Fast, Streamlined, Efficient Growth
Our Influencer package is designed for growth. That means we expect complexity and resource demand to grow over time. The more content you add, and the more followers you gain, the harder it is to keep your site responsive and (possibly more importantly) the more time it takes to simply manage your site.
We can help with that automatically.
Our Influencer Package Includes:
- Regular updates of WordPress and Plugins. We handle the maintenance for you.
- Performance tweaks to keep your site fast and load times low.
- A set of plugins that make designing your site that much faster, simpler, and easier.
Regular Maintenance
WordPress is fast and secure, but it’s also the most popular website software in existence, with something like 43% of the world’s web sites running on WordPress. That means it gets a lot of scrutiny from folks who are up to no good, and it’s important to update your software and plugins regularly.
To ease your effort here, we will:
- Update your plugins automatically as updates become available. This is a manual process, performed with care, rather than a script that blindly updates plugins when a newer one is reported. Updates are important, but so is keeping things running smoothly without breaking your site.
- Perform regular off-site backups. While we perform backups twice a day to our own storage server for everyone, this is an additional step we take to back your site up to cloud-based storage every day to protect against all risks. If you like, we can have our software back up to your cloud storage as well, whether this is Google Drive, OneDrive, or a cloud service you configure. This way you always have the most recent backup of your site in your possession.
- Monitor your site’s performance on desktop, mobile, and tablet. Dropping performance triggers our attention and we will check to see what’s slowing you down. (See the next section.)
Performance Configuration and Monitoring.
Faster web sites perform better. Increasing your web site’s performance is a complex thing to explain, but in simple terms here’s what we do:
Make your site “smaller” so it loads faster.
To start, we make sure your files are optimized for web delivery as soon as they are uploaded. That image at the top of the page? It was 1.2 megabytes as we uploaded it, but it was automatically compressed down to 46 KB. This means it’s 96% smaller, and we didn’t need to enter an editor to do it. It happened in the background.
Optimize your lsCache or WP-Rocket settings
These are plugins for WordPress that handle a lot of optimizations for you. It’s pretty straightforward, but the trick is in knowing which optimizations work transparently, and which ones will break your site. The end result is reducing the number of files that need to be downloaded to display your site to your users, and reducing the size of the essential files as much as possible. Significant reductions in page load time are the result.
Configuring server-level optimizations
These are in three categories:
- Caching your web site in the web server’s cache. If you’re visiting this page, and nothing’s changed since the last time it was viewed, the web server didn’t even need to check the WordPress page itself. It’s caching the last version of the page that was displayed to a previous viewer and serving you that directly. This is fast and leads to the lowest page load times.
- Caching database queries. Every web page WordPress displays requires data to be pulled from the database. All these words you’re reading? Those are stored in the database. We can remember the answers from the last database query, and the database knows if that data is still current, so we can minimize lots of database access, speeding up your site. We use redis for this.
- Caching the WordPress files themselves. WordPress is written in PHP, which is an “interpreted” language. When you view a page that isn’t cached, the web server loads the PHP code which is readable by humans, compiles that into something the web server can read, the code is then run and the results show a web page to the viewer, then the compiled code is thrown away. We cache this compiled code and save this step, resulting in faster we pages.
The added benefit here is that all of these optimizations also reduce load on the server, so you can serve more web pages to more users without slowing down.
CDN Setup
You’re probably using Cloudflare for DNS, and that includes access to their CDN network. What a CDN does is save files from your web page on a global Content Delivery Network, which means when someone’s computer tries to download the image at the top of this page, or the logo, or the CSS files that tell the browser how to format text on this page, they are served from a computer that’s closer to the user than this server is. This is typically the fastest way to serve files.
We can take that a step further and use a CDN for your video files as well, so they load quickly for users wherever they are in the world, and they don’t consume space here on this server. You can click here for an example of how this works. Note that this is not perfect, as every video needs to be uploaded to the CDN manually, but it’s quick to turn on and very affordable.
Plugins for Better WordPress
There are a few we believe are almost essential for most sites. Click here for more details. That’s our sister site, and that page documents our Concierge Managed WordPress. The plugins we install are the same.
What we are doing here is making management of your site easier and faster, and more efficient:
- We include the most popular page builder, Elementor. We also include the Pro version with its additional features, and a third-party paid plugin with additional blocks you can use.
- Image optimization is handled in the background, automatically.
- Caching is handled in a way that you don’t need to touch.
- Your CDN will probably be Cloudflare – Bunny is faster, but not so much that you’ll notice the difference if you’re not benchmarking.
- We install good SEO software. SEO is a black art, but if you do your part to make it clear to the search engines what content is on your site, you do pretty well without any tricks. Our SEO option does things like use AI to summarize your pages and automatically label images so you rank well with very little effort.
These are all fully licensed – we are covering your site under the umbrella of our Agency licenses so you don’t need to purchase them individually.
Better, but not essential
You can have a successful web site without these services, and many are things you can do yourself. But if you want us to handle the behind the scenes work, we’re happy to. Just choose the Influencer package.