridays. Thrice-weekly updates are usually performed on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. There may be some variability in the days that these updates are performed based on schedule and other issues presenting themselves.
The updates service does not include testing the updates on a staging server. If your plan includes Site Reviews, the site will be checked over once it is updated to ensure that the updates have been successful and have not adversely affected the site.
See all plans offering Updates
Malware scans
Sites that include malware scanning will have their sites scanned by the leading malware-scanning service in the industry to help identify issues such as JavaScript injections, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), hidden and malicious iframes, malicious redirects and phishing attempts.
If a problem is identified, the account owner is notified to determine how to proceed. The plan does not include malware removal; we know that there are services much better equipped to handle malware removal and we’ll gladly refer you to them.
See all plans offering Malware Scanning
Uptime monitoring
The uptime monitoring service will check your site every 5 minutes to see whether it returns a status code between 200 and 399. If your website returns a status code greater than 399 (think of common error codes like 404, 503, 504 etc.), then we will notify the account owner to determine what to do next.
See all plans offering Uptime Monitoring
Site reviews
Site reviews are your chance to have your site looked over by someone who knows WordPress inside and out and can be on the lookout for problems or changes that may have happened. It’s also a good way to ensure that site updates are completed successfully.
In addition, it’s a good way of having a professional look over your site regularly and provide you with suggestions for how you might improve your site, either by correcting problems, or by making improvements to keep up-to-date with the latest technologies, plugins and methods.
See all plans offering Site Reviews
Development time on retainer
Sometimes you need a little work done on your site. Keeping us on retainer provides you with the reassurance that if you need something fixed or you want something changed, you can just ask and our developers will make it so.
Your time allotment does not roll-over from month to month. This is a monthly allowance, so you can use this amount of time every month, but may not store it up over time.
See all plans offering Development Time on Retainer
Version-controlled updates and development
If your website is version-controlled, or your host has a version-controlled file system (like Pantheon), you’ll need this service if you want your updates or development work performed under version control.
See all plans offering Version Control
Business and strategy review
For our most feature-rich plans, we offer regular business and strategy reviews, where we will review what your website is doing for your business and where you want it to take you. It also gives you the opportunity to discuss whatever may be on your mind about your website.
These reviews can be conducted over the phone, Skype or Slack. If you’d rather, we can also exchange emails instead.
See all plans offering Business and Strategy Reviews
Complimentary services
WordPress expertise
We’ve been working with WordPress for a long time, so if you want to know how to do something with WordPress, or you want to know the best plugin for a task, just drop us a line and we’ll point you in the right direction. This includes as much guidance or advice as you need, but does not include any development work.
Emergency site restoration
If something catastrophic happens with your site and you need to roll back to a backup, we’ll take care of it for you. These requests automatically go to the top of our queue and we’ll handle the request as soon as we can.
You can also request to just have a certain part of your site restored. So, if for example, a plugin update went badly and you either want one or all of your plugins rolled back, we can leave your uploads, database and themes intact while only reverting to the backup of the plugins.
WordPress training videos
WP101 make an excellent set of training videos that get updated with every major version of WordPress, so if you’re looking for some training videos to help you do the most common tasks with WordPress, right from within your dashboard, you can view WP101’s suite of videos right from within your site dashboard.
Security plugin configuration
We have a lot of faith in the iThemes Security plugin and we have a standard configuration that we will apply to your site to thwart most security issues. However, not all sites are equal, so if you need your site configured a little differently, we’ll happily set it up just the way you need.