It’s true: We do call ourselves a “managed WordPress hosting company”. But that phrase means very different things to different people, and allows just about every hosting company to claim the “managed WordPress hosting” moniker.

Before we dive into our definition, let’s take a step back and talk BIG picture. You’ve got a website that’s built on WordPress, and you need to maintain it to keep it safe, secure and performing well for your site visitors. Let’s talk about what common tasks are needed for managing your own WordPress site:

The Hosting of Course!

It all starts with “the hosting”. This boils down to a simple concept of having somewhere out on the world wide web for your website to live. This space comes in a number of different flavors: shared hosting, dedicated hosting, virtual private servers, and the latest buzzword: CLOUD hosting. Each of these has its own pros and cons, but we’ll save that conversation for another day.

Server Maintenance

When you find yourself outgrowing a shared hosting plan, there’s a good chance you’ll end up looking for a dedicated slice of server resources – whether that be a virtual private server or a dedicated server. Underneath the name lies hardware and software, the latter of which has frequent, periodic security updates to be performed to keep your site secure. Maintaining the server involves frequently applying software patches that address security and performance issues.

WordPress Updates

Your WordPress site is “modular” – think of it like a puzzle. It’s made up of many different components (WordPress core, theme and plugins) that when put together make up the site that your visitors see. Daily — sometimes even hourly — these components get security updates, performance updates, feature updates, and even the dreaded update updates. Updateception. Keeping up with these updates ensures that if your website gets hacked, it’s unlikely due to insecure plugins or security vulnerabilities. Ignore these at your own peril.

Uptime Monitoring

Congratulations! You don’t have to worry about site security and performance when your website is offline. If and when your site goes down, you’ll want to be the first to know. You’ll have time to proactively notify your customers, engage your staff to help dive into the bits and bytes of what’s causing the outage, and resolve the issue. You do have someone on staff with a degree in bits and bytes, right? Or was it a certification? Use uptime monitoring for automated notifications when your site is down or taking too long to load.

Security Monitoring

The reality of today is that there are custom bots that indiscriminately and automatically crawl the internet looking for easy targets. They use search engines to build lists of possible targets and then methodically run tests on each target to find out if there’s an easy way to exploit it. The keyword his is “automatically” – it isn’t always a group of people looking for specific targets.  If your website can be found on Google, it’s a sure bet someone is trying to gain access to it. But, why? You don’t store customer credit cards, you’re just a small business just trying to make ends meet, right? The word you’re looking for is botnet. Security monitoring helps identify and prevent attacks that could otherwise cripple your website and organization.

Backup and Retention

“Stuff” happens. Even when you’re updating your own website with the best of intentions, sometimes that new blog post got permanently deleted. Sometimes a WordPress automatic update conflicts with that custom code your contractor from Adammia wrote. Having a backup and retention policy provides that security blanket to know that even when you take two steps forward, you can take two steps back. Easy enough, right? But what happens when there’s an attack on the data-center where your site is hosted? If you integrate off-site backups in your backup and retention strategy, you’ll be able to restore the site to a different location in the event of any prolonged outage.

Performance Monitoring

We’re deep into the territory where Google takes your site performance seriously. An often quoted statistic is that 40% of visitors abandon your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Anecdotally, that’s not you, right? You’ve tested your performance with tools like Pingdom, GTmetrix, and Google’s own PageSpeed Insights test. Congratulations! But wait… those tools work from a single location at a single point in time. Your visitors don’t always come from the same place at the same time. Consistently monitoring your performance over a longer period of time provides a much clearer picture of performance deviations.