WordPress Care & Maintenance Plans

Running updates and installing backup software is a relatively simple process; troubleshooting when an update goes wrong requires expertise. 

We’ve been working with WordPress for a long time and have fixed many sites with all types of issues from plugin and theme compatibility issues to full site hacks and malware. Our WordPress Care Plans are mostly about prevention strategies and maintaining a healthy website but we also specialise in finding and fixing issues when they arise. 

We’ve also become the go-to guys for a number of other web design agencies in Perth when their clients have technical issues. This experience means that we’re often able to quickly find and rectify any issues and get you back online fast. This saves you the time and stress of trying to fix the issue or getting someone on short notice who doesn’t know your site. 

If you’re a freelance web designer or agency ask us about our white label services.

Our On-Site Support covers a wide range of services including:

• Adding/editing copy and images
• Image compression
• On-page SEO
• Adding/editing products
• Adding blog posts
• Creating Custom Post Types (CPTs)
• Third party integrations
• Contact forms and plugin configurations

Building and maintaining an online store can quickly become very time consuming and getting it right is critical to running a successful business. Every additional second of load time can make a potential customer start to look elsewhere. So, what can Blue Kelpie do to help maintain your store?

Our advanced analytic tools show us where your customers are dropping off in your sales funnel and which pages aren’t converting.

We help you with your store’s configuration like setting up payment gateways, taxes, shipping costs and all customer emails.

We help you with some of the more advanced extensions like affiliate programs, up-sells and cross-sells, user subscriptions, variable and virtual products and downloads, booking systems and all premium Woocommerce plugins. 

We have created complex membership and training sites using Woocommerce and other systems. 

We have extensive experience in writing custom code to add to, and modify, Woocommerce’s core functionality. 

We have written numerous custom functions for many different applications, including complex third party system integrations for a number of clients. 

Do you have a custom Woocommerce project? We’d love to help!

When we partnered with WP Engine it was part of a wider reaching decision to provide our clients with the best service we could. Our dedicated hosting environment operates out of the Google data centre in Sydney which is fast, secure and well maintained. It comes with an SSL certificate and a Content Distribution Network (CDN) from Stack CDN that can reduce page load times by up to 60%. For added security we provide you with 30 days of backups which is great for isolating any issues that occur.

We also give you staging and development environments for safely making major changes and updates before going live. That’s three environments in one! Finally, and quite importantly, we don’t just provide web hosting. We run daily security scans of your site to detect malware and other security issues. We utilise the WP Engine support staff to help with any problems that arise – with 24/7 chat support that you can access yourself.  It’s a premium digital service on the fastest architecture we could find. We wanted to provide our clients with the best solution and we believe we’ve found it.

A common response that we get when we tell clients our hosting comes with a CDN is, ‘..a CD-Whatnow?’.

This gets a little technical but keep reading, we’re going to keep it brief.

When WordPress displays a page (or post) it runs a loop that queries the database and retrieves the content for that page. This requires some processing by the server which takes valuable time before sending the content to render in the site visitor’s web browser. A CDN or Content Distribution Network captures the rendered output as pages without the need to query the database each time. The rendered pages are then stored across a network of Edge servers across Australia, and all around the world. When a visitor comes to your site they are actually seeing the cached pages from the Edge servers, cutting down server time and also sending the data from a closer location than the Sydney data centre. If you’re getting lost here don’t worry too much, the main point is how this improves performance.

The CDN we use reduces load times by a margin of around 15-25% from our tests. For a site that previously took 6 seconds to load this can take a further 2 seconds off your page load time. Faster loading pages have a much higher conversion rate than their slower competitors. A study by skilled.co showed that:

• Pages that loaded in 2.4 seconds had a 1.9% conversion rate
• At 3.3 seconds, conversion rate was 1.5%
• At 4.2 seconds, conversion rate was less than 1%
• At 5.7+ seconds, conversion rate was 0.6%

 Just how fast is our hosting? We’ve found most sites load in around half to a third of the time as other hosting providers. This matters, a lot! Not only do your site visitors have a better experience with higher conversion rates but Google ranks you higher too – it’s a major factor for SEO. If your site loads slower than your competitors you will be losing customers.

How would an increase in conversion rate by 2 or even 3 times affect your bottom line?

Everyday when we work on our clients’ websites we have a priority system based on the urgency of the work. Adding content to your homepage is not as urgent as fixing your site when it’s down, and we extend this courtesy to all of our clients. When your site is down, we know you will appreciate a faster response. 

‘High Priority Service’ means that you have paid to be kept at the top of the queue. This makes a big difference when you are running an online store and a plugin has prevented your customers from reaching the checkout. With a high priority job and as a high priority client we do everything we can to make sure your site is back running again as soon as possible!

There are many factors that can lead to sites going down or being hacked so it is impossible to guarantee your site won’t be affected. However, we are able to take all reasonable efforts to minimise the likelihood of your site being impacted and, with 30 days of backups we can get you back online as quick as possible with the most recent stable version. 

We are experts in WordPress maintenance so we prevent your site being impacted. If it is, you have some of the best support on hand to get things right again, fast!

We update all themes, plugins and WordPress core files. Some plugins and themes require a more involved update process than the standard WordPress update function. When we start maintaining your site we’ll let you know of any issues and work with you to keep your site pristine.

Our WordPress Care services are all pre-paid month-to-month plans, with no lock-in contracts. We find that our clients are happy with the service and love the peace of mind that comes from knowing there are experts looking after their websites, leaving them more time to focus on running their business.

We have worked with many of the largest hosting companies in Australia and many US and Asian based companies as well. There are many factors that can impact the security and performance of your site; being on a large shared hosting environment is one of them. While hosting on servers can restrict some of the services we provide we can certainly help to keep your site secure.

For optimal security we have our own dedicated hosting environment that enables us to run our own scripts and gives us greater control over the security of your site. We cannot run all of these scripts on shared hosting servers. 

Our cloud based hosting is also one of the fastest hosting environments currently available in Australia. 

Contact us to find out how we can work with your current hosts.