Website Integrity

Keeping websites fully functional

Why Website Integrity?

Website availability is something most of our clients want. The expectation is for the website to cause positive branding, increased reach to their target audience, and more revenue. The Website Integrity Offering protects the website at a foundational level so that real business objectives can be met long term.

Maintaining your website visitors’ experience – Your investment is protected by securing and maintaining your website. Websites and technology are fluid and degrade slowly, so website maintenance and security services are required to continue to win.

Focus on your business – Take care of your business without worrying about your website.

Protect your brand – Your target audience will see your site looking great. Protect yourself from the bad branding of a broken or hacked site.

Have your time back – We implement processes to manage website users and essential technology connected to the site.

Website Availability

Website availability is measured and documented to assure you that everything is available to your customers. Availability is confirmed before website changes are pushed to production, assuring you that bugs aren’t inhibiting your customers’ experience.

Brand well-being

Your organization continues to look great and have a positive reputation. Brand value is protected. To read more check out this article about good branding and how it connects with website maintenance.

Flow

Rest assured knowing that customer exchanges are flowing through your website unhindered.

Decision-making

Know your website’s uptime, search rankings, and general performance. This drives predictive sales, management of marketing, and proactive business decisions.

Nimble Marketing

Be free to make swift marketing changes as a result of scheduled website maintenance. No more outdated software bottlenecks.

Click here for a deeper dive into business reasons for website maintenance.

How often does a website need maintenance?

Websites need regular software updates, monitoring, and other technical services to maintain integrity and positive branding. Frequency of website maintenance required depends on each website's needs. To learn more check out our blog post on the topic: How often does a website need maintenance?

Focus on your business – Take care of your business without worrying about your website.

Protect your brand – Your target audience will see your site looking great. Protect yourself from the bad branding of a broken or hacked site.

Have your time back – We implement processes to manage website users and essential technology connected to the site.

Why does a website need software updates?

Most websites are a combination of third-party software that is all combined to make the final website. Because software developers make their product adapt and change over time to address different issues or roll out new features, there is a necessity for software updates. Software updates are new versions of a piece of software. If the software updates are not applied then there is the potential for unwanted results on the website that affect business.

Focus on your business – Take care of your business without worrying about your website.

Protect your brand – Your target audience will see your site looking great. Protect yourself from the bad branding of a broken or hacked site.

Have your time back – We implement processes to manage website users and essential technology connected to the site.

Common approaches to managing website software updates

We've noticed some common approaches to managing website maintenance and common results to each approach. As you can see in the diagram below, there are four common approaches to managing website software updates. The usual results are the website being hacked or having parts of the website design be broken or unavailable.

Focus on your business – Take care of your business without worrying about your website.

Protect your brand – Your target audience will see your site looking great. Protect yourself from the bad branding of a broken or hacked site.

Have your time back – We implement processes to manage website users and essential technology connected to the site.

common approaches to managed website software updates and painpoints

VS.

Our approach to managing website software updates

To have desired results the website integrity offering has four different areas of management. These different areas ensure that the website is protected and fully functional.

Our Approach to Website Maintenance and the Results

Wordpress website maintenance

Wordpress is the leading Content Management System on the web today, and it is also the most highly targeted website creation platform by hackers. Due to the fact that Wordpress is open-source, anyone can have access to the source code, which means lots of exploit attempts over the years. However, Wordpress is also increasingly becoming more secure as a trial by fire.

Due to the nature of open-source platforms like Wordpress, security patches are released regularly by the myriad of developers across the network. In order for a website to remain secure, the number one most important step is to have regular website software updates.

Website Maintenance Packages

What's included:

Basic Care

Advanced Care

Updates

Update Wordpress core, plugins and themes

PHP updates

Management

SSL renewals

Domain name renewals

Software license renewals

DNS Management

Platform

Wordpress

Wordpress + Woocommerce

Backups

Backups on the webserver

Backups on Google Drive (cloud)

Local backups

Git Revision History

Backup WooCommerce customers, coupons and orders

Security

Uptime monitoring

Malware scan

Activity log

Website hardening

Firewall

Webhosting | Server Stack

Linux

Apache / Nginx / Litespeed

MySQL / MariaDB

PHP

Reports

Client portal - reporting

Notification emails

EIG (Environment Information Gauging)

Performance

Pagespeed optimization

CDN (Content Distribution Network)

Restoration

Standing up backups

Hack removal

Emergency Restoration

Who it's for

Small businesses, professional bloggers, influencers

E-com stores, bigger brands

Have questions?

For discussion of your purpose click below.

Updates

It depends on your site.
We update monthly for smaller, lower priority sites while we update bi-weekly or weekly for higher priority sites.
Wordpress Core has a new version released once every 43 days on average, while plugins and themes are updated independently of Wordpress and each other.

A website is a piece of software, and there is no perfect, completely impenetrable and secure piece of software. The code behind websites like Wordpress is constantly being improved--security threats are being identified and patches are released. If these patches aren't applied then the website is vulnerable to attackers.
Only about 30% of all Wordpress sites are running the current, up to date version of Wordpress as of January 26th, 2021.

We manage renewing all of your other related technology that connects with your website. This includes domain name renewals, third party software renewals, SSL renewals.
This is a concierge-style service. You can hand over the keys to us and we’ll make sure to get the oil changed, tires rotated, and even get the tag updated every year for you. Don’t worry about if you paid the renewal for your domain name. See this blog post about what happens when a domain name isn’t renewed.

We don’t do automatic updates, that’s because automatic updates can mean that your site is partially or totally broken after an automatic update while you have no idea. Instead of automatic updates, we make them manually by hand with extensive testing involved.
We believe touching your site is important, which is part of our TLC model. Touching aka manual testing of your website by a trained specialist is part of the reason we are more expensive than some others. We have found that quality increases with manual testing.

Platforms

These two platforms are what a vast amount of websites are built upon, and so they also have a great need for security and maintenance.
We are comfortable with these two platforms, and don’t want to extend beyond our focus and expertise.
We also develop and design websites and most all the time we use Wordpress or Wordpress + Woocommerce. We found that these are great platforms for storytelling because of their incredible flexibility and customizability.

Backups

This gives us redundancy and flexibility. In case of file upload failure, malicious script injection, two copies of the site not being consistent for any reason, etc., we can roll back to previous versions and pinpoint when issues were introduced.
We use the testing-staging instance of the site to determine if all updates are good to go to the live production site. We may stand up different backups to test for particular issues while in the testing-staging environment.
For more expensive plans the diversity of backup locations, quantity of backups and frequency of backups only increases, giving us more flexibility to track down bugs, protect against malicious behavior, and just be generally in a better position as your managed services provider when facing a worse-case scenario.

Think of it like save-states in a video game. You can pause and save the state of your website easily and reload the site at previous save-states easily. Git does basically the same thing that we do with backups, but it is a much faster and more nimble approach to handling differences between software versions.
Think of your website as version 1.0 when it launches, then over the course of each software update it’s version number increments to 1.1 and then to 1.2. Git helps us organize those versions and easily switch between them when necessary.

Yes, your website is software, and software is not a fixed, set-in-stone type of thing. It’s not like a brick building. It’s like a mud hut that constantly needs maintenance so that it doesn’t turn into a pile of mud.
As much as the popular perception about websites and other software is that it is some sci-fi, perfect, serene solution, it’s not. Software is made by human beings solving logical problems that are constantly growing and developing. Likewise, software that is being updated is becoming something new on the inside while it may look the same on the outside.
All of that to say, backups of different versions over the years can be very helpful, because the site is like a living breathing thing that is constantly growing and changing with each set of updates, and each set of changes needs to be backed up. Depending on your plan, we will determine how far back in time to retain legacy backups of the stie.

Security

Logging keeps track of what has been changed on your site. We can review the logs to see if there’s any signs of malicious behavior. When a site doesn’t have logging it’s like flying a plane blindfolded--from a security perspective.
Logging helps us identify a data breach sooner. The average time for software breaches to be identified is over 200 days.
According to the Open Web Application Security Project insufficient logging and monitoring is the bedrock of nearly every security incident.

Webhosting

Reports

Performance

First off, it depends on the goals of your website. One of our representatives can have a conversation with you about your options--how your target audience and brand are affected by the path you choose.
When a site is optimized for speed, it gets to a point where speed optimization returns are less and less. Usually the biggest gains are made in the 1st 3 months.
While part of speed optimization is tool-based and therefore requires a recurring cost, the other part is service based and requires a fixed non-recurring cost. The service work can be spread out over months or all be done at once.
So, there is a recurring cost for performance to be maintained after the initial service work has been done.

Restoration

What's not included

These services are not included in a maintenance package and will be considered an additional cost as a start-stop project (if you would like to purchase development / design / content hours in bulk on a monthly recurring basis please let us know and we can build it into your plan):
- Web Development
  - This means customizing the site's code, not just updating and securing it. An example of this would be changing the size or color of text on the website.
- Content
  - This means writing copy or producing content or even choosing stock images or videos for your website.
- Graphic design / web design
  - This means editing photos, creating graphics or any other type of visual media for the site.

Have questions?

We'd love to talk with you.

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