We use MalCare for our security monitoring and firewall. We’ve found this to be the most lightweight plugin for WordPress security while still offering powerful protection for your site. Included with each plan is:

• Managed website firewall (WAF)
• Virtual patching & malware prevention
• Daily security scans
• Blacklist and reputation monitoring
• Domain and SSL expiration monitoring
• WordPress hardening
• Downtime monitoring

If a site does not have an active SSL certificate or if it’s broken (insecure/mixed content warnings), we’ll set up a free Let’s Encrypt certificate (should the host provide it). Every three months, we ensure that all sites have their security certificate renewed.

Depending on your plan frequency, we’ll:

• Ensure that WordPress core automatic updates are turned on and functioning
• Update all plugins and themes used on the site. We remove old default WordPress themes, except for the latest version. If a premium license key expires, we notify you so that you or your client can renew.
• Ensure that your WordPress installation is running on the latest secure PHP version
• Each quarter, update the hosting, FTP, and WordPress admin passwords

Before each update, we create a full off-site backup of each site, just in case something goes wrong. This is stored separately from the site’s server to keep it safe. Depending on the plan, additional routine backups are also created. This is useful for sites that have new content added regularly or WooCommerce active.

Sometimes updates can break or change a site. It’s difficult to check every single page for tiny details that could have changed between updates, especially on larger sites. Instead, our visual comparison tool takes screenshots of your website pages before we run updates. After we apply the updates, it takes a new set of screenshots and automatically compares them to find any differences. If there are major differences, we’ll investigate further and possibly roll back or look for a fix. This ensures that the style and design of your site continually stay in check.

There are a number of premium plugins that The Wonder Jam uses when building sites. Often we purchase the agency license for those plugins and pass those on to the folks whose sites we build.

If you have specific questions about this, you can ask.

Yes and no. We’ll try to work with any host, but certain hosts restrict outside security and generally offer a poor website experience. If an issue arises, we’ll suggest moving hosts or will discontinue the plan. We recommend (ranked in order):

• SiteGround
• Kinsta
• WP Engine
• Flywheel

We do not recommend:

• GoDaddy
• Bluehost
• MediaTemple
• Network Solutions

We’re happy to maintain staging sites, but they will require an additional plan.

After you purchase a plan for your site, you’ll be sent an intake form that will ask for additional details. At the minimum, we’ll need access to the hosting control panel and the WordPress admin. After the intake form is complete, you’ll receive a link to a shared 1Password Vault. Here, you’ll be able to save logins for all of the sites you have with us and keep them updated should you need to change them. We also update the passwords once a quarter for additional security.

The goal of a maintenance plan is to keep anything from happening in the first place; however, there are certain things that may be out of our control, like issues arising from 3rd party plugins, hosting environment, updates you make on your own, and so on. While we cannot promise that you will never experience any issues, we can guarantee that we’ll provide top level preventative care. We can also utilize our offsite backups to restore a site quickly. If something does break due to a required update, we’ll roll back and reach out with next steps and an estimate to fix the issue. You can then decide how to proceed.

Definitely! We’re happy to help with simple content changes or adding additional functionality. Our standard rate is $85/hour and we invoice any billable time once per month. We’re also happy to estimate a project rate for more complex changes.