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Before working with a WordPress support company it’s important to get all the details and the facts. Check out some of the questions to ask about ongoing WordPress support & maintenance services, to help pick the right company for you.
So, whether you’re starting a new website or looking to switch support providers, read on to learn more about the top 16 questions to ask about ongoing WordPress support.
As a business owner, maintaining a website can be a daunting task, especially if you’re not a tech-savvy person. WordPress support is essential to keep your website up-to-date, secure, and performing at its best. However, choosing the right WordPress support provider can be tricky. With so many options available, it’s essential to ask the right questions to ensure that you’re receiving the best ongoing support for your website.
We’ve compiled a list of the top 16 questions that you should ask a potential WordPress support provider. From pricing and turnaround time to security and backup plans, we’ll cover everything you need to know to make an informed decision.
What is covered in a WordPress maintenance package?
Here at Acclaim, we have three WordPress maintenance packages to choose from silver, gold, and platinum. Each of these includes the same maintenance tasks but they are done more or less often.
For example, if you choose our silver WordPress support package, maintenance services will be run once a month. Whereas the gold package you will have support hours biweekly and lastly with platinum, you will have weekly support for your site.
Some 👉 basic maintenance tasks 👈 included in these packages are:
- Core WordPress software updates
- Plugin updates
- Cyclical backups
- Boosting site security
- And email support
To these regular maintenance tasks, you also add small website edits and more.
FAQs to ask when hiring a WordPress Support Agency
Check out some of these frequently asked questions to ask before hiring a WordPress Support Agency.
What does the WordPress website Support process look like?
The WordPress site support process will look different for each company. You should ask what it looks like and if will it suits your needs. Also, you can ask whether this process can be customized to better suit your site.
So for example, here at Acclaim, our 👉 WordPress maintenance process 👈 can be broken down into 8 easy steps:
- You contact us & pick the plan that best suits your WordPress site.
- We onboard you to our maintenance services by giving you access to our communication and organization tools. This way you can chat with our developers, QA testers, and project managers. Moreover, you give us access to your site by providing us with passwords, FTPs, etc.
- Next, we analyze the health of your WordPress site. We check out security aspects, website performance, and optimization.
- Our WordPress developers will set up a staging site, testing environment, and a local environment to run support.
- Now our developers take the time to learn how your website was developed and how the code was written.
- Next, the web developer will build additional security measures for your website.
- Now our WordPress developers can finally run the first support for your site.
- After, the initial support services, we will run cyclical maintenance services based on the package you choose.
Obviously, once we get over that initial first-time support & maintenance service, this process will be much shorter. Not to mention that the service will most likely take less time.
Do you want to check the health of your website?
Do you provide me with a report after WordPress support has been run?
Another question you want to ask is whether you will receive a report about the support that was run. This can prove to be valuable later on if you have any questions or notice certain changes on your website.
Acclaim will provide you with a report after every cyclical WordPress support service. In this website care report, you will find information such as:
- the number of updates performed
- the WordPress version your site is currently on
- which plugins were updated
- overall site uptime
- speed & website performance
- security
- backups that were done and how many exist
And so much more. Check out an example of our 👉 WordPress website care report 👈.
Do you create a strategic master plan for WordPress websites?
You may also ask whether the company will create a strategic master plan for your WordPress site. As a business owner, you want a development team who will dive into your website and get to know it inside out. Moreover, you want someone to get to know what your business needs in terms of a website.
If you use a company like Acclaim, we create a strategic master plan. We want to give our customers an individualized approach in terms of what we can do for their website. And how these changes can also 👉 improve their business 👈. In our strategic master plan, we will present aspects of website development, security, optimization and so much more.
What areas of support do you specialize in?
Another important question to ask a potential WordPress support agency is what they specialize in. There may be certain aspects you want these services to focus on. For example, you have a WordPress site and you want the focus to be on website performance. Or perhaps you want the focus on search engine optimization. So you want to find a company that fits that need.
Here at Acclaim, some areas of focus for WordPress support include speed optimization and website performance as these are important in terms of user experience and Google ranking. Whereas, if you need 👉 WooCommerce support 👈 we will focus on speed and testing out checkout procedures. We can manually test out the payment process but we can also set up automation testing. This way you can set up how often you want your payment procedures to be tested with the intervention of a developer. Of course, a developer will check through the checkout process manually but an automatic test is also valuable.
What are your support hours?
This is a critical question to ask before not all companies offer 24/7 support services. Plus you want to know what optimal times to contact them for help. Or when you could expect work to be done on your site. Here at Acclaim, our support hours are from 9 am to 5 pm Poland CET. Our developers work from Monday to Friday.
Do you have a QA tester on your development team?
This is valuable to ask because the tester is in charge of searching for any errors or issues on your site. Then they report these issues to developers so they can be fixed before the website is returned back to you.
So ideally, once the website is returned to you, there are no more errors and everything is running smoothly as it should. This way when you check over your site, chances are you won’t have many bugs to report. Also, your users won’t get frustrated when trying to use something on your website that doesn’t work.
Is there a minimum contract length I have to agree to?
So each will company will approach contracts differently. Some will ask you to sign a contract for a minimum number of months, while others won’t. Here at Acclaim, there is no minimum contract agreement. But if you want to cancel our maintenance services you will need to provide us with a one-month notice period.
How much time will you allocate to my project?
The amount of time a developer will allocate toward your WordPress project will depend on what you previously agreed upon. So aside from the cyclical support that is run, you will also want to factor in website edits. These edits can take a few hours to several hours depending on the task.
So for example, if you use Acclaim WordPress support services, you can create as many tasks as you like. We don’t limit our customers. However, it’s critical that at the start of our cooperation, you let us know in advance how many hours you want for website edits. This way we can logistically make it work.
So for example you may decide that every month you want our developer to spend 30 hours on website edit tasks. We will allocate this time to spend on your project. But if you don’t notify us about this workload in advance, you may have to work a bit longer as we will have to play Tetris with our timetable. If you pre-order hours, you can be sure that things get done sooner rather than later.
What happens to the support hours I do not use?
So, if you don’t provide our Acclaim WordPress developers with enough work to fill the support hours you signed up for, they don’t carry over to the next month. You will simply lose those hours. Our team was ready to go and it’s not their fault that they weren’t given any work.
Will I have a project manager or one central contact point?
We will do you one better. Not only will you have one central point of contact such as a project manager. You will also have the ability to communicate with the development team that is working on your WordPress site. So you can ask your questions directly to developers and QA testers. They may be more equipped to explain technical information regarding your development project.
Can you interview our current or previous clients?
The answer to this question can also be very telling. If a company is reluctant to give you access to their customers, that may be a sign something is not right. You may want to consider a different company that is happy to connect you with a previous client. A previous client can give you much-needed insight into the WordPress maintenance and support process.
Do you have a written process checklist for WordPress support?
Many companies will have a written checklist for support services to ensure that the most important and standard aspects get done. Some will have more details in terms of specific categories. For example, there may be more tasks about speed optimization or website performance. Here at Acclaim, our developers have created a 👉 checklist for WordPress support 👈 that we can share with customers upon request. Moreover, we can adjust these checklists if there is a need for them.
Can you do a test on a small project?
Most companies will offer to run a test on a small project so that you can see how their support services work. During a trial project, you can ask for a detailed itemized list of features. Moreover, you can see the process and the length of time that it takes. After this is done you get a bigger picture, to see if it will fit your larger project. Here at Acclaim, we can also do a test on a small project to give you a better idea of what our services look like.
Once you run a small project you can also ask a third party to audit the code, this is will give you a better idea of the quality of work. Moreover, you will be able to verify that the code is stable and doesn’t have any holes. Or that there isn’t unnecessary code that just adds processing time. Lastly, the third-party company can also tell you does the code meet WordPress development standards.
Can we have a third-party audit of our code?
This is another question you want to ask any potential developer who will run support on your WordPress website. A third party can confirm the quality of the code written by the support agency. You want clean code that is up to the latest standards to avoid any website problems.
A company that has problems giving access to its code, is usually hiding something, and its code may not be the best quality. So this is definitely something you want to ask and even follow through with once support is run.
Do you specialize only in WordPress?
You probably want to pick a company that specializes in WordPress for your support service provider. Sometimes a company that specializes in everything isn’t really good at anything. Here at Acclaim, we specialize only in 👉 WordPress sites 👈 and we have developers who specialize in WordPress.
How do I get billed for support services?
This is another important aspect to cover with a website maintenance company. You don’t want to be surprised by the bill you receive at the end of the month. Make sure you understand what is included in a maintenance care plan and what is extra. Also, if you are paying a fixed price or perhaps time & material.
Here at Acclaim, we have 👉 3 support packages 👈 that are foundational costs plus on top of that we add time & material for website edits. You these additional hours you can order in advance, this way you know what you will pay in advance. Moreover, if you don’t want our development team to go over a certain amount of hours, won’t all you have to do is let us know.
What questions to ask WordPress Maintenance developers
Here are some questions to ask WordPress developers before maintenance services.
Do you use a staging site to run updates?
A good WordPress developer will run support of WordPress sites on a staging site. There are a couple of reasons for using a staging site. The first reason is to minimize downtime on your website. When 👉 using a staging site 👈 to run maintenance and support, your site is still active and usable for visitors. The second reason for using a staging site is to fix anything that may fall apart during support. Developers are able to quickly fix things on the staging site before moving it to production.
What do you do to improve the security of my site?
So each development company will have a different approach when it comes to boosting security for your WordPress site. Here at Acclaim, some key thing we do in terms of website security is to install a malware scanner that will run in the background. If it detects anything, we will receive a notification and remove any malware.
Another thing we can do is install a plugin like WordFence that provides your site with a firewall and much more. This is one of our trusted plugins and we use it on our sites to prevent hacking, viruses, and unwanted bots. Additionally, our developers can write code to help boost the security of your website.
How do you perform website backups?
Ideally, your hosting company should create backups for your WordPress website. But a WordPress development agency will also create a backup before running any support & maintenance services.
So if you choose weekly support, then developers will create a backup every week. If it’s biweekly, then you have backups done biweekly. And lastly, monthly support services, will create monthly backups of your site.
What do you consider essential WordPress plugins?
So for each website development, the essential plugins will vary depending on what functions you need. A good rule of thumb is to keep plugins to a minimum. The more plugins you install on your website, the greater the security risks.
Sometimes it’s better to ask a developer to write code that will provide you with the function that you are missing, as opposed to using a plugin. But if you really desire a plugin, you can also run it past our professionals or check out the list we created of 👉 must-have WordPress plugins 👈 for your website.
What do you do to make my WordPress site faster?
There are a number of things that we can do to make your WordPress website faster. The first thing that we do to optimize page speed is bundle CSS and JavaScript files. Moreover, we optimize images and other media files. For many websites, we install lazy loading. Lazy loading allows developers to choose the order in which things load on your site. So your website users will have something to work with but while scrolling other elements will pop up. So they won’t have a white screen but images may load 2 or 3 seconds after the text.
Some other things that we can do to improve WordPress site speed include:
- Database optimization
- Using a caching plugin
- reducing external HTTP requests
- using the website hosting provider
These are just some 👉 optimization solutions 👈 we implement to make your site faster.
Summary of what to ask about WordPress support services & WordPress developer
Let’s do a quick run-through of what to ask a WordPress support agency before you decide on cooperation. Some key questions include:
- What does the WordPress Support process look like?
- Do you provide me with a report after WordPress support has been run?
- Do you create a strategic master plan for WordPress websites?
- What areas of support do you specialize in?
- What are your support hours?
- Do you have a QA tester on your development team?
- Is there a minimum contract length I have to agree to?
- How much time will you allocate to my project?
- What happens to the support hours I do not use?
- Will I have a project manager or one central contact point?
- Can you interview our current or previous clients?
- Do you have a written process checklist for WordPress support?
- Can you do a test on a small project?
- Can we have a third-party audit of our code?
- Do you specialize only in WordPress?
- How do I get billed for support services?
You may also ask the WordPress developer some questions about website development and maintenance services. Some of these questions include:
- Do you use a staging site to run updates?
- What do you do to improve the security of my site?
- How do you perform website backups?
- What do you consider essential WordPress plugins?
- What do you do to make my WordPress site faster?
These can give you a better idea of the process, what the company focuses on, and do your needs align with what the company can provide you. Also, it can give a glimpse into the more technical aspect as well.
Do you want to learn more about our WordPress support services and how to pick the right one for you? 👉 Drop us a line 👈 and let’s have a free no obligation chat.
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