Website Care Plan – Help FAQs

Please leave the updating to us. Website maintenance is an integral part of updating and keeping your site working properly. At Centner Consulting we take great care to first backup the website, check the website, update, then check the website again for any changes. Our software keeps a record of plugins we update so if there is ever an issue we see what plugin version was changed and revert back.

If you just update from your WordPress admin, Centner Consulting wouldn’t have that record. We update client’s site once a month so we can take the time to devote to checking your website thoroughly (either the 15th or the 30^th). Also included on our monthly maintenance report are the performance and security scans. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket and we address it before you. We also take care about which plugins we are updating and single out large updates (like WooCommerce) as its own task for additional quality control.

If your website is not loading, first check to make sure this is the same experience for everyone at DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.

If the website is down just for you, try clearing your browser history (cache and cookies) and reload, also checking your internet connection. If the website is down for everyone, shoot us a support ticket email, even though chances are that our website uptime monitor has already alerted us.

If this happens outside office hours, call the web host directly and see what they can do to get the website back online. Chances are most likely it’s related to the following issues:

1. Your web hosting, domain or SSL certificate has expired and bill is due for payment.
2. The web hosting is experiencing maintenance issues.

Anything outside of those we will investigate to bring the site back online.

If you received an email about your website files being compromised, make sure it is legit by calling your web hosting company and forwarding the email to our support team.

Our next steps, as webmaster, is to reach out to your webhost about their protocol for a compromised website and a scan on their end to confirm where the compromised files are on the server. Under your website care we will restore a clean backup of WordPress, and then take note from the webhost about where the issue arose if outside of WordPress. This may mean the webhost recommending a third-party service to clean up the compromised files or additional security.

The best way to prevent a compromised website is to keep WordPress and plugins up-to-date, which we do for you monthly under website care, as well as keep daily backups to restore in the event of an issue. Unfortunately just updating won’t prevent a hack 100% which is why we help work with the web host and third parties to restore your website on the event of a hack and institute security measures to prevent most known methods by hackers.

Common causes of a slow website are unoptimized images and external embedded media and ads.

Full-sized images can consume a lot of bandwidth while loading. So, take time to resize your images. Take a look at the image tag – it allows you to set the height and width. Be sure to scale the photos proportionally so that they don’t get stretched or skewed. Then, consider changing image format, which can significantly reduce the file size. Finally, reduce image quality. No, that doesn’t mean making your photos look bad. It just means tweaking some simple settings. For JPG images, this is done by directly reducing the quality. In most cases, a quality setting of 80 to 90 percent will show no significant changes from the original version. And you can go even lower depending on the type of image, the detail, and the colors. For other image formats such as GIF and PNG, you can reduce quality by opting for a smaller color palette.

For external embedded media, think twice before embedding someone else’s media into your site. Once you embed external material into your site, your pages will only run as fast as the host site. In other words, if that external site is having a particularly slow day, your site may run slowly too. Don’t let another site drag yours down! Whenever possible, it’s smart to host all content on your own server.

Plugins may also be causing an issues, as just like external embedded media, plugins can bring in resources from other websites. We can perform some investigative work to see what plugins could be causing this outside of the typical monthly website care. Reach out for a quote for evaluation and plugin cleanup.