FAQ

WordPress is great - it powers over 35% of the world's websites. But that popularity means it's also a target for hackers. Things can and do go wrong - just like with software on your laptop, or your car when you don't get regular maintenance. This is what you need to protect your website:

• High-quality hosting.
• Regular backups of your site stored in a safe, offsite location.
• Regular software updates (plugins, themes, WordPress).
• Security through annual audits, malware scans, security plugins, quality hosting, and regular updates.

You can certainly take care of all of these things on your own. It's time-consuming and requires technical expertise with WordPress - including knowing how to fix things when they break. Or, you can let us handle these tasks for you and feel confident your site is being well cared for.

Because we offer hands-on service. Your plugins, core files and themes are not updated automatically by a robot - real humans are involved in the process, making sure everything goes smoothly every week (and ready to step in and make it right if problems occur).

We started WP Minder as an extension of the personalized care we've been offering to all our WordPress design and development clients through Red Kite Creative since 2009.

No contract, you can cancel at any time and receive a refund for monthly accounts. Annual plans are not eligible for refunds.

For the first 14 days, a 100% refund is given. After 14 days, refunds for monthly plans are prorated based on how much time is left in that month. Quarterly and annual plans are not eligible for a refund after the first 14 days.

Absolutely! Contact us for more information and let us know how many sites you’d like to include and what plan you're interested in.

Yes it does – a high-quality, fast host is especially important for business websites. This is why we include fast Managed WordPress Hosting with all of our Plans. If you choose not to use our hosting, a limited number of other hosts are supported - see the Plans page.

The answer is "maybe." But it's not likely they do them every day or even once per week, or they store them off-site away from your server, in case something happens to the server. Servers do fail.

Yes, you get a free SSL certificate with our hosting.

No, it's not. We chose to focus on providing the best WordPress hosting we can and not to expand into other services. We love Rackspace Email for handling our general email delivery.

Yes we can. Support for complex sites using WooCommerce is included in our Advanced and Premium Plans. We take special care when upgrading WooCommerce and its addons using a staging site and visual comparisons of before-and-after appearance.

We're serious about strong security. Our Plans include features to safeguard your website like:

• Free SSL certificates
• Annual security audit
• Blocking users and hosts on industry blacklists, or who are caught scanning your site for openings
• Watching for unusual file changes
• Requiring strong passwords
• 2-factor authentication
• Daily malware scans

...and much more.

There certainly is! Agencies get discounts for multiple plans of any level billed monthly (annual plans not eligible, except for the first site):

• First site at full price
• Second site 20% discount
• Third-fifth sites at 25% discount
• Sixth and higher sites at 35% discount

Agencies get a white-labeled monthly PDF report for each site delivered to them to pass on to their clients.

So glad you asked! Check out our onboarding process.

During the onboarding process we'll request a few things from you, including an Administrator-level WordPress user account and a login for your hosting account control panel (if not using our hosting). If we will migrate your site to our hosting, we'll also need access to your domain registrar in order to repoint your domain to the new hosting account. We keep this information safely stored in an AES-256-bit encrypted location.

Before we begin maintaining your site we first do a Site Audit to become familiar with your website, how it was built, and any potential issues that it may have. We want to make sure that there are no barriers to us maintaining your website properly and securely.

If we do find serious issues, we’ll provide you with details and you’ll have the option to fix them yourself or have us do the work at our hourly rate before we begin regular maintenance services.

In some very rare cases, we may determine that because of a site’s condition, age, or unusual structure we won’t be able to effectively maintain it, and if that’s the case, we’ll let you know right away and provide a full refund.

Your website is an important part of your business and deserves your attention. You agree that you’ll check in on it from time to time, and if you notice any problems you’ll submit a support ticket promptly. We rely on you to help us keep your site safe – often the client (or your customers) are the first ones to see a problem.

Yes there is, and we’d be happy to have you. Go here to sign up. You’ll receive a 50% commission on the first payment for each referral you send to WP Minder (view the fine print).

Absolutely, you can upgrade or downgrade at any time.

Just send an email with a clear description of the problem to [email protected] and we’ll start a new ticket for you at our support helpdesk.

Please be as descriptive about the problem as you can, you can even attach a screenshot if you think it’s helpful. And we’ll be in touch as quickly as possible.

Submit a ticket when you notice any of the following:

• Your site is suddenly not loading in a browser.
• Your site pages appear to be defaced (the sign of a hack).
• You’re seeing an error or warning message when viewing pages on your site.
• Large parts of your site aren’t loading properly, like a sidebar.
• You’ve run a scan using your security plugin and it tells you there’s something suspicious.
• You see user accounts (admin-level) you don’t recognize.
• People who try to access your site or purchase something are seeing a warning.

Like a retainer, the monthly time is there for you every month to reserve your place in our work queue, therefore it does not roll over. You can take comfort in the fact that support you request within your allotted minutes of time per month will be addressed by our team promptly.

The whole purpose of our Care Plans is preventative care, so we hope to prevent anything from happening. While well-maintained websites rarely get hacked, it's just not possible to prevent all emergencies. In case your website does get hacked or breaks after an update, we'll be there to fix it, clean it or restore it with one of our fresh backups.

No, it's not. We bill $100 for hack cleanup on our Basic Care Plan, and that rate will apply to all new sites that come in with malware already present.

We’ll update commercial themes like Genesis (as long as you're using a child theme), and commercial plugins such as WooCommerce, but our sole no-charge remedy for breakages is to roll back to the previous version. We recommend you contact your developer to get your customized theme or plugin working correctly. If that’s not possible, we may be able to address the problem at our normal hourly rate of $115 (or higher for specialized programming) but your best course of action will be using your developer who did the original work for you.

No, not usually. But if we identified critical security issues with your site during one of our Security Audits or other checks and you chose not to correct them, your account will be limited to one (1) full free restore per calendar year. Your site was identified as high-risk and therefore a much better target for hackers. It’s your choice if you want to risk your site, but after the first restore in a calendar year, the $75/hour fee applies.

Absolutely. Design and development work is done through our parent company Red Kite Creative. For projects like theme design and development, send us a note about what you need as we quote by the project.

Our support hours are 9am - 5pm MT. Any support tickets submitted after hours will be attended to promptly during our next regular support hours.

Simple adjustments or edits that take 15 minutes or less are included, like content changes, adding posts/pages, adding/changing images, adding events, etc. This does not include design/development, hack repair or restoration, adding online stores or products, adding membership systems, or training. For larger jobs, we’ll provide a formal quote.

• Fixing premium themes or plugins like shopping carts, membership management and other complex commercial plugins is not included, they will be rolled back until the developer can be contacted.
• Talking with commercial plugin or theme support on your behalf.
• Talking with your domain registrar or any other service provider on your behalf.
• If not hosting with us, talking with your hosting company on your behalf.
• Managing subscriptions or licenses for commercial plugins and themes you've purchased is your responsibility unless you've requested we handle these for you and invoice you.
• Design and development of custom themes or custom plugins is not included for discounted add-on hours, nor is repairing complex custom templates for commercial plugins such as WooCommerce.
• Editing or troubleshooting of custom themes or customized commercial themes is never included as a support feature – for this you will need to contact your theme developer.
• SEO work is not included.

That's not a problem at all! We'll review your support request and provide a quote for you to approve, separate from your monthly Care Plan. However, many times we'll evaluate your request and with your approval, just provide the extra time at our current support rate.

If a plugin becomes abandoned because it's not longer in active development, we'll know about it, and can work with you to find a modern, active alternative.

Yes you can - we'll be sorry to see you go but there is no contract. Just fill out our form requesting a cancellation or send an email to [email protected].

We’ll cancel your subscription and do the following:

• Stop your next payment;
• Remove our plugins from your site;
• Remove our licenses from your site and let you know what licenses you need to purchase;
• Issue any refund due (monthly plans only);
• Notify you when your account is fully closed.