2023 Care Plan Overview
[00:00:00] Hi there. Today I’m gonna talk about our care plans. These are the packages that we use and we’ve created to help our clients keep their websites up, maintain them, keep ’em secure, keep ’em backed up. We just. We have all kinds of things that we do in the background that maybe you may not see. I wanted to walk you through all the different reports, the daily, weekly, monthly, annual type of check-ins that we do with you, with your website, and kind of walk you through what that process is.
[00:00:33] First off, that’s me. Hey there. How you doing? If you haven’t seen me in person, which by now most of our clients have. We manage WordPress websites. We do have a few basic HTML sites that we do manage, that we’ve built years and years ago. You have to understand, I’ve been doing this for almost 25 years.
[00:00:52] I’ve actually got a website that I’ve built 25 years ago. We still manage it . So just wanted to give you a little bit of information about my background. First off, again, 25 years building this, I have a team of 10 and we are a virtual business. My team is all over the world, which allows me to find the best programmers and the best project managers, and I’m not limited by location.
[00:01:21] That’s the whole team here. We have weekly actually we meet twice a week. Monday mornings are our team meeting where everybody gets on and we run through projects.
[00:01:30] We run through care plans. We highlight any issues that we see coming up. We highlight things that we need to address during the week. So for example Google Analytics is switching over to Google Analytics four from Universal to four. Completely different system, totally different reporting. But what we’ve been doing in the past few months is migrating, well, I shouldn’t say migrating.
[00:01:52] We’ve been adding these different accounts. And this is the whole team. So all of us get together one time and I finally got everyone to wear the, the GlobalSpex hoodie.
[00:02:01] Some of the benefits that I would say having a care plan like I mentioned earlier about the Google Analytics, it is a proactive approach to websites.
[00:02:11] I do keep up to date with the latest technologies, the latest with Google changes and algorithms. The latest when it comes to security, I’m always trying to keep updated on what needs to happen with your website to keep you safe. To keep it safe, and protect.
[00:02:28] First we make it as easy as possible.
[00:02:30] You may not hear from us. Kind of what you want, right? You just wanna open up your website and have it be there and working. We work in the behind the scenes. We do send you a monthly report of the things that we’ve done. So you have that, you have that ability to open up and see all the different plugins and things that we’ve done the prior month.
[00:02:47] We’ll keep you on task, so if you do send us a support request of an issue that you may have found or an update you’d like to make. We do create tickets and we are very proactive about keeping you on task and we will we have a nice little tool that allows us to see all the tickets, what we’re waiting on, what’s our, what are active, maybe we put a ticket on hold, we have that kind of dashboard.
[00:03:11] And then again, we do take a proactive approach to website development and website maintenance. For example, You know, web servers are looking for different ways of improving. So your c panel, your backend server, C panels, those might get updated. Proactive. I keep saying proactive, but I can’t think of a better word.
[00:03:29] We are actively looking at always keeping the servers updated with the latest technology and the latest software we do have three servers that we manage. We’ve also got a WP Engine server that manage and about three or four others, most of our clients are on our servers. You’ve got one or two that have their own, which is perfectly acceptable.
[00:03:51] We just are very picky about the kind of hosts that you have. I will give you feedback if that’s what you know, if you, if you’re struggling to find out, you know, should I host with you Christina, or should I host my own? So we are act proactive about that. There’s that proactive word.
[00:04:07] Next are the, some of the features that you’ll get with the care plan.
[00:04:11] We’ve got latest monitoring technology, so we, we just switched over from an old system to a newer system that gave us a better visibility in all of our websites that we manage. Premium hosting. I used to host with a few, you know, hosting companies that actually got bought out. And what happens is support tends to drop significantly.
[00:04:30] I don’t have servers here in my office. First, just so let you know, , we have servers in northern Texas, Utah, and Virginia. And then WP Engine is in Austin, Texas, but even their servers are distributed. We, we resell for a hosting company. So when we have any issues we have, we use their support.
[00:04:56] Most of the time it’s extremely technical. There might be some backend, cPanel issues that we’re looking at. There might be an issue where we’re getting hammered with some malware or somebody is trying to hit the site too hard. We’ve got some tools, not only through the host, but we’ve got some tools using something like CloudFlare to help us block that. But the, the great thing about these companies is that they’re very, very responsive. whenever I get a sense that the hosting company is starting to slack and we’re not seeing the kind of response that we need, then I’m all on it. I’m looking at, okay, what’s going on? How can we make that change?
[00:05:35] It’s just really, really important that when I come in and I have a question, I need immediate response. And they are actually, I’ve actually upgraded our accounts with them. So they are ac looking at anything that might have a problem, same as what you with us. I do that with them and they’ll come to me with different reports saying, Hey, we’re seeing a lot of activity over here, we’re gonna kind of slow it down.
[00:05:57] Maybe it’s coming from different country countries, so we kinda wanna watch. What is happening? They’re helping me watch what is happening there. The next is that security monitoring and response like we talked about. There’s always bad actors out there, and sometimes it’s not so much that we’re getting hit by maybe Russia or China someone or in Africa, and it’s also places like the Southeast Asia that are trying to figure out ways to get into your website. What we’re always looking for is, first off, is there something on the site that is open, meaning there’s some code in there that is allowing somebody to insert malware.
[00:06:39] We have reports in place that will tell us there’s a problem here. You need to address it now. Or the great thing, some of these tools that we have, they are going out and monitoring. Different types of code as well, and reporting back that says this has been identified as a problem and the developer has already come back, come up with a, a patch to the security, and then we now see it as a critical or maybe medium risk.
[00:07:09] So we’re, those are just constant looking at what’s going out there. What’s the landscape look like when it comes to fraud, spam we do have a quick, efficient support. Like I mentioned earlier, I do have a. Ticket. One of the best things I ever set up about 10 years ago, and it kept, you know, for the longest time it was just me and maybe one other developer.
[00:07:29] But now I needed a way that you all weren’t relying on me to answer anything. Now we’ve got a team of 10, we’ve got a support ticket system, so now it’s so much easier to monitor and we can keep moving forward. And I can go back and I can track who did what when, what did we do, how did we do it, and you yourself are able to log in and see that as well.
[00:07:54] Others are expert development. My team are experts in WordPress. We can do some pretty amazing custom work on your site. And that in addition to the fact that we are, we know what to look for on the site if there’s problems, if we’re seeing a performance issue, what do we need to do?
[00:08:10] Every year there’s always something. For once it was the encryption, right? So Google required everybody to encrypt their websites. All right, let’s get everybody encrypted. We had privacy policies last year. I was made a push on. Making sure everybody has some type of privacy policy. It’s getting a little bit more sp urgent.
[00:08:28] Now it’s getting more urgent because we’re having laws being passed in California and Nevada and Virginia even Canada. Even Quebec has their own laws, and if you don’t have a lawyer that is always looking at your privacy, your terms, I digress. But these are the types of things that I’m always kind of bringing to your attention.
[00:08:47] And then obviously just this year now is Google Analytics universal is going away and being replaced by GA 4.
[00:08:55] The reports are being emailed to you. We do visual checks, plug in and core dates. If we make this update, we have to double check that it’s hasn’t mucked something up on the website.
[00:09:05] We have a visual check on daily basis. We come in and we can see thumbnails and what that looks.
[00:09:11] These are just some of the care plan packages, we’ve got the tech executive and partner plan. I do have one higher one called the Chairman’s Plan, and that gets into the 700 a thousand dollars range. Most often those are custom types of websites where we have a lot of development that goes on and every little change that we might make they’re, we don’t know. Or it’s a type of website that has to stay up no matter what. If you’ve got websites that are high traffic volume, maybe it’s dependent on maybe a TV show, maybe it’s dependent on a high volume, e-commerce site, those types of things really need special attention. So those are kind of our higher packages.
[00:09:55] But if you’ve got a brochure site, those are kind of in our tech and executive plan. It depends on how active you’re going be with a website. If you’ve got an e-commerce, even if it’s like 15 to 20, we typically add on a little bit more to that because of the complexity of the e-commerce side and WooCommerce is usually what works with WordPress, but there’s, you know, if we make an update on a live e-commerce site, we have to be super careful.
[00:10:21] We, we actually try not to, we move it over to a staging site first, make those updates and then move it back.
[00:10:27] and these are just some of the daily, weekly, monthly, annual checks that we do. I don’t wanna run through every single one of these. You can kind of see this yourself daily support tickets, malware, update rate, weekly, depending on the care plan.
[00:10:40] We’re gonna be scheduling every update. That could be WordPress core, that could be the plugin, your theme, and we try and do that on a scheduled basis. If you’re on the chairman, partner, and plans, then usually week one. Week two is executive and tech, and week three we’ve got maybe e-commerce. We try and keep up to that schedule so that, you know, if I’m on this plan, it’s the second week of every month.
[00:11:06] We do monthly. Obviously we’ve got user checks, we’ve got some AI installed using a tool that will automatically go in and check what a user interface might look like or how it, how something is performing. In the past, a person would have to come in and order and do a test order.
[00:11:24] Using this tool, we use AI that we tell it kinda like, Siri, do these steps, come in here, add this check out, add to the cart, check it out. Or if it’s made a complicated website with a lot of directories and filtering. tell it to kind of do this first, filter it, check this, open it up. Can you send, or sending a form is another one.
[00:11:51] Sometimes we’ll send a form and either you’re not getting the form or we’re not getting the form or something. Again, all these checks and balances that happen.
[00:12:00] Performance reviews, visual checks, critical checks, as well.
[00:12:04] and then annually we’ve got a pretty comprehensive marketing on it. That’s kind of new.
[00:12:08] Just started it this year just just because I find that people kind of get stuck with their website and they don’t touch it enough. I of wanna be proactive about that and make sure that the website is doing what it should be doing for you, whether it’s a brochure site, e-commerce site, database site.
[00:12:29] Just wanna make sure that you’ve thought about those things , and it’s a full marketing audit. I mean, we’ll go into your reviews. I’ll look and see some SEO work and see what your competition’s doing, your social media work and build on that.
[00:12:43] The other thing we’re gonna start doing is for partner chairman is do monthly videos.
[00:12:48] So you’ll see here the new for the chairman of partners, the monthly website review video. We, we try and have a phone call, but everybody’s busy and I’m probably not the most interesting person in the world and not the the greatest topic. You can’t wait to have a discussion about your website, but it’s still necessary.
[00:13:05] And it also, I feel like if I can show you that we are actively looking at your site, like we’re taking a moment and looking at it, you, you maybe you’ll see that, that you are not forgotten. We. You know, putting you in some system and forgetting about you. We’re going to make a point and we’re trying to keep it small, like five minute video and just kind of walk through and see if there’s anything in there.
[00:13:28] Some of these are just some of the technical reports that might look like you can see this one is it’s got some broken anchors. There’s like two links in there, so it looks like we need to fix that. They’ve got some 3 0 1 redirects that are kind of acting a little squirrely, but everything else checks off.
[00:13:42] This is the kind of report that we’ll get. Obviously as you click each one of these, it, it’ll, it opens up and I can see now what broken anchors and what links are redirecting. That actually gets emailed to our tech support and it goes into its own pile once a month. And we just go through it individually, check anything off that’s pretty critical.
[00:14:03] Performance reports for sure. And you can see this is a, a screenshot that I took today. You can see there’s some, there’s an f, there’s a couple F’s in there, and this happens almost every day. We don’t really go in and look for performance if you’re in tech.
[00:14:17] Usually if, if we do see an f. We’re, we’re looking into it. If you’re, again, e-commerce chairman, partner plans maybe if you’re an executive plan, we will, or you’re on one of our marketing plans, it’s really important that we make sure you don’t have that f. So why do you have an F? Sometimes what happens is that some clients come in and they upload some huge 10 megabyte file, or caching has been turned off somehow.
[00:14:42] We’re looking at page load time, fully loaded time, image optimization, code compressions, and it’s just as really helpful to see of course Google and any user is gonna want a website that is fast.
[00:14:54] And this is our way of making sure that’s what’s happening.
[00:14:58] And this is a, a more detailed screenshot of a website. You can see where an entire list of different programming checks that it’s going through, optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, defer parsing of JavaScripts, specify cache. All of these things get checked off.
[00:15:14] And but, but you can kind of see this is a 4.7 load time. Even though it gave us an A, it’s loading too slowly, so we’re going to look at the optimize the images. There’s most likely a really big image in there. We’re probably gonna see if we can compress it or replace it, and that might really bring down that page load time to under three seconds, which is essentially the goal.
[00:15:38] We do have uptime monitoring, and this is again, another screenshot of another report that we get. Now, if a website does go down a monitor is sent into our Slack channel. We’ve got a special uptime monitor, slack, Slack channel. The entire team sees it and we do rotate our developers.
[00:15:56] Every other weekend they each have to they’re on call for the weekend and of course it’s usually like Friday or Saturday where the website goes down. why started to do that and uptime monitoring ensures that each website is always available. Sometimes you might change a word and that might be the word that we’re using to keep it up.
[00:16:14] We don’t use uptime monitoring based on a server. It’s always based on a very unique word on a website. We used to, we, we’ve, you know, mistakes that we’ve made as a website gone down, but we didn’t know it because we had it set up for a different type of monitoring and now we just say, look for this word cuz according to it if the site goes down and there’s maybe a 404 or some words on there, according to the monitor, hey, well it’s up, but the website’s not up. It’s either maybe been switched out, maybe God forbid there’s some malware on there, but there’s some words in there. Now we have a very specific word, and it can’t be your company name.
[00:16:52] It has to be like a unique, quirky word that’s in there that if it goes away, it’s a huge indicator that something’s wrong. All of that gets sent into a Slack channel as well as a ticket that we’ve automated to have high alert. Now, if you happen to come to your site and it’s down and we didn’t notice it, you can email [email protected], uppercase website down, you know, but normally we’ll know before you do.
[00:17:22] This is an example of one of our dashboards, another dashboard that we use. This is the big one. This is one we just switched over from an old system owned by a very big conglomerate company that I didn’t see they were making improvements on.
[00:17:36] They weren’t. There was no a, there was no growth or future upgrades or updates. It was, it was so stagnant. But here we are in a world that every day technology changes. This is a, a tool that not only does it fix malware, if it’s found, I just have to press a couple buttons. It’s vulnerability and security scans are much, much better.
[00:18:04] We do, you can see there’s a security, all sites are clean, right? We zero in on that. You can see there’s 67 plug-ins right here that need to be updated. Now we don’t go in and every day and update these plug-ins. We, like I mentioned, we have a schedule. We’ve got four themes. , well, how many WordPress sites are all WordPress sites?
[00:18:21] And, you know, 141 total auto update. Right? And we’ve got little tags in here and then we, I can go in individually in each website and see what’s happening there.
[00:18:33] Now this is our annual website marketing audit that I mentioned. It is 150 point checklist that I go through. It is massive!. And it takes me, the last one took me about three hours.
[00:18:47] I’m trying to get a little bit better about that, I’m gonna try and reel it in to an hour or two hours to do it. But you do get a really thorough, thorough checklist of what’s happening with your website, with screenshot. I’ll do some keyword research and I’ll also do a competitive research. So if there’s about three or four different competitors, I just wanna get a sense of what they’re doing.
[00:19:06] And it’s, it’s not 150 on them, it’s, it’s a few checklists. I just wanna see how active are they on social media? How active are they on their website? Have they even made a change to their site? It has been it really opens up your eyes possibly making either updates to the site, maybe you need to redesign, add some features, do more social media but it is very helpful.
[00:19:31] Contact support if you have any questions. You can email support globalspex.com. You can do a phone number at (281) 201-4527. Now if you call that number it, it will go straight to voicemail. I don’t have the time to answer every single phone call, and 80% are spam callers anyway. If you call and leave a message, I have it set up that it will automatically sent to a tech support person.
[00:19:55] So my care plan manager usually lets me know if it’s for me or if you can even say, Hey this is website xyz.com. I need somebody to take a look at such and such page. There’s images are missing. That will get transcribed automatically sent to a ticket system. And based on your phone number, usually we can just apply it to you as our client.
[00:20:18] Or go to links.globalspex.com/support and that will send you straight to our support login page and there you can see all of the tickets that you’ve created. You can submit a ticket. Don’t forget, you can just email [email protected] and that also will create a ticket as well.
[00:20:35] I hope this has been helpful to see the things that we do in the background, and I hope to hear from you soon.
[00:20:42] If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Thanks, bye.
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