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RelyWP is a team of WordPress experts 100% based in the UK, and we love what we do! We don’t just look after your website, we care about the success and growth of your business.
We will manage and maintain your website every day, saving you time and resources so you can focus on what you do best, running your business. It’s almost like having your very own in-house development team, at a fraction of the cost & time!
Founded by Elliot Sowersby, RelyWP and its team is backed by over 8 years of WordPress experience. By choosing us, you can be confident that your website is in the secure hands of qualified experts.
Our new support tool also gives you an incredibly easy way to securely submit support your tasks and questions to us, directly on your website. This takes literally a few seconds to submit your changes, instead of a few minutes compared to using clunky email communication. See our demo video here.
You don’t just have to take our word for it. RelyWP manages the websites of small and large business are around the world. Take a look at our reviews section to see what a few of our existing clients say about us!
What do “maintenance tasks” cover?
Maintenance tasks cover a variety of services, including content and image changes on any page / post / product / header / footer, plugin setup and installation, changing plugin settings, small theme design & css tweaks, small code changes & fixes, adding a new simple page (or copy of existing page template), formatting a page, general optimisations and more! Essentially, any small WordPress task that would fit within about 30 minutes per task is usually acceptable.
Maintenance tasks do not cover graphics design work, advanced SEO work (unless on the Growth plan), advanced theme design customisations, custom coding of new functionality (plugins, themes etc), PSD to WordPress, or anything that leads to design and/or development of a new website.
What if I require more advanced tasks?
If you require more advanced support or development work, for anything that’s not covered by maintenance tasks, you can purchase additional development hours at your hourly rate of £60 + VAT per hour.
Do you support custom sites?
The “Enterprise” care plan offers support for advanced custom websites, which includes working with custom code (themes/plugins) via the “maintenance tasks” for small changes and fixes.
How many tasks can I submit at once?
Although you can submit as many tasks as you wish at once via our support tool, you will have a single developer that will work on them, one task at a time in order of submission. We will usually be able to complete anywhere around 1 – 2 tasks per business day, per website (depending on the size of the tasks). We may be able to complete more than this if they are just quick edits.
What are your business hours?
Click here to view our business hours.
Task Examples
Here are a few examples of allowed maintenance tasks:
Task Example 1
– Included: You want us to setup/create a new post or page for your website, copying one of your existing page templates (or a simple text page), and editing the text and images. You will provide the content and images ready to be imported into WordPress, with full instructions.
– Not Included: You want us to create and design a brand new page for you, choose your images, and write the content of the pages, without any instructions.
Task Example 2
– Included: You want us to edit the content of an existing post or page, or add a new section to the page using an existing page element.
– Not Included: You want us to create new content for your pages or posts.
Task Example 3
– Included: You want us to add a new product to your WooCommerce store, with your existing products template, in which you will provide all the content and images, with clear instructions.
– Not Included: You want us to create a brand new product page template design, or brand new checkout process design for your WooCommerce store.
Task Example 4
– Included: You want us to install an existing WordPress plugin on your website, and configure its settings, to use its existing functionality. If it’s a premium plugin, you will provide the valid licence for the plugin.
– Not Included: You want us to develop a custom plugin or advanced functionality for your website, which isn’t available via an existing plugin. (This can be done via development hours.)
Task Example 5
– Included: You want us to make some small theme css changes to your website, to improve the look of your existing site, such as changing colors, buttons, fonts, borders, spacing etc.
– Not Included: You want us to develop a brand new theme for your website, or make larger theme adjustments such as creating a completely new header design.
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If a task is not covered by “maintenance tasks”, we may be able to complete it via additional development hours.
Our response & completion times can vary depending on the time and day your support ticket is submitted.
During our business hours, our response time to tickets is usually within 1 business hour to alert you that we are looking into your request. Most small tasks will be completed within a 8 business hours, but usually much faster (within 1-3 hours), especially if it is a priority/urgent task.
Although you can submit as many tasks as you wish, you will have a single developer that will work on them one at a time.
It may take a little longer (1-3 business days) for us to complete more complicated tasks/changes, or if you send us multiple requests at once. In most cases, we can complete anywhere between to 1-3 tasks per day, per website.
Our enterprise plan (and higher) includes “priority support” and usually sees most single-request tickets completed within a few business hours, or the same day (if sent within our business hours), but may be longer in some cases, depending on the size of the task.
These times are estimates and are based on a single task/request. Several tasks will be broken up as multiple tickets, and therefore may have a slightly increased completion time. We will let you know if a task may take longer than usual.
If you have an urgent update/change for your website, you can set your task status as urgent, and we’ll try to complete it a little faster for you.
What are your business hours?
Our normal business hours are Monday to Friday, 9:30am to 5:30pm (UK) for development and non-urgent support. This is when you can expect the fastest response times and live chat support to be available.
We are available for custom site maintenance, tasks, changes & development support during our business hours.
However, we may also be available outside our “normal” support hours (and weekends) for general support and queries submitted via our support system or email, although you could expect slightly slower response times in some cases. You may email us or send us a message via the support system any time, and we’ll reply as soon as possible.
Customers on the Enterprise can expect priority support, and faster response time.
Emergency support is available 24/7 for urgent hosting issues, such as your website going down. Submitting an “emergency support ticket” via our client area will alert our hosting 24/7 emergency support team, so they can take a look into your issue as soon as possible.
When you have signed up for your chosen maintenance plan, you will be able to instantly access your customer dashboard. Here, you can fill out our simple “add a site” form, where you can securely submit all the details we require in order to get our services setup for your website, and migrated over to our hosting (if applicable).
We will ask you for your website admin login information (username/password), and your existing hosting login details. We will suggest the best ways to securely share this info, such as via LastPass.com (never send anyone login details via a direct email – this is not secure).
The process of setting up your plan and migrating your website may take around 1 business day and is included FREE as part of your plan.
Once your plan is setup, it may take around 1 – 2 additional business days for us to fully complete the first set of “site optimisations”, as this takes extra care to make sure it is done right, and is often unique for every website.
If you have any further questions in regards to the setup process, please get in touch!
Certainly! Each plan covers one individual website & domain, so you will need a plan for each site that would like us to manage.
However you may add extra sites to a bulk plan, and receive some great discounts! Get 10% off for 2+ sites. You are also more than welcome to mix and match, and create different plans for different websites.
Multiple websites as subdomains still count as a separate website.
Certainly! You may cancel your plan, or upgrade/downgrade at any time with no additional or hidden costs.
Yes, in the unlikely case malware is detected via our scans, or your site is hacked, it will be removed for you completely free. Our expert dedicated team will scan your site, and detect what is causing your security issues (such as plugins or themes) and fix this for you.
Sucuri scanning is also included with all sites we are hosting, and will be used in cases where potential malware is detected by our hosting security scans.
Yes, you can resell our services 100% white label, with bulk discounts. For more details visit: https://relywp.com/partner
If you’re looking for an affiliate option see: https://relywp.com/affiliate
Definitely! The Professional, Enterprise and Growth plans fully support websites with WooCommerce (or other eCommerce plugins) and other advanced functionality.
If you are running an eCommerce site, or other advanced functionality, extra attention to detail needs to be take to make sure you site is always running at the best possible performance. We will perform major site changes on a staging version of your site, so any potential issues/bugs can be fixed, before the changes are pushed to your live site.
If your website uses WooCommerce, we will also include a summary of your eCommerce site statistics and sales for the previous week, in your weekly site report.
Before you jump in, though, it’s important to ensure that you’re handling credit card data in a safe way. No matter where you host your website, credit card data should never be passing through your website, meaning credit card data (including card numbers, expiration dates, CVVs, etc.) should never touch your server, your database, your javascript, or other portions of your site’s code.
The best way to handle credit card data on a site is to use a third-party payment processor. Most eCommerce platforms support third-party processors by default, including WordPress platforms. By handling credit card data this way, you can avoid dealing with a complicated set of security policies called PCI-DSS.
There are plenty of third-party processors to choose from. A few of these processors include: Authorize.NET, Stripe, and PayPal. RelyWP has also worked with nearly every WordPress eCommerce product. These eCommerce solutions tie into the third-party processors mentioned above for managing your products, shopping carts, and checkout process. Some of these eCommerce platforms include: WooCommerce and MarketPress. However, WooCommerce is by far the most popular choice.
You will also want an SSL certificate, which we provide one for free with all plans!
If you need help setting up an eCommerce website, or third-party payment processor, get in touch.
Our plans include dedicated maintenance tasks available for “maintenance & changes” which may be used every month for a variety of changes and edits on your site.
We believe that website maintenance is an ongoing process to ensure your site is always optimised & secure. We want to be your long term partner, to help you move forward & grow your business. With website security, speed & SEO, “one-time” changes are usually not very effective. It is important to continuously maintain and manage your website to always keep it fast, optimised & secure.
However, if needed, you can purchase one-time tasks at £35 per task, or extra development hours for £60 per hour.
See here for more details: https://relywp.com/pricing/#planextras
If required, we also provide full custom website design and development services via our parent company. Get in touch for more details.
If for any reason you wish to terminate your Plan, you can do so on written notice to us at help@relywp.com and we shall refund to you any Fees paid and cancel your plan, provided that such notice is received within 14 days of the date of your first payment. Otherwise, if you cancel you plan after 14 days of signup, no refunds will be provided.
Refunds are not available for our “Growth” WordPress care plan, and “One-Off Tasks” or “Development Hours” services.
Additionally, refunds are not available if we do an emergency malware or hack removal for your website.
If you would like to host your website yourself, then our built in ‘security features’ included with the hosting service are not available. We will however still run our standard weekly security scans on your site to check for malware.
We would still fully manage and help take care of & improve your site security. To do so, we would instead install the premium ‘WP Defender’ security plugin on your website. WP Defender includes regular security scans, vulnerability reports, audit logs, 2-factor authentication, safety recommendations, blacklist monitoring, IP lockout device, simple security tweaks, core, plugin and theme code checker and login masking.
Malware removal, if detected, may be at an additional charge if you are self-hosting your website – depending on the complexity of the issue. We can however first use your available maintenance if available.
Yes! If your company is a registered non-profit or charity, we will offer a recurring 20% discount on all of our plans.
Please email help@relywp.com with your organisation details, registration certification, and preferred plan, then we’ll get back to you.
There are no fixed contracts, and you are never locked in. All plans are either month-to-month or annual, and can be canceled at any time without any cancellation fees. If you cancel, you’ll be able to safely recover your files and database.
If for any reason you wish to terminate your Plan, you can do so on written notice to us at help@relywp.com and we shall refund to you any Fees paid and cancel your plan, provided that such notice is received within 14 days of the date of your first payment. Otherwise, if you cancel you plan after 14 days of signup, no refunds will be provided.
Yes, the backups come with fantastic security. Backups run every night, are stored for alteast 30 days, and can be restored at any time (upon request).
If your data isn’t stored offsite, you’re still at risk if anything were to happen to those files. All backups we create are stored in the Amazon S3 cloud for maximum security and reliability. This way they’re physically separate from your site, and you can retrieve whatever you need at any point.
Yes, all websites on your managed hosting plan include a free Let’s Encrypt Simple SSL; a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit to provide SSL certificates. You can request the installation of your free Simple SSL certificate for free with no extra costs.
Yes, you can use your own SSL certificate, instead of the free Simple SSL we provide. This will be installed and setup for free.
We install a number of invisible “must-use” plugins on each site hosted. These plugins do various things to help protect your site and optimize it to work correctly with the servers. “Must-use” plugins are always enabled, and cannot be removed. For more information about “must-use” plugins, see the official WordPress documentation.
Currently we install the following plugins:
Main: The main plugin installs the other MU-plugins, and does various things like installing the admin help menu, and disabling various WordPress features incompatible with Limit.
Login Attempts: Limit Login Attempts blocks an Internet address from making further attempts after a specified limit on retries is reached, making a brute-force attack difficult or impossible.
Disable Core Updates: Completely disables the core update checking system in WordPress. The plugin prevents WordPress from checking for updates, and prevents any notifications from being displayed in the admin area.
Nginx Compatibility: Configures WordPress to be compatible with the webserver – Nginx.
Additional “RelyWP Maintenance” and “ManageWP” plugins may also be installed on your website to provide maintenance services.
The servers meet PCI-DSS requirements for sites that don’t process, handle, or store credit card data. That means, as long you’re using a third-party processor to handle credit card data, your site will meet PCI-DSS requirements.
Questions come up about PCI-DSS compliance a lot, and there’s a lot of confusion about what PCI-DSS means. It’s impossible for any web hosting company, including our provider, to be PCI-compliant. Becoming fully PCI-compliant requires that you provide information about things like: how you control access to your site, who can access your codebase, how you store data on the server, how your site’s data is transferred, and more. As your web host, we don’t have control over most of those things, and therefore can’t be PCI-compliant.
The best way to handle credit card data and remain PCI-compliant is by using a third-party processor.
We define a visit as: A unique IP address in 24-hour period.
Essentially, we count the number of unique IP addresses that visit a site in a given day. This is the number of visits for that day. We then add up all the daily values for the entire month, and that’s how we arrive at the number of visits for your site.
Note
Before we do this, we do our best to remove IP addresses from known bots, spammers, and attackers. You shouldn’t have to pay just because some bad people are trying to attack your site or because search engines are crawling it.
We feel that this is the most fair and transparent way to measure traffic. There are a bunch of ways to do it, but each have their limitations. We feel it’s important to be clear about how we measure usage, and not use ambiguous terms.
How many pageviews does this equate to?
Because we only count each visit, it means that there’s no difference between someone who visits your site and views one page, or someone that views a hundred. Both cases count as “one visit”. So, the number of pageviews could be many times the number of visits, depending on how many pages your site visitors view each time they visit your site.
Why not measure using pageviews, visitors, or some other metric?
Like we mentioned, there are a ton of ways to measure traffic. Some hosting companies use pageviews, some use visitors, and some just make things up. Visits is an easy metric for us to measure on the server side, without having to inject any code into your site, which could potentially slow it down.
What about Google Analytics? Which metric should I look at there?
We generally tell people to look at the “sessions” category in Google Analytics to get a rough view of how many visits your site gets in a given month on our system. While these two things aren’t entirely equal (one’s calculated on the client-side with javascript, and ours is calculated server-side), it can be a good approximation of your historical traffic for the purposes of selecting a RelyWP plan.
Can I view a report of my usage?
Currently, if you’d like to know your exact visits and storage usage, you may contact us.
Wait—my visitor count doesn’t match Google’s. Why is that?
There are several reasons for this, but the short answer is: in many ways, we’re counting different things, using different methods.
We both have our specific algorithms, and we’re both doing the best we can to be as accurate as possible, but we may filter (or more likely, notice) things Google doesn’t, and vice versa.
It isn’t that one is right and one is wrong, necessarily; we just have two different methods. We’re always improving our stats counting, and we don’t charge for overages, so even if there is a substantial difference in the numbers, it won’t reflect on your invoice.
To get more technical: a big reason for the disparity is that Google uses JavaScript-based tracking. That means that Google counts page loads in a JavaScript-enabled browser. Google may not track a visit if the whole page (or at least enough of it to get to the analytics script) doesn’t load, if JavaScript is disabled, or if the request is not loading in a browser window.
By contrast, since we use IP-based tracking and monitor all incoming traffic without relying on JavaScript, we catch things that Google won’t.
For example: let’s say you host a podcast on your website. If podcast apps are “pinging” your site to download episodes or to get the cover art for your podcasts, that won’t be counted on your Google visits. But it will on ours, since it’s a unique IP address coming to the site and requesting data and/or files.
Another example: if you link to your site’s logo in your email address signature, every time somebody opens one of your emails, their email client will send a request to your site’s server to retrieve that logo from the site. Google won’t be capable of noticing or counting that visit, but our servers will see the activity and record it.
The same thing could apply with any files linked from other sites, feeds that pull in data from your site, and other kinds of connections from third parties or external services.
In this way, we’re sometimes counting things pretty differently than Google is. If we were to filter all those types of requests, we would get closer to Google’s method, and our count might be more reflective of visitors in a certain specific way. But we also might also be hiding lots of actual requests and very real traffic to your site—all of which matters and can potentially affect performance and bandwidth—and so we choose to display the IP-based number instead, as we feel it’s a more accurate reflection of everything that’s going on with the site.
Again, we don’t charge for overages, so if you feel this number isn’t consistent with your preferred tracking method, you’re free to go by another tracking service’s count, knowing your invoice won’t reflect the difference.
As always, if you have any questions pertaining to visits or how we calculate them, don’t hesitate to contact support!
Source: Flywheel
Standard Plan
Visits: Up to 35k per month
Storage: Up to 5GB
Bandwidth: Up to 50GB per month
Professional Plan
Visits: Up to 50k per month
Storage: Up to 10GB
Bandwidth: Up to 100GB per month
Enterprise Plan
Visits: Up to 100k per month
Storage: Up to 15GB
Bandwidth: Up to 200GB per month
Growth Plan
Visits: Up to 150k per month
Storage: Up to 20GB
Bandwidth: Up to 200GB per month
Addons:
Visits: You may purchase additional visits as an addon to your existing plan at the cost of £10/month per 10,000 visits/month.
Storage: For extra storage (should not be needed for most sites), please contact us.
Bandwidth: Extra bandwidth should not be required if your site is well optimised, but if needed, we will discuss additional costs with you.
See FAQ: Why is there limits for visits and storage for the hosting services provided?
We’re confident that your website will be at-least 20% faster when you signup for our maintenance and hosting service. If not, we’ll reward you with your first month completely free.
We will take 5 scans of your Website when hosted by your previous supplier (if any) via tools.pingdom.com from the location “London” and the fastest speed will be taken. Following the transfer of the Website to our Services and the completion of any initial requirements, including relevant optimisations, we will again take 5 scans of the Website and take the fastest speed. If the fastest speed through our Services is slower than the previous host’s fastest speed, we shall notify you accordingly, and within 10 days, we shall refund to you a pro-rata sum equal to a one month subscription to your Plan.
This only applies if we are hosting your website.
In order to offer your website with dedicated resources and optimal speed & performance, limiting your “visits” is the best & easiest way to offer incredible site performance, and allow us to monitor your site usage. However, in most cases, a small to medium sized business website shouldn’t expect more than 5k – 30k visits per month, so all of our plans will work great for most sites.
In terms of “storage”, all of our websites include more than enough storage. None of the websites we host require more than 10GB storage, and in most cases, a single WordPress website would use no more than 2 – 5GB storage.
See FAQ: What counts as a “visit”?
Yes, we do offer custom development services, including custom website design and development, at an additional cost.
If you require custom development work for a larger project that isn’t covered by the “maintenance & changes” time available, we are happy to discuss a custom one-off quote for you to complete this work.
If you’re ready to get started with a new project, please get in touch with us to discuss further details & costs with our team.
Yes!
If you would like to test out our services for a month or two, before committing to a full year to receive 1 month free, that’s totally fine.
When you upgrade, you will be prorated any unused days/time when switching plans.
Every WordPress site is unique. We will review and monitor your WordPress sites to determine which of these plugins may be beneficial to you without affecting performance. However, if you’d like to install any of these plugins for free, just let us know!
Included with ALL plans.
– WP Rocket – Performance Plugin (Required)
WordPress site optimisation plugin, including GZIP Compression , Minification / Concatenation, Browser Caching, Database Optimization Fonts Optimization and more.
Learn more: https://wp-rocket.me
– Video User Manuals
Access to 89+ professional WordPress video tutorials, directly on your WordPress dashboard.
Included with Professional & Enterprise Plans
All WPMU plugins worth over £400 per year, including:
– WP Smush Pro (Optional)
Automatically optimize and resize every image in any directory on your WordPress on upload. Save space and speed up your site with the incredible power of WP Smush Pro. User’s choice, award winning and benchmark tested – The fastest, easiest and best-performing image compression plugin for WordPress!
Learn more: https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/wp-smush-pro
– SmartCrawl SEO Pro (Optional)
Boost your PageRank and drive more traffic to your site with little effort and simple configuration tools. This plugin is a premium replacement for the Yoast SEO Pro plugin (worth £79/year).
– WP Defender Pro (Optional)
Not required (or available) if we are hosting your website.
WP Defender Pro includes regular security scans, vulnerability reports, audit logs, 2-factor authentication, safety recommendations, blacklist monitoring, IP lockout device, simple security tweaks, core, plugin and theme code checker and login masking.
– WP Hustle Pro (Optional)
Hustle is the ultimate online marketing tool for WordPress. Quickly setup email opt-ins, custom ad pop-ups and slide-ins, and floating social bars to drive results and create a following.
Premium WooCommerce plugins combined worth over £1000 per year.
We can also provide full free installation and setup of a variety of awesome premium plugins (and themes) for WooCommerce websites (with a valid license and updates). Get in touch for more information.
Please note, if you move onto our hosting services, security and caching plugins are not required, as all of this is handled for you (server side) without the need for any plugins.
Yes! All of our plans include malware scanning, and free malware removal is also included if we are hosting your website. If you are hosting the website yourself, an additional fee may apply to fix any malware that may be detected. Feel free to contact us for details.
If you are not currently signed up for our services, and your WordPress website has been hacked, you may still signup for one of our maintenance plans, however additional fees may apply to fix your hacked website before we get you setup with our services. Please feel free to contact us for a no obligation quote.
When we are hosting your website, in most cases, our ongoing security scanning will automatically detect potential malware or hacks, and our dedicated security team will fix it for you as soon as it’s spotted!
Yes, we are happy to support you and maintain your website on any hosting provider. However if we host your website on our platform, this allows us to provide the best possible support, security and care for your site.
Rest assured, you can rely on our hosting platform. We offer an “enterprise grade” service and are partnered with Flywheel at getflywheel.com to provide your hosting services and to keep your site safe.
If you were to host your own website with another provider, you would need to handle and take care of the “hosting” side of things yourself.
Additionally, several of the “security” and “hosting” services we provide would no longer be available, and would need to be dealt with by your hosting provider. We will however alternatively install the WPMU DEV “Defender Pro” plugin on your site. This will replace some of the basic security & speed features that would have normally be built in with our hosting & security services.
For WordPress “multisite” websites, you only need 1 plan for us to manage your “main site”, to host the multisite, and perform all security and managed updates for the whole multisite network.
However if you would like us to manage, maintain, and perform changes on each individual sub-site (with separate themes etc) on your multisite network, you will need to create a bulk plan and add additional sites for each sub-site. Please feel free to get in touch to discuss whether or not your multisite sub-sites need separate plans.
Our hosting provider Flywheel, where your site will be hosted, offers enterprise grade security at server level. The servers are configured specifically with WordPress security best practices, and we have server-level blocking and scanning for hackers and malware. We prevent brute force attacks, lock down core WordPress files, and take many other security measures for you.
There is no need for installing any security plugins on your website. Security plugins duplicate this functionality, and in many cases significantly slow down sites by interfering with our caching, bloat the site’s database, and/or interfere with our native security software.
We also keep all plugins (and in some cases themes) up to date as older code has had more time to get cracked by the bad guys. Additionally, hiding your WordPress login, requiring a CAPTCHA or single-sign-on, having strong usernames and passwords all will help keep your site safe from the unsavory types on the web. We will help with all of this!
As well as our server level security features, our hosting is also partnered with Sucuri. Sucuri scanning is available and used whenever our hosting security and malware scanning detects a potential threat. Sucuri scanning will then be run of a deeper scan of your site, to help detect and remove any potential security threats or malware on your site.
Most of this section only applies if you move onto our hosting services. Get in touch if you have any questions.
There are more than 54,000 plugins for WordPress out in the universe and most of them are going to work splendidly on our hosting platform at Flywheel. However, there are a few categories of plugins that either duplicate functionality that RelyWP already provides, or are known performance-killers on sites.
We believe that users shouldn’t have to “fiddle” with their site to get the best performance and security. As your WordPress maintenance expert, and managed hosting provider, our goal is to make sure you’re starting out with a site that just works.
Backup plugins
We already have you covered on the backup front. We back up every site each and every night on external servers. These are stored for atleast 30 days. Backups can be easily restored by our team, or we can send you a download of your backups.
Backup plugins, on the other hand, are incredibly resource-hungry. When running, they can take a big bite out of the resources you need to deliver content to your visitors and really slow your site down at inopportune times. For larger sites, some of the MySQL queries can even take your site offline. These plugins also often store large backup files on your server, which can unnecessarily fill up your disk space.
Examples of disallowed Backup plugins:
If you’d like to keep your own backups in additions to the ones we keep, feel free to contact us (via ticket or chat on the client area) and we’d be happy to send you a copy of of a recent backup.
Note: If you do want a regular backup in addition to RelyWP’s nightly backup, try choosing a plugin which allows you to store backups offsite like VaultPress. Your site’s performance will still take a hit while the process is running. In an attempt to keep data usage to a minimum, we’d advise you only allow the plugin to store of one day’s backup on the site itself.
Caching plugins
We handle caching at the server level, eliminating the need for caching plugins. Server-side caching is significantly more efficient and scalable than any plugin-based caching, as it doesn’t rely on PHP at all. This aside, caching plugins run the risk of interfering with the caching we already have in place.
Examples of disallowed Caching plugins:
We will provide you with free installation and license of “WP Rocket” which will handle things like JavaScript and CSS file minification and concatenation, as well as GZIP Compression, Database Optimization Fonts Optimization and more.
These are tasks which are ideally handled at the site development level, however WP Rocket will help if the necessary optimisations are required. WP Rocket is the only “performance” plugin that is supported on our hosting platform, and does not conflict with our server side caching & performance features in any way. We recommend not using the caching features of any plugins and leaving that to our servers instead. We will take care of this for you.
WP Smush Pro plugin is also available for free to install on your site, and is supported on our platform. This plugin will help with optimisation & compression of your images.
We will also perform other routine performance scans and optimisations on your website to keep it blazing fast!
Security plugins
Our servers are configured specifically with WordPress security best practices, and we have server-level blocking and scanning for hackers and malware. We prevent brute force attacks, lock down core WordPress files, and take many other security measures for you.
Security plugins duplicate this, and in many cases significantly slow down sites by interfering with our caching, bloat the site’s database, and/or interfere with our native security software.
Examples of disallowed Security plugins:
Note: Our hosting offers a solid baseline of security for all sites. We also keep all plugins (and in some cases themes) up to date as older code has had more time to get cracked by the bad guys. Additionally, hiding your WordPress login, requiring a CAPTCHA or single-sign-on, having strong usernames and passwords all will help keep your site safe from the unsavory types on the web. We will help with all of this!
Related Post Plugins
In general, if you aren’t manually assigning related posts, any plugin that is automatically showing related posts is going to be doing so via a barrage of MySQL queries that happen on each and every page load. The end result is often a devastating hit on your site’s performance and substantial damage to your database.
Examples of disallowed Related Posts plugins:
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
- Contextual Related Posts
- SEO Auto Links & Related Posts
- Similar Posts
Since crawling over all your posts and establishing connections automatically requires some a lot of horsepower, we’d recommend one of these external related post services to perform the same function without the performance consequences.
Link Checker Plugins
Like some of the other listed plugin categories here, the ongoing jobs run by these plugins can be really taxing on your server and steal resources that your visitors need to view your site in a timely fashion.
Examples of disallowed Link Checker plugins:
Note: For most users, checking broken links is only needed for one-off audits. For this, we recommend an external service like Free Broken Link Checker which will crawl your site for broken links.
Plugins with known issues
- SMTP email plugins tend to interfere with our server mail sending, and run the risk of preventing your site from sending any emails at all. This is specific to SMTP; other email plugins that don’t use SMTP are generally ok.
- EWWW Image Optimizer and other plugins rely on the exec() function, which we disable for security purposes. We don’t have any issue with image optimization plugins in general, though; in fact, we encourage them, as long as they compress existing image files and don’t create duplicates (since that could fill up your site’s disk space very quickly).
Some recommended alternatives: Compress JPEG & PNG Images, EWWW Image Optimizer Cloud (which does not rely on the same function as the non-cloud version of EWWW Image Optimizer), Imagify and Kraken.io. - Any plugin that specifically modifies .htaccess will not work on our hosting platform, since .htaccess is an Apache file and our hosting runs NGINX.
- Similarly, any plugin that needs to write to the wp-config.php file will be unable to do so, although in most cases you can contact us and we’ll be happy to work with you to put whatever you need in place.
Other things to watch out for
The TimThumb image resizing script is embedded in lots of older themes and plugins built from about 2000–2014, but it is no longer supported or updated, so it’s a vulnerability. Besides, it tends to break things anyway. Stick with the image optimization plugins recommended above.
Along with TimThumb, Sucuri reports that outdated versions of Gravity Forms and RevSlider contribute to a high number of security incidents and vulnerabilities with WordPress sites. This is largely because these plugins are frequently embedded in themes and aren’t updated. As long as your theme is kept up-to-date and you are running the latest versions of these plugins, you shouldn’t have issues, but it’s worth double-checking.
Note that certain plugins run database queries to work, and these interfere with caching, which will slow down a site. These include (but are not limited to) Broken Link Checker (which also doesn’t play well with Staging/cloning) and some “related posts” plugins.
We take this issue very seriously and try our best to strike a balance between freedom, security, and performance. If you have any issues, we’re happy to work with you to figure out the best solution for your site!
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but gives you a sense for the types of plugins that we strongly discourage and/or don’t allow. If you have any questions about a particular plugin and whether it is allowed, don’t hesitate to contact us.
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Most likely! We’re happy to move your site so you can compare it with your current host. If you’re happy with the performance, we can help you choose a plan. However, don’t forget, our service comes with more than just great hosting and speed!
If you are not sure which plan is right for your business, please feel free to get in touch and we’d be happy to discuss your requirements. 🙂
Absolutely!
We know how painful it can be to move a WordPress site from one server to another, and that’s why we help our customers move their sites – FOR FREE. We can typically get this completed for you to look at within 1-2 working days.
Simply fill out our secure migration request form with some details about your previous hosting account, and we’ll get your site transferred and set up as a demo site under your account. You can then review it to see how everything performs, and make sure everything is in place.
As part of our WordPress maintenance services, we include optional enterprise grade Managed Hosting, partnered with our hosting provider “Flywheel”. Therefore, a bunch of the technical nitty-gritty hosting stuff is all taken care of for you, so you don’t need to worry about anything.
Here are the main tenets of what makes up a true managed WordPress host:
Managed caching and performance: We handle caching for you at the server level, using super fast servers to begin with, and even work individually with our customers to further optimize their sites for the best performance. No plugins needed!
Managed security: We proactively scan and block malware and hacking attempts. We do all of this at the server level, without the need for any plugins or configuration on the part of the customer. And in the unlikely event that your site is hacked, we’ll fix it for you, free of charge.
Expert WordPress support: A WordPress expert available to help you out with anything! We go above and beyond what you would expect from a “normal hosting” company. From “hey, I need help, I have a serious problem!”, to “can you recommend a plugin for XYZ,” we’re here to help.
Those are the core pieces of what it means to be a true managed WordPress hosting provider. If you have any questions, let us know!
