WP Minder

Maintaining WordPress

Replacing Your Content – What Would it Take?

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My website is gone...Picture this – you’ve got a busy business (yay!) and you’ve devoted a considerable amount of time building up your expertise by writing high-quality blog posts once per week.

You’ve been doing this for one year – that’s 52 blog posts.

One morning you discover that your site has been hacked (or your server has had a major meltdown, or “insert other problem here”). And you didn’t have a backup. Or your backups were on the server, and are now gone.

What would it cost you to redo all that work?

Find out by calculating the cost of content replacement. It can be an eye-opener!

Then after that shock has worn off, make a plan to keep this from happening to your business. Make sure you have fresh backups stored somewhere other than your host’s server – like Dropbox, Amazon or even a portable hard drive on your desk.

‘Fresh backup’ means just that. If you blog a lot, say twice per week, don’t rely on monthly backups; you could lose up to 8 posts that way. Make your backup schedule match the frequency with which you add new content.

Make sure you know how to restore the backup. Then, you won’t need to worry so much. Your site can be up and running again in just minutes, and you won’t have to redo anything at all. Take that, hackers.

Why I Started WP Minder

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I like taking care of clients with small businesses. I have a small business (actually, a few of them) and I know I feel good when I know someone is really watching out for me as a business owner. That’s what WP Minder is all about – watching out for you. Protecting clients so they know that if the worst happens and their site is attacked or their host server fails, their website is still in safe hands. They don’t need to panic, because recovery will be quick and simple.

“Why would anyone want to hack my website? I’m not selling anything. I’m just a small business.”

Hacker hacking siteI’ve heard this from my WordPress design clients on a fairly frequent basis. And the answer is usually not what they expected. Hacking is often just a crime of opportunity – it’s usually nothing personal and you weren’t targeted for any particular reason. The hacker was mostly likely just looking for an easy target in order to do one of the following things, just for example:

  • Use your website to attack others, like a botnet, a widespread hacking attempt that’s hard to pinpoint.
  • To hijack your site in order to present misinformation or deceive search engines.
  • To use your site to store the malware that gets downloaded through an email scam.
  • Adding links to spammy websites on your site.
  • For fun (putting obscenities on your site, for example).

Some of these are pretty easy to recover from, but some will cause you much more grief – your site can be blacklisted, it can be removed from Google search results, or your users’ data could be compromised.

Why Did I Get Hacked?

Having an old version of WordPress or old, outdated plugins and themes provide what can be a ridiculously easy way in, leaving the door open to hackers. That’s not to say that WordPress is the problem – it can happen to Drupal, Joomla or any other content management system.

There’s no absolute way to prevent hacking, but there are some things you can do to reduce the likelihood it’ll happen to you.

And that’s what WP Minder is for. We keep client websites up to date. We take fresh backups that can be restored in case of emergencies. And take basic security precautions to reduce the risk where possible – including running an annual security audit to locate and fix potential vulnerabilities before they become real problems.

I don’t like getting calls from panicked clients who realize too late that they never bothered to back up their websites. My goal is to prevent that in an affordable way, and give clients some peace of mind, knowing that the business website they’ve invested time, money, and effort into is as safe as it can be.

What It Costs to Maintain a WordPress Site

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WordPress is free – that’s popular reason for businesses to choose this very popular platform for building their company website. And that’s not a bad reason at all.

But it’s not really ‘free,’ is it? There are always costs associated with owning a website, and WordPress in reality has a lot more than a simple site with no content management capabilities.

Let’s look at the basics: what it costs to maintain a WordPress site.

1. Domain name registration.

This is a minor cost but a critical element – you have to pay the fees to keep your registration current. It could vary from a few dollars to $30 or more per year depending on where you register your domain.

2. Hosting.

Again, a critical element (your site has to have somewhere to live). Depending on the host, it can range from a few dollars to hundreds per month, but most of our business clients are paying between $10-25/month. Cheap hosting usually provides slow loading times and little or poor support, expensive hosting generally gives you faster speeds and better-quality support. There’s a huge range of hosting options available.

Learning what it costs to maintain a WordPress site3. Maintenance.

WordPress and its plugins get updated. A lot. Much more often than you might suspect, you’ll login and see you have 2, 3, 5 updates…

Like the other ongoing elements above, maintenance costs can vary quite a bit. Here are a few scenarios.

 Scenario 1: Free! (for a while, anyway)

No one’s going to force you to keep your site up to date or back it up. It’ll run fine for awhile, but eventually the security risk of having an outdated version of WordPress or old plugins is going to catch up with you. The site may get hacked, or something might just stop working. The cost of fixing this can be quite high (hundreds of dollars, typically). If you don’t have a usable backup, it could become quite expensive.

Scenario 2: A few hours per month of your time, plus up-front learning time

Taking care of your own WordPress maintenance is not difficult. Learning about it and keeping on top of it is going to take you some time though. You’ll need to:

  • keep WordPress up to date
  • keep all your plugins up to date
  • if a plugin goes out of development, replace it with a current one
  • backup your site, preferably offsite, so you can recover it in case of a major problem

Not hard and no up-front costs, but it does take up some of your valuable time. And if you have a problem with an update and don’t know how to fix it, you’ll have to hire someone to help.

Scenario 3: Monthly maintenance plan

Working with a company like WP Minder means your site will be kept up-to-date, including at the most basic level:

  • weekly WordPress and plugin updates
  • daily/weekly offsite backups to Amazon S3
  • database optimization
  • uptime monitoring – if your site is down, we’ll know in 5 minutes

WP  Minder also includes an annual security audit to make sure things are as they should be.

Our maintenance plans start at just $19.99/month. If an update fails or you get hacked, we fix it – that’s included. And you don’t have to worry about your business website anymore.

The Bottom Line

WordPress maintenance includes nothing you can’t do yourself, but do you really want to? Do you have the time to learn how? If you’re running a business, it’s probably not a priority and it shouldn’t be. It’s not a good use of your time.

Update All In One SEO to Fix Two Security Vulnerabilities

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All In One SEO logoWordPress security pros at Sucuri discovered serious vulnerabilities in the very popular WordPress plugin All In One SEO earlier last week, potentially affecting millions of sites.

Security site Hacker News estimates more than 15 million WordPress sites are now using All In One SEO, so you can see what a big problem this was…

What exactly were the issues?

First, there was a vulnerability that allowed even low-level logged in users like Subscribers or Authors access to elements of All In One like SEO titles and meta descriptions. And second, another vulnerability also allowed attackers to inject malicious code in the Admin panel and do things like change an admin user’s account password.

A new version of the plugin that fixes both problems is now available, so please update to version 2.1.6 as soon as possible to protect your website.

WP Minder clients – we’ve got you covered. You’ve already been updated! And if you’re on the Small Business, Business or Enterprise Plans Sucuri has your back too, we work with them to monitor your sites for malware 24/7.

What Would You Lose if Your Website’s Host Server Failed?

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It’s a scary thought – and the more valuable your website is to you or your business, the scarier it can get!

Think about it, though. Say you’re in charge of blogging for your business (or you currently are your business and therefore in charge of everything under the sun)… You try to be consistent and you spend an average of half an hour writing a post each weekday, five posts per week.

A Not-too-bad Scenario

One day you get to work (or walk into your home office) and fire up a browser, go to login to WordPress and – boom. The site is down. Or it’s covered with unmentionable junk because it’s been hacked.

For this little example let’s assume something happened to the server that hosts your site – servers do fail.

If you have an IT staff, you’d likely call them first, but you may not have that luxury, so the next step would be contacting your host.

They confirm the worst – your server had a  major meltdown. But, they have a backup for you. It’s one week old, would you like for them to restore it?.

Of course, you say.

Within a short amount of time  (I’m assuming here that your host has either fixed your server or moved your account to a new one) your site is up and running again.

That’s awesome! And you’re lucky that your host had that backup.

But still, you’ve lost the last five days of work, the 2.5 hours you spent writing those blog posts. They’re gone, and you’re going to have to recreate them. [Read more…] about What Would You Lose if Your Website’s Host Server Failed?

WordPress Backup Myths

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IThemes had a great post a few days ago about all the excuses WordPress site owners and managers give for not backing up their sites – and not protecting their investment. These were my three favorites, and they are all something I’ve heard from one or more clients in the last six months.

1. WordPress backs up my site automatically.

Er – no. Actually no, it doesn’t. That’s a huge misconception; maybe because WordPress seems to do so many things, like a Swiss Army knife, it’s assumed that this is just one of those things.

Maybe it’s true of WordPress.com? I’m not sure… but definitely, a self-hosted WordPress site will not magically back itself up.

2. My Web host will take care of me.

Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.

While all the hosts I’ve ever personally used assured me that they took at least weekly backups, I’ve had to rely on this three times in the entire time I’ve had websites. On one occasion I got a backup that was 4 days old, the other two were 10 days or two weeks. Not bad – but what if you’re running a very active blog, and you put out a handful of posts every day or two? That’s a lot of work you could lose in two weeks’ time, and there’s no guarantee that your host is really backing up as often as they say.

One design client that asked me to fix their site after it had been hacked was counting on their host’s backups, and was not happy to find the most recent one available was over a month old.

Don’t rely on your host. Either do it yourself or use a service that manages backups for you, preferably daily database backups.

3. I backed up once, so I’m okay (or – I have a copy of my site on a DVD from the developer).

And how old is your site? Has it changed since you backed it up that one time, or since you launched it?

If it hasn’t you may have worse problems than getting hacked… but if you’re posting new content to your site regularly as you should be, you stand to lose everything that’s gone into it since that last backup. How much work could you lose? Can you afford to lose it and have to start over? Most likely the answer is no.

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Take control of your own backup situation – either do it yourself, or check out our plans, which include daily database backups and daily or weekly full-site backups. Don’t leave it to chance or rely on someone else to handle it, it’s too important.

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