One of the most frequently asked questions we get whenever we’re bringing on a new client is what we’re doing behind the scenes for our monthly WordPress Support clients.
Aside from the various levels of maintenance and support we offer in each package, there is also a lot that goes into keeping a website running smoothly, from ongoing security monitoring, to ongoing image and script optimization, to software and plugin updates (and the testing that comes with this), to keeping things like PHP updated, and beyond. We spend a few hours each week behind the scenes keeping all of these things running smoothly, and our clients can sleep easier knowing this.
Yes, you can absolutely get away with not doing a thing over the course of a few months and be OK, but eventually, it’s likely to catch up with you.
On a number of occassions I’ve personally been called on to fix websites that have gotten outdated over time and have gotten hacked by spammers, or gotten into situations where their software no longer worked correctly, or their site simply wasn’t up to date with modern technology.
These types of situations can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to fix, depending on their severity, and even worse, can drive away business while they exist.
For these reasons and many more, we urge everyone who we build website for, and those who just need help time to time, to get on one of our monthly support plans. Even at the lowest rate, software and technology is kept up to date in the background, which prevents many of the bad situations listed above.
But often at just the next tier up, a website can be kept completely up to date over time, avoiding costly rebuilds that come with letting a website get “stale.”
But enough about that. You came here to check out some of the software we use. Here is the list of what we use in the background to keep your website fast and safe, as well as how we use it!
The Basic Foundation
WordPress
WordPress is (almost) exclusively what we use to build websites. Sometimes we’ll make an exception for clients that already have sites built on platforms like Wix or SquareSpace, but these platforms are often more costly and less effective, so we don’t like to.
WordPress powers nearly 1/3 of websites in the world, so it’s community and level of support is massive, making it an easy choice.
Genesis Framework and Add-Ons
Next is Genesis by Studiopress. This framework that sits on top of the WordPress basic layer offers several powerful and turn-key features which make building and managing websites a lot more efficient. The basic idea is to make the building process as quick as possible, to save money for small businesses using our services.
StudioPress Themes
A theme in WordPress is a basic layout and design. We’ll generally start with one of Studiopress’s several dozen themes, and make many customizations based on needs from there. Outside of creating content, this is where most of the work goes into building a website.
The Optimization (Extra) Pieces
WP Fastest Cache
One of the main differentiators from one website to another is speed. Users will often abandon a website if it takes more than just a few seconds for a page to load. People are impatient these days. We use WP Fastest cache and a variety of configuration options with this tool to keep your site running quickly.
AWS CloudFront
Amazon Web Services’ CloudFront service allows simple offloading of larger files like pictures, stylesheets, PDFs, and javascript. This costs us a couple hundred bucks a year to run for everyone, but it offers a huge speed increase and more efficient server utilization, so we’re happy to offer it for our clients.
WP Smush
WP Smush is another performance optimizer. Keeping file sizes small is a large part of keeping a website fast. This piece of software automatically resizes and compresses uploaded images to make them efficient for browsers to download. It makes a huge difference vs non-optimized images.
Yoast SEO
Getting found in search engines is one of the key wishes of small businesses we work with. Yoast SEO offers some very simple configuration options to give customers a head start on this. With each site we build, we configure this piece of software to give customers the best chance of optimizing each page they build for search engines without doing a ton of extra work.
Wordfence
Because WordPress powers a huge chunk of the Internet, this makes it a target for hackers and spammers. Wordfence is the key piece of security software we use. It offers an unparalleled array of options to protect websites from brute force break-ins. We set up each client with our own hand-picked array of settings, and will adjust these over time as we monitor the activity reports it provides.
This is one of the largest things we spend time on after a website is built, keeping it safe.
Backup Buddy
Backups are important to keep, because software updates do sometimes fail, and it’s important to be able to restore to a previous version if needed. Backup buddy offers simple offloaded backups to storage buckets that are indepedent of the webservers we use. We run a backup each week for most clients, and some even daily.
Wow. That Was a Lot.
Some of this software is free to use, and some of it requires a bit of overhead for us. But the main takeaway is that all of this takes time, quite a bit of time. Keeping all of this software up to date, along with the many individualized pieces of software we use, is one of the most time-intensive things we do for our clients.
Each website we support is updated weekly with the latest software released from WordPress, its plugin providers, and its theme providers. On top of that, we’re constantly monitoring the industry for improvements we can make for our clients, which is how many of the pieces of software you see above were chosen.
All of this together keeps the websites we manage running quickly and safely, for a price far lower than what you’ll find at most large agencies.