ActionSkills CarePlan

Ongoing management and security for your website

WordPress websites need to be maintained and cared for.

Site performance and security is at its best when regularly monitored and updated, while negleteted sites have an increased the risk of being hacked.

Being on a plan means your site will continue to ‘just work’ and do what you need it to do, giving you more time to focus on updating the content.

The plans are a great move for the first 6-12 months of your site, and are ideal for busy or security conscious organisations ongoing.

It is cheaper to maintain a site than fix one, particularly if the site is hacked and has unreliable backups. Our care plans give you peace of mind that your backend tech will be automatically kept in check and maintained for you.

All CarePlans include:

  • Weekly software upgrades
  • Weekly visual inspection of homepage
  • Any upgrade issues fixed
  • Security management
  • Premium Plugins
  • Secondary manual backup system and third monthly automated backup system
  • Ongoing monitoring for any downtime
  • Continuous improvement & research for long term assurance

6-month option

$50

per month. ($300 in total). NFP rate.

 

12-month option

$40

per month. ($480 in total). NFP rate.

Pricing options

(no GST charged)

  • NFP – 12 months – $480 PA ($40PM)
  • NFP – 6 months – $300 PA ($50PM)
  • Commercial – 12 months – $660 PA ($55PM)
  • Commercial – 6 months – $420 PA ($70PM)
  • Second website is half price.

These plans are for existing ActionSkills clients and sponsored groups on our community hosting environment only. We may be able to support other Not-For-Profit or grassroots organisations however we will need to first login to review your setup to ensure it is in good shape (or if we can easily update it to be good practice).

We also offer grants and discounts for small campaigns in addition to free hosting services as part of our mission to support change. Care plans provided under a grant do not include monitoring or weekly home page inspection.

Please contact us to discuss.

More Details

Weekly software updates

We update your available WordPress software, plugins and themes every week and check for any issues on upgrade.

 

Technical issues

We manually review your home page and fix minor issues as part of this process we see on your homepage. If anything major affects the upgrade, we will roll back to a stable version and notify you to discuss options. We do not include major fixes in the base cost as this rarely happens and we would need to increase the costs substantially to cover potential costs. It is your responsibility to regularly check functionality such as email forms and e-commerce. We can provide this service at an extra cost (again we are keeping base costs low).

 

Backup system

We provide a secondary backup system and space for manual backups (in addition to your host’s backups). Your host should provide automated daily, weekly and monthly backups of your site.

Additionally we install a backup plugin to allow you take manual backups of your WordPress that you can download and also send to our online storage to keep safe. We can also do the technical configuration to your preferred location of choice. Google provides free stirage for NFP’s.

Additionally we provide a monthly backup on a third separate system.

 

Security management

We ensure your security protection is up to date in context to new and emerging threats.

 

Notifications

We add your site to our monitoring system that emails us if you site is down for longer than 5 minutes.

 

Premium Plugins

Your website build and work has come with use of a range of software licences meaning you don’t have to pay additional costs to use many of these plugins and functions because we hold commercial licences and we’ve added them to your site as part of the work, at no extra charge.

 

Our Care Plan setup process

  1. Configure our security lockdown
  2. Create a disaster management plan (optional)
  3. Setup secondary backup setup and data storage
  4. Implement speed optimisation – setup basic cache
  5. Add site to our software upgrade sytem (also provides monthly backups)
  6. Add site to our monitoring system

 

Long Term

We are continually improving our approach to WordPress and when we update our systems, we will apply these upgrades to your site.

Frequently Asked Questions

Feel free to contact us at anytime if you have any other questions.

Why would I need this?

It is more cost effective than hiring us by the hour and it is cheaper to maintain a site than fix one, particularly if the site is hacked and has unreliable backups.

Being on a plan means your site will continue to ‘just work’ and will do what you need it to do, giving you more time to focus on updating the content and other things in life. It gives you peace of mind that your backend tech will be automatically be kept in check and maintained by us for you.

Do I pay in advance for the 6 or 12 months?

Yes, you pay for either 6 or 12 months in advance. Contact us and we will send you an invoice. Payments aren’t taken out monthly because it creates extra accounting work for both of us. Billing it this way allows us to keep the prices of the plans down as well.

How does this actually help?

This helps by making sure your site is fast, secure, updated, upgraded and backed up. You will have a site that is up-to-date, performing at its best so it can continue to work as it should. It also prevents security and hacking risks and decreases the need to hire us ad hoc if something were to go wrong. It is easier, quicker and cheaper to do upkeep than to fix issues later.

What work do you do?

We first give your site a full audit, setting up your site for good practice maintenance and reconfigure all the settings so they don’t conflict with anything, then we undertake weekly and monthly maintenance work which includes looking out for any errors, alerts, issues and fixing small issues straight away so it doesn’t get any worse. We also carefully manage updates and upgrades, and undertake regular research for any vulnerabilities, or better ways of managing sites. 

Can I do it all myself instead?

Yes. If you would like to manage maintenance and performance yourself, we can train you to manage ongoing upgrades. If you need help with anything in the future you can hire us by the hour, as and when you need, at $100 an hour.

Is this for content edits like changing text?

No, this is for technical maintenance of your site such as backups, security and software updates. We can show you how to make changes to your text and images. E.g. you can make a change directly in the site in the same time, or quicker, than it would take you to write an email describing what you need. If we build you a site, we show you how to use it. We also offer content services that are charged seperately

Is this for hosting emergencies?

No because your host offers you a full support desk service for your hosting  should provide emergency support for hosting issues. All our work is done in standard business hours. We will prioritise emergencies, however we are not setup to provide emergency service. 

This is not an emergency support system. 

Lets get started...

The best way to work out where to start is to book a quick introductory meeting on Zoom, or you can get in touch via email. We can discuss your  needs and how we can help you.