We offer a few different WordPress Support Plans, and many of our clients sign up for these to keep their site up and running smoothly. Having a plan ensures your software is up to date, your site is secure, and it’s up and running at all times.
But it actually can do more than that.
Recently I was running updates for a client and was getting errors on my end that the site wasn’t connecting to my system. I immediately went to the site and discovered that their SSL certificate had expired. I emailed the client and let them know, so they could get it renewed right away. Their response was that they’d already renewed the SSL. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize you also had to install the SSL for it to be active, just paying the renewal wasn’t enough. (SSLs are kind of funny that way.)
I was able to login to their account, quickly activate and install the SSL, and got all their warnings fixed up in no time. If they weren’t signed up for a support plan, I wouldn’t ever have seen that their SSL had expired. Further, since this particular company’s website, as is the case for many of our clients, is a brochure site, available solely as a way for their clients to find them and learn about them. This means they aren’t logged into the site and updating it themselves and they generally are out on the job servicing clients, not hanging out checking their website. They may not have known about this issue for a very long time.
Having a support plan potentially saved them from months of embarrassing security errors on their site.
Not only would this turn away potential new clients, but it could affect their Google ranking as well. There’s no telling how much income they could have lost had this issue not been discovered.
Amy Masson
Amy is the co-owner, developer, and website strategist for Sumy Designs. She's been making websites with WordPress since 2006 and is passionate about making sure websites are as functional as they are beautiful.