Site maintenance
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My wife had her WordPress website built around a year ago and it has been hosted by the same company since. It has cost a lot of money for the seo hosting maintenance etc and she would now like a maintence only contract. Any suggestions appreciated as to a reliable and experienced person/ persons?
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Hi there,
It sounds like your wife has a self-hosted site. To make any changes to the hosting plan for that site you’ll need to contact the hosting provider on whose servers that site is installed. We’re only able to help with sites hosted on WordPress.com’s servers in this forum.
If you are looking for a directory of WordPress professionals you can see here:
If you’re interested in perhaps moving the site to WordPress.com, you can see these links:
Coming from a self-hosted WordPress site?
Moving from a Self-Hosted WordPress to WordPress.com
Note that hosting and software maintenance is completely free on WordPress.com, and SEO comes standard on all sites. You only need a paid upgrade if you wish to have a custom domain connected to your site.
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Aloha howarthrob, I would recommend taking a look at the differences between WordPress.com and the self-hosted WordPress.org to see which one would work best for you.
https://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/If you think WordPress.com is a good fit, you can take a look at the different plans available:
https://wordpress.com/pricing/If you think a self-hosted site would be better, I would recommend checking on http://jobs.wordpress.net/ for somebody offering maintenance services.
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Thanks to you both for your prompt and informative responses. I will discuss these options with my wife. We were apprehensive about managing and maintaining the site ourselves anxieties around the site getting blocked or crashing. She’s getting good traffic to the site now and didn’t want to risk losing business. However since registering with WordPress I’ve seen there is a lot of support available, via these forums tutorials etc. I started a separate topic on access to live chat as this would also be very helpful.
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We were apprehensive about managing and maintaining the site ourselves anxieties around the site getting blocked or crashing
The chances of the site crashing here are very slim, and we would only block it if it violates our terms of service which you can find linked at the bottom of the forums. Do keep in mind that we don’t offer plugins or custom themes, so you’ll only be able to migrate your site’s content to us, not the site in its entirety.
She’s getting good traffic to the site now and didn’t want to risk losing business.
Any change in hosting or in domain will cause a drop in search engine traffic as search engines re-index your site. However, if you connect the existing domain to us the impact should be minimal, though.
I started a separate topic on access to live chat as this would also be very helpful.
I’ve just replied in that thread as well, but I’ll repeat here that live chat support is available only for users on one of our upgrade plans. For free users you can get help here in the forums, and then there is also direct email support.
Before making any decisions, I suggest you set up a free WordPress.com site and play around with it a bit. That way you can get to know the interface and the tools we have available, and get a better idea if it will work for you.
You can create a new free site at this link:
https://wordpress.com/start/site/
And you can find a detailed tutorial on how everything works here:
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I’ve followed the links suggested and read further information and we are a self hosted site. The company are U.K based and they moved us from Presta shop around 9 months ago, they arranged the server too. Ours is primarily an ecommerce site and as such it appears a self-hosted site would best suit our needs. We feel a bit stuck though as the company we use are expensive and we have asked about a low cost maintenance contract but they are not keen on this type of contract. We don’t feel confident managing the site ourselves. It’s difficult to know how effective the hosting company are and what they are actually doing for the payment. I visited the jobs site but it appears to be a site to find jobs in the industry. Are you suggesting I post an advert for someone to do the maintenance on our site?
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Ours is primarily an ecommerce site and as such it appears a self-hosted site would best suit our needs
To use an ecommerce plugin you need the open source version of WordPress, yes, not the version we use on WordPress.com.
We feel a bit stuck though as the company we use are expensive and we have asked about a low cost maintenance contract but they are not keen on this type of contract.
We need to distinguish here between hosting and web developers. Hosting is something you need. That refers to having space on a hosting provider’s servers so your site is online. Most hosting providers don’t provide support for WordPress itself, though some have hosting plans that do include it. With hosting it’s very much a case of you get what you pay for – support tend to come in more expensive hosting plans.
One hosting provider that we recommend, who does provide support for the software itself and who takes care of stuff like backups and software upgrades for you, is Pressable. You can find more information on them here:
However, ultimately the purpose of WordPress is to ultimately give you a tool where you can make and maintain your own website without having to know how to code, so most hosts have only limited support.
That’s where developers come in. There are people who make their living, either as freelancers or as part of a company, to build and maintain WordPress sites for others, and it sounds like that’s what you have. If you want help from a developer to maintain your site, you are still going to have to pay for that even if you move your site to a different hosting platform. We do have a directory of WordPress developers at https://jetpack.pro/ in case you want to look for someone different than you have now.
I’m also sending you an email with some additional information. You’re welcome to reply there if you have any more questions.
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