45 minutes of changes is enough time to do roughly 4 to 6 of the following changes per month:

• Updating an event page
• Adding a new client testimonial
• Making small additions to or tweaking copy (text) on a page
• Swapping an image
• Uploading a blog post (usually 20 –  30 minutes)

So 45 minutes of development time would allow, for example, a new blog post, 2 new client testimonials and 5 images. Or making 1 small change to website copy (text), swapping 3 – 4 images and adding a new event. 45 minutes does not allow enough time for advanced edits within an online shop, membership section or any graphic design tasks for example. If you’re ever in any doubt as to whether a particular task is covered by your care plan, just ask!

Simply send us an email with clear instructions to support@magpie-creative.co regarding any changes you would like made along with any new images you want uploaded (if relevant) and we’ll let you know when it’s done, usually by the next business day.

Small changes include any changes to content (text) on any page, adding events, adding testimonials, uploading blog posts, updating text on your ‘Welcome’ email for new subscribers or making style adjustments. 

Not included are additional pages, website redesign, creation of content, graphic design requests, adding new products to your online store or setting up an email marketing campaign.

Simply send us an email to support@magpie-creative.co with clear instructions on any changes you would like made along with any new images you want uploaded (if relevant) and we’ll let you know when we’re done, usually by the next business day.

EXAMPLE Included: You would like us to change the prices of particular products in your shop (for a sale) and upload a graphic, that you have provided, to your site announcing your shop sale.
Not included: Uploading a product along with images and description, setting the prices, category, shipping, taxes and formatting it.

EXAMPLE Included: You send us the finished content of your blog post along with the relevant images that you have sourced and we will upload it to your site and publish it on whichever day and time you specify.
Not included: You want us to write your blog post, source the images to go with it and upload it to your site without any formatting or scheduling instructions.

EXAMPLE Included: You would like us to take the text that you have emailed to us and switch it with the original text on your Home page.
Not included: You want us to redesign your homepage or create a new page altogether.

If you have any change requests that fall outside of these areas, please send an email to support@magpie-creative.co and we will provide a quote for the extra work.

If you’d like to make further changes or additions to your site that are not covered by any of our Care plans, please contact us at support@magpie-creative.co and we would be more than happy to help. We can then schedule a time to discuss the work you would like completed and arrange an appropriate solution. 

If you require any additional services of a more regular nature (such as fresh monthly content in the form of blog posts or scheduling and sending out emails to your subscribers) then we would love to discuss this with you further and can create a custom add-on to your plan to implement this.

BLOG POSTS: We have access to a network of talented SEO copywriters who specialise in creating content (writing) for the web that improve your website’s SEO, build trust with your customers and establish you and your business as the experts in your industry. You can read more about the benefits of regular content marketing (blogging) here: The 5 Stages of Organic Online Marketing Explained & 6 Key Ways to Grow Your Business Online.

EMAIL MARKETING: We offer, and highly encourage, all of our clients to invest in email marketing to further build trust and loyalty with their target audience. Simply reach out to us and we can arrange a time to discuss your requirements. You can read more about the power that email marketing provides in the following blog posts: The 5 Stages of Organic Online Marketing Explained, How to Stay Top of Mind With Your Customers & 6 Key Ways to Grow Your Business Online.

For clients in our Master plan, I offer a monthly 30 minute coaching call where I suggest improvements and how to implement them.

As we are already monitoring your site and assessing how its visitors respond via Google Analytics, we are in a prime position to coach you through any necessary adjustments to improve your site’s performance. Whether that’s by experimenting with different lead magnets (subscribe forms), marketing funnels and advertising to help you gather more email addresses & more customers. Or to increase the likelihood of successful purchases in your online store. It could also mean working together to provide customers with better incentives to book in an appointment with you.

If you’re interested in learning how to do something on your website and are in need of training then we would be more than happy to show you. Whatever your business needs, these coaching sessions are a great way for us to continue working as a team towards your goals. 

Your card will be charged automatically each month in the same way that you might pay for your subscription to Netflix or your phone. Each month you will receive a receipt directly to your inbox for you to download or print.

Absolutely. We are here to provide support and value for your business, so of course we would be sad to see you go. But we understand that financial circumstances can change and we wouldn’t dream of tying you down.

To suspend or cancel your subscription simply login to your account and click “cancel” or “suspend”. This stops the subscription immediately and keeps you in control at all times. There is an unlimited amount of times that you can suspend your account, however you may be subject to a reactivate fee if the account has been suspended for more than 7 days. This is because we cannot guarantee the safety of your website during this time away from our care and need to ensure that your website can adequately and safely be reinstalled onto our server. 

Should you wish to pause your subscription, we would urge you to select “suspend” rather than “cancel”. This is simply because, when a subscription is cancelled a client’s entire account will be deleted off our server and so if you change your mind in the future and want to restart, you would need to enter all of your details again. Whereas with a suspension everything is still stored securely within your account.

To reactivate your subscription please contact support@magpie-creative.co

Yes, absolutely. You are free to upgrade and downgrade between the plans as and when you choose. Some of our clients operate seasonally and as such they have quieter months where they won’t be needing as many content updates on their site. For these quieter months they might downgrade to the Maintain care plan to keep everything secure and functioning, but when the busy season comes around again they switch up to the 2nd or 3rd tier and it’s during these times that they see the most growth for their business. You will be able to switch between the plans within your account which keeps you fully in control.

We would recommend retaining the Maintain website care plan as the bare minimum in the interest of your site’s ongoing care.

Please leave the updating to us. Website maintenance is an integral part of updating and keeping your site working properly. At Magpie Creative Co. we take great care to first backup the website, check the website, update, then check the website again for any changes. Our software keeps a record of plugins we update so if there is ever an issue we can see which plugin version was changed and revert back. If you just update from your WordPress admin, we wouldn’t have that record. 

We update clients’ sites once a month so we can devote the time to checking your website thoroughly (either on the 15th or the 30th of each month). Also included within our monthly maintenance reports are the performance and security scans. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket and we address it before you. We also take care about which plugins we are updating and single out large updates (for online eCommerce stores) as its own task for additional quality control.

As you have entrusted your website’s care to us, it’s also important that you make us aware of any plugins you wish to have installed. As a faulty plugin can affect the entire site, we highly recommend that you request us to do it for you otherwise your Care Plan will not cover the cost for us to fix things should it break the website if you install it yourself. 

We work hard to protect your site as much as possible, but we can’t ever guarantee that it won’t be hacked or go down. Unfortunately, simply having a website, no matter how small, is enough to make you susceptible. But that’s where our services come in, so that if, heaven forbid, your site should be hacked and taken down, it can be reinstated easily and quickly thanks to our 24/7 Uptime Monitoring and Backup services. The same thing applies if it breaks for any reason.

This saves you the worry of having to one day find your lovely website gone and having to pay a small fortune to get it built back up again, from scratch. 

If your website is not loading, first check to make sure this is the same experience for everyone at https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

If the website is down just for you, try clearing your browser history (cache and cookies) and reload, also checking your internet connection. If the website is down for everyone, shoot us a support ticket email (to support@magpie-creative.co), even though chances are that our website uptime monitor has already alerted us.

If this happens outside office hours (weekends), call the web host directly and see what they can do to get the website back online. Chances are most likely it’s related to the following issues:

1. Your web hosting, domain or SSL certificate has expired and bill is due for payment
2. The web hosting is experiencing maintenance issues

Anything outside of those we will investigate to bring the site back online.

If you received an email about your website files being compromised, make sure it is legitimate by calling your web hosting company and forwarding the email to our support desk at support@magpie-creative.co.

Our next steps, as your webmaster, is to reach out to your webhost about their protocol for a compromised website and a scan on their end to confirm where the compromised files are on the server. Under your website care plan we will restore a clean backup of WordPress, and then take note from the webhost about where the issue arose if outside of WordPress. This may mean the webhost recommending a third-party service to clean up the compromised files or additional security.

The best way to prevent a compromised website is to keep WordPress and plugins up-to-date, which we do for you monthly under your website care plan, as well as keep daily backups to restore in the event of an issue. Unfortunately just updating won’t prevent a hack 100% which is why we work alongside your web host and third parties to restore your website in the event of a hack and institute security measures to prevent most known methods by hackers.

Common causes of a slow website are unoptimised images and external embedded media and ads.

Full-sized images can consume a lot of bandwidth while loading. So, take time to resize your images. Take a look at the image tag – it allows you to set the height and width. Be sure to scale the photos proportionally so that they don’t get stretched or skewed. Then, consider changing image format, which can significantly reduce the file size. Finally, reduce image quality. No, that doesn’t mean making your photos look bad. It just means tweaking some simple settings. For JPG images, this is done by directly reducing the quality. In most cases, a quality setting of 80 to 90 percent will show no significant changes from the original version. And you can go even lower depending on the type of image, the detail, and the colors. For other image formats such as GIF and PNG, you can reduce quality by opting for a smaller color palette. (We have placed a video tutorial explaining how to optimise your images, you’ll find it in your client dashboard when you log in to your site).

For external embedded media, think twice before embedding someone else’s media into your site. Once you embed external material into your site, your pages will only run as fast as the host site. In other words, if that external site is having a particularly slow day, your site may run slowly too. Don’t let another site drag yours down! Whenever possible, it’s smart to host all content on your own server.

Plugins may also be causing an issue, as just like external embedded media, plugins can bring in resources from other websites. We can perform some investigative work to see what plugins could be causing this outside of the typical monthly website care. Reach out for a quote for evaluation and plugin cleanup.