Is your clients’ WordPress down? What could be the possible outcomes for your agency you might think?
WordPress plays an essential role in harnessing your website’s full potential. It is crucial to maintain the up-to-date and secure status of your end client’s website. Agencies may perceive neglecting maintenance services as cost-efficient in the short term. However, this approach exposes them to security vulnerabilities and the risk of potential revenue loss for their partners’ businesses in the long run.
At White Label Agency, we specialize in providing ongoing maintenance services. By offering a dependable support system, we not only address WordPress issues but also establish a consistent revenue stream for our partner agencies. With insights gained from 10,000 WordPress projects, let’s examine the potential triggers for website downtime and effective management approaches.
What is a Website Downtime?
Downtime occurs when a website or web service is unavailable or not functioning adequately for users to complete tasks. In the earlier days of the Internet, it simply meant that a site was inaccessible. Nowadays, the definition of downtime is more complex, including scenarios where blogs, images, videos, and other site resources cannot be accessed by visitors. When your client’s website is down, they miss opportunities to engage and convert visitors. Even brief downtime, lasting only minutes, doesn’t go by without the notice of current clients or prospects. Website crashes serve as indicators of underlying problems such as code issues, plugin errors, expired domains, and more.
Businesses face significant challenges when dealing with website downtime. While a few minutes of downtime may seem insignificant initially, the impact can be substantial. For example, in 2017, Amazon faced a prolonged Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud outage, lasting several hours and affecting numerous companies reliant on Amazon’s cloud services. This outage had far-reaching consequences, affecting major players like Apple, Venmo, Slack, Trello, and numerous individual sites, resulting in a staggering estimated financial cost of over $150 million, as reported by NPR and Data Center Knowledge.
How to Handle Your End Client’s WordPress Down Issues?
Before confirming downtime, it is crucial to thoroughly investigate the root cause of the issue. Once you have confirmed that your WordPress website is offline or experiencing issues, it becomes essential to strategize and organize an appropriate response.
The most common technical issues that can bring your WordPress website down include:
• Hosting server issues
When investigating the cause of the WordPress down issue, your initial focus should be on your WordPress hosting. Issues such as excessive data usage, scheduled maintenance downtime, or power outages at the server location can be contributing factors. One important factor is Bandwidth, which represents the amount of data your website can transfer to visitors simultaneously. When a hosting provider is poor, even without reaching the bandwidth limit, if too many visitors access your website, it may go offline. Additionally, the server hardware responsible for storing websites may require replacement over time. If such maintenance is carried out on your hosting server, it could be a contributing factor to the downtime you are experiencing.
Your hosting plan has a limit on disk space, determining the maximum size for your website, including images, videos, HTML, and CSS files. As your website expands, it may hit the disk space threshold, leading your hosting provider to shut down specific parts of your site. To bring your site back online, a solution is to upgrade your hosting package, expanding the available bandwidth and disk space.
• Domain name system (DNS) configuration issues
Your domain could be compromised through various means:
- Negligence in securing credentials: If you fail to keep your username and password secure, someone might gain unauthorized access to your domain.
- Domain provider security breach: If your domain provider experiences a security breach, hackers could exploit it to access your domain information, leading to potential hijacking.
- Domain registration expiration: If your domain registration expires, opportunistic individuals may seize the opportunity to take over and control your domain name.
If you secured the domain a while back, its registration to you might have lapsed. If you face issues with your domain registration, reach out to your domain name provider through their customer support. Request an update on your domain status.
• Plugin and Theme conflicts
If your WordPress theme or plugins lack support, originate from an untrustworthy source, or require updates, your website may become vulnerable to hacking or malware attacks, leading to potential downtime.
In the event of an attack, you can restore your WordPress website by reinstalling core files and adding a theme and plugins known to be compatible with the latest WordPress version from reputable developers.
While plugins contribute to the functionality of many websites, they can occasionally malfunction, or conflicts may arise between two plugins or with the WordPress theme. To quickly identify if a plugin is the source of the issue, disable all plugins using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or the file manager. If the website reappears, the problem is likely plugin-related, and you can systematically reactivate plugins to identify which ones are causing the issue.
• Custom coding and CSS
Code-related issues pose a risk of website downtime if left unaddressed. Bugs, programming errors, memory leaks resulting in crashes, alterations to server configurations, updates, or modifications to the hosting environment, and codes interacting with a database can all contribute to downtime. Complications may escalate with problems like database connection failures or SQL query errors.
Updating WordPress or installing themes can sometimes introduce compatibility issues that may lead to a WordPress down situation, breaking your website. If you encounter errors after an update or install, start by identifying the specific problem. This could involve checking error logs, plugin conflicts, or theme compatibility issues. Consider troubleshooting solutions before resorting to a complete reinstall. It’s also always best practice to test any changes in a staging environment before making them live to avoid downtime on your main site.
SERVICES
WordPress maintenance plans
We offer an easy way for agencies to guarantee ongoing support to their clients with our WordPress maintenance plans.
The Essential Benefits of Regular WordPress Site Care
Digital agencies often overlook website maintenance as a mere technical necessity. However, a proactive approach to maintaining WordPress sites creates a strategic advantage. Having a well-maintained website for your clients, fosters trust not just with them, but also with their audience. This trust, the cornerstone of long-term partnerships and recurring business, transforms website maintenance from a cost center into a powerful revenue generator. There are essential benefits that come along with regular maintenance care:
- Data protection
- Protecting website from vulnerabilities
- Long-term viability and relevance in the market
- Up-to-Date features
- Better User Experience
- Credibility in your audience
SERVICES
Website as a service
For a fixed monthly fee, our website as a service plan provides your agency with a complete website solution for your clients.
Prevent WordPress Down Issues with White Label Agency
At White Label Agency, we create our maintenance packages to suit each business’s unique needs, ensuring optimized security for our clients. Our care plans include essential tools and strategies.
We understand that website downtime equals lost revenue. Our real-time uptime monitor watches our clients’ websites 24/7 with an interval of 60 seconds. Daily security scans and checks for blacklisting on services like Google Safe Browsing and Norton Safe Web are integral to our proactive approach. Hosting all sites with WP Engine, renowned for its firewall, ensures that the sites we manage are securely directed, fostering trust.
Page speed significantly influences a website’s success in terms of SEO ranking and user experience. Our performance check assesses our clients’ websites, grading their performance. This service also tracks keyword ranking changes, monitors website visibility, and identifies main competitors.
With over 3,000 WordPress projects annually, we are well-equipped to assist. Our white-label WordPress maintenance packages empower you to offer top-notch services to your clients without being overwhelmed by WordPress down issues or any other technical complexities. For more details on how we can support your WordPress needs, don’t hesitate to contact us. Our team is ready to assist you with any challenges you may face.
