Maintenance or No?

Some examples of administrative tasks:I need to know how many subscribers I have for my newsletter. – I’m responsible for putting the subscriber form on your site and making sure it works. You are responsible for everything else as it concerns your newsletter, especially if you’re using a 3rd party tool, like Mailchimp, SendFox, etc.Has anyone signed up for the training I had you post the other day? – I’m responsible for completing the task of setting up the form for people to sign up for the training. You are responsible for checking the numbers.A plugin I added is causing a conflict with another plugin. Can you figure out what’s going on? – Since you are paying me for maintenance, I strongly encourage you not to add plugins without consulting me first. If you add a plugin that “breaks” your site or some specific functionality, then the onus on you to figure out what’s going on or you can pay me an additional fee to fix it for you.I need to change the email on my user account. – This is something you can do yourself by going to your profile and updating your email. You can even change the admin email for the whole site yourself, even though you may need a tutorial to do one or both. I’ll create the tutorial, and then you can make those changes yourself.I want to do some tests on some pages on my site. Can you do a backup for me? – Maintenance includes one (1) daily backup, and I do those everyday. If you need another backup, then you will do that yourself. I will make a written/video tutorial for you, and then you can do backups any time you like.My hosting provider is telling me that ____. Can you deal with them, because I have no idea what they’re talking about? – This is a “you” thing. Dealing with your hosting provider is all on you. It usually has nothing to do with WordPress maintenance. If it does, you need to get that information from them and pass it on to me. I can deal with your hosting provider on your behalf, but it’s billable and not included in maintenance and/or site updates.I have a client who can’t log in. Is it okay for me to give them your email, and you help them? – This is never okay. You deal with your clients, and I deal with you as my client. Giving my email to 3rd parties is never okay unless I explicitly give you my permissionSome examples of maintenance:For some reason, I’m getting a lot of comment spam on my latest blog post. Can you help me deal with that? – Sure! I need to look into why comment spam is getting through and not being thwarted before it becomes a pain in your neck. It’s also my responsibility to remove all the comment spam, even if there are 2,000 messages to delete. Seriously, I had a client who had almost that many once.My site is super slow. It’s taking forever for pages to load. Is there anything you can do about it? – Sure! I need to do several things to troubleshoot a slow-loading site: check the database, remove revisions, check the security plugins to see if you’re being hit with a “denial of service” attack, look in the Media Library and see if you’re uploading huge media, etc. After I do all my checks, there may be things that you need to do, as well. I’ll do my part, and then I’ll let you know what you need to do on your end. A slow site is not always a maintenance issue. Sometimes it’s site-owner-induced.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, so please ask me if you’re not sure.