Website Maintenance & Security

Monthly Backup & Maintenance Service

I offer a monthly backup and maintenance service which involves

  • Pre-upgrade full website backup
  • Upgrade of WordPress, plugins and themes
  • Post -upgrade backup

Fee: £40 per month per website

Why backup & maintain your site?

Because the usage of WordPress to build websites is so widespread, sites built with WordPress are often targeted by hackers. Regularly backing up and maintaining your site mitigates against your site being compromised by hackers.

What kind of things do hackers do to your site?

Hackers can

  • Upload files containing malicious code to your server.
  • Modify your existing website files
  • Modify your WordPress database
  • Add unauthorised users with full access to your site
  • Publish unauthorised content on your site
  • Redirect your site to other sites that contain malicious code.

Steps you can take to make your WordPress site more secure

There are several basic steps you can take to make your WordPress site more secure, and mitigate against any attempts by hackers to hack into and damage your site.

Use strong passwords

Make sure that you use complex, random passwords that contain a mixture of uppercase, lowercase, characters and numbers-don’t make it easy for the hackers!

Keep your WordPress version, themes and plugins up-to-date.

Updates to the core WordPress software often contain security patches so it is important to keep the WordPress version updated to the latest version.

Hackers will often try to use outdated plugin or theme files as a kind of ‘back-door’ into your site so it is important that you keep your plugin and theme files up to date too.

Use a WordPress security plugin

There are a number of security plugins available (for free) which offer firewall and scanning facilities, along with processes designed to stop hackers from ‘brute force’ attacks on the admin login section of your website. I would definitely advise that you install and configure one of these plugins.

Back Up Your Website regularly

If you take regular weekly or monthly backups to your site then if your site does get hacked then you can ‘roll-back’ to an earlier version of your site.

Sometimes your hosting provider may take daily or weekly backups with a ‘roll-back’ facility so check with your hosting provider and ask them if they offer this facility.

If you need to take a manual backup of the website files and database you can find instructions here.

Help! My Website has been hacked!

If you find that your website has been hacked then your first port of call should be your hosting provider-they may be able to ‘roll-back’ and restore your website from an earlier date before the hack took place-the trick is in knowing roughly when your website was hacked.

So, if for example you know that the hack took place in July, try restoring the website back to June.

Please note: not all hosting providers offer this ‘rollback’ facility so check with your hosting provider.

Website Malaware Removal Service

If your hosting provider can’t help you then I can

  • analyze the files on your server
  • remove the infected website files and replace with ‘clean ones’
  • re-scan your website for any residual malaware
  • harden the security on your site to prevent future attacks.