Easy Web Things

Website Help and Tech Support

Need help with your website? Give us a call!

Website help available, right here in beautiful Aotearoa New Zealand. 

We offer support and maintenance plans for sites we build, but even if we didn’t build your site, we can still help you.

Running a website can be a fair bit of work, but don’t worry, we’re here! 

A website on the internet, is a bit like a ship at sea.  In that the internet is a treacherous, ever-changing environment.  And a website, needs to navigate these changes successfully.   Changes in hardware, browsers, server software, new devices, new security threats, search engine adjustments, there’s never a dull moment!

And if no one is captaining the ship (your website), you can find yourself at the bottom of the sea (metaphorically speaking). 

So let us successfully keep your website afloat. 

A website on the internet, is a bit like a ship at sea...

Managing your own WordPress site?

Here are 10 quick tips to keep your WordPress site working well and ‘safe at sea’;

  1. Regularly update your Plug-Ins and Theme 
  2. Regularly check your site on multiple devices to ensure it still displays correctly
  3. Regularly check interactive functions of your website
  4. Use a security plug-in such as Wordfence, and follow security recommendations
  5. Ensure you are using reputable Plug-Ins and Theme, that have regular updates released by the creators
  6. Ensure administrators use strong passwords and set up 2FA
  7. Use a reliable host with good support, who have options to upgrade your hosting if your traffic increases. 
  8. Keep regular backups of your site and data
  9. Use a staging site to test new plug-ins, or when adding other major site changes
  10. Be familiar with every Plug-In on your site, so you can get rid of any that you no longer need.

Do you need;

  • Regular Updates?
  • Something Fixed?
  • Lessons and Guidance?
Contact Us

Monthly WordPress Maintenance

A quick guide to doing your own monthly WordPress Maintenance:

If you do this each month, you can keep your WordPress website healthy.  And if it sounds a like bit too much work, get us to do it for you!

Note: If your customers will be affected by site maintenance, you should stick to a regular schedule and warn them of downtime in advance.  

  1. Create a fresh copy of your site as a staging site, so you can test the updates. 
  2. Update plug-ins and theme on your staging site.
  3. Open your production site in one tab, and your staging site in another. 
  4. Go through page by page and compare the current production version, to the updated staging version, to check for any changes or problems. 
  5. Check on different kinds of devices (such as mobile, tablet, different browsers etc.)
  6. Check any interactions or functionality, such as contact forms.
  7. When you are happy that everything is working correctly on the staging site, overwrite the production site from the staging site.*
  8. Check again on the production site that everything is working correctly.
  9. Review any messages and alerts from security plug-ins.
  10. If you encounter issues at any step that you don’t know how to fix, get help! 

*There are some cases where you shouldn’t overwrite production from staging:

  • Learning Management Systems, where students could lose progress
  • Social pages, where posts could be lost
  • Other dynamic websites where data could be lost

In these cases, instead of overwriting production from staging, instead, after testing, repeat the same updates you did on staging, on the production site.  

When doing maintenance on the live site, it is a good idea to time this for when your site is the least likely to be used by your customers.