Our Services

WordPress Maintenance

Full management & maintenance for your website

A management and maintenance service for organizations who want to leave their site to the experts

Why a maintenance plan?

Write content, grow your business and delegate the tech work to us.

Pixel takes the stress out of managing your WordPress site. Fiddling with backups, updates, maintenance and security will now be our responsibility, not yours. We proactively manage, secure and support your WordPress website and let you focus on running your organization.

Despite its simplicity and ease of use, under the hood WordPress is a sophisticated database-driven platform with a completely open source codebase. There are also numerous plugins installed on WordPress that power your website. This, combined with the fact that 30% of the internet runs on WordPress, makes it a prime target for hackers and malware. The reality is that WordPress and its plugins require consistent maintenance to remain stable, secure, and in good working order, like any other software.

Which tier is right for you?

Our WordPress Maintenance Plan comes in two tiers

 MaintainActive
WordPress Security Scans & Monitoring
WordPress Core File & Plugin Updates
Nightly Off-Server Backups
Uptime Monitoring and Maintenance Reports
Licensed Premium Plugins
Website Mail & Form Management
Tailored for eCommerce, Membership, & LMS Platforms
Pixel Help Desk & Training
Unlimited Content Updates
$60/Month$130/Month

WordPress Security Scans & Monitoring

maintainactive

Run a security scan on the site on a regular basis to confirm there are no known issues and monitor all plugins against a database of known plugin vulnerabilities.

Should there be any malware (viruses, malicious software variants, ransomware, spyware, etc.); or if a site is compromised, we will remove it and clean up the site for no cost.

WordPress Core File & Plugin Updates

maintainactive

Update the core WordPress platform of your site whenever new releases are put out. We also update the WordPress theme if it is purchased or downloaded from the WordPress public theme repository.

Update plugins on a scheduled and on an as-needed security basis. We will monitor plugin changelogs and update them when there are security releases or updates that are required to match WordPress releases.

Reviewing and testing the site after every WordPress, plugin, or theme update to make sure everything is still functional and working smoothly.

Nightly Off-Site Backups

maintainactive

Breathe easy: Pixel creates secure, off-site backups for your site every night and has access to them 24/7. A minimum of eleven total backups are kept at all times: four from the previous four months, and seven from the previous seven days.

support active

Responsibility for reverting to any individual site backups either due to a website compromise, a malfunctioning plugin, or accidental lost content.

Website Uptime Monitoring

maintainactive

You don’t always have time to check your site every day or even every week, but as a part of our WordPress Maintenance Plan we do. We are constantly monitoring, reviewing and scanning your site, so if we see something out of the ordinary, or even something small like a typo, we can jump in and fix it. We monitor the site for uptime and resolve any issues that may occur with it going down (that we are able to control).

Licensed Premium Plugins

maintainactive

Install and configure our standard plugin suite. Some of these plugins are premium (paid), but there are no additional costs to you. Full list of plugins below.

Website Mail & Form Management

maintainactive

We install a premium service called Postmark on site. This means email and form messages are not sent from the same server the site sits on and instead is sent from a dedicated transactional email server. This results in more reliable email sending, with less email ending up in spam. It allows us to trace if emails sent from the site land in the right inbox, and if they are opened.

Pixel Help Desk & Training

active

Gain access to the best WordPress help desk on the web — us! Send a support ticket, or pick up the phone and call us directly.We’re here to answer whatever WordPress and website questions you have. We provide you with a direct email address and phone number to reach our team.

Looking to find a new plugin, or researching a new theme? Drop us a line and we’ll be happy to chat with you and lend our expertise. Put us to work and let us do the research and investigation for you. Whether that be instructions on how to upload a file, resize images or just wanting to gain insight on the best options to expand your blog, we’re here to help, provide you with guidance and be your dedicated website support team.

If requested, we will sit down with you and train you on how best to use WordPress to update and manage your site. We can also record your training and provide an instructional video to you so future staff or editors can get up to speed.

Unlimited Content Updates

active

Rather than having complex pricing models and hourly rates, our active maintenance plans offer unlimited help from our experts. It’s tiring constantly asking to see how much something will cost, or checking how many hours are left on a retainer, so instead just send us the work and we’ll get it done. What’s a “Content Update”? Basically anything that can be done using the WordPress Framework, that doesn’t require custom PHP or HTML. Minor CSS changes are included (e.g. size/font/colour changes).

  • Menu aditions, subtractions and revisions
  • Digital asset (photo, video, audio) upload and management
  • Page content management (addition, subtraction and modification)
  • WooCommerce product management (addition, subtraction and modifications)

FAQs

Can you do WordPress Maintenance on a site you don’t host?
Absolutely, we can perform our maintenance plans independently of what server the site is being hosted on.
How long will it take to get setup on your WordPress Maintenance Plan?
Typically we can get a site setup on our maintenance plan within 2–3 business days of joining.
What do we need to get started?

To manage all aspects of a WordPress website for our clients we need access to three things:

  1. Administrator-level access to your WordPress admin.
    You may either create us a new account or you can provide us with your admin account details and we will create our own admin user.
  2. Your website's cPanel or hosting information. If you don’t know it, let us know and we can help you hunt it down.
  3. Access to your domain zone file or the contact information for your IT team that does (only necessary for Support and Active Plans)

In general, people give us two things: their WordPress admin credentials and their hosting account admin credentials, and we are on our way!

We always create our own users for accessing different areas, so that we don't have conflicts with password resets and also so that it is easy to remove those users should our services no longer be needed.

Doesn't WordPress auto-update itself?

Yes, WordPress and some plugins do have auto-update functionality. In our experience, enabling this feature is a bad idea. There are two reasons for this:

  1. If auto-updates are enabled, you have no control over when these updates occur, and there is no opportunity to test these updates to make sure nothing has broken or changed.
  2. The most common reason for crashes and other disturbances on WordPress sites are due to plugin conflicts, either when two plugins are updated at the same time and there is some conflicting feature, or when one plugin is updated and “outscales” another plug-in that was required for its continued performance.

As such, updates should be done in a controlled manner, with proper backups in place.

Do the maintenance plans include SEO?

Our maintenance plans are focused on the maintenance of your website and in-depth SEO is outside the scope of a maintenance plan.That being said, we follow best practices to enhance the SEO of anything we do as part of your maintenance plan. Some examples are:

  • when we add images we add alt tags (alternative text for search engines and users relying on screen readers).
  • we make sure your website has a good quality SEO plugin in place (we use SEO by Yoast).
  • we make sure your site is able to be indexed by search engines.
  • we add an XML site map to help search engine spiders crawl your site.
  • we keep your site running smoothly.
Do you offer bulk discounts for managing more than one site?
If you have three or more sites we certainly do. Please email info@wearepixel.ca with your enquiry and we can start a conversation.
Can I change my plan to a different one, or switch from monthly to yearly?
Most certainly, just shoot us an email anytime during your billing cycle and we'll make the change.
What are the details around cancelling my subscription?
Cancelling a Maintenance Plan can be done either at the end of the year or month, depending on your subscription. There is no cancellation fee at any time.
Do you clean up hacked WordPress Sites?
Yes! If the site is already on our Maintenance Plan then we’ll clean up hacked sites, and if the site isn’t yet on our plan, then sign up for one and we’ll clean it up as part of the onboarding process.
Looking to whitelabel our maintenance?
Absolutely we can do this. See Agency Friendly page for more information
What is the full list of premium plugins available?
  • Admin Menu Editor - Cleans up the WordPress interface to make it easier for clients to interact with WordPress.
  • Advanced Custom Fields Pro - A Premium plugin used to manage and support custom fields
  • Updraft Plus - Manages and monitors backups.
  • Google Site Kit - Install and set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both if not already done). Allows admins to view Google Analytics from the WordPress Backend.
  • Gravity Forms Pro - The most powerful solution for building custom forms and flows to connect with your users and expand your reach.
  • FormTester 365 - Automated form tester allowing us to quickly easily test that forms on the site are still functioning as expected.
  • Simple History - Monitors client edits to the website, allowing us to trace and diagnose issues.
  • Wordfence - A security plugin which helps harden, secure and monitor the site for malicious activity.
  • WP Rocket (or an alternative) - A premium WordPress caching plugin that helps speed up and optimize page loading, giving sites a higher score on Google PageSpeed Insights.
  • Imagify (or an alternative) - Optimizes and resizes every image in any directory on the WordPress site. It will also compress images as they get uploaded to the uploads folder automatically. This will significantly speed up image-heavy sites.