The Barrel Roll Launch Plan
Why we charge more for the first month of service
Our members, and their websites, matter to us.
We’re not another cookie-cutter WordPress maintenance agency. We get to know our members, their businesses, and of course, their websites. An important part of that process occurs right from the start – our initial audit of your site, which we call the Barrel Roll Launch Plan.
(Barrel Roll is the rocket.)
What is the Barrel Roll Launch Plan, and Why is it necessary?
When was the last time someone thoroughly audited your website?
Has anyone ever carefully reviewed it?
The answer to that question is too often “never.” Just like most things in life, your WordPress website requires routine maintenance and optimization to operate at its best.
The Launch Plan is our process of getting your site onboarded to our systems, carefully reviewing the nuts and bolts, and preparing a long-term optimization strategy unique to your site and business. It’s the starting point for everything we do moving forward.
That’s why the Launch Plan is critical. We often find things that are broken that our members weren’t even aware of. We find security issues, abandoned plugins and themes, and things that are no longer being used but are still running (and slowing down your site).
Here’s a comprehensive list of what we do after you join:
- Run initial performance benchmarking – This is our baseline for how your site was performing before it got the Barrel Roll treatment.
- Onboard your site into our system – We’ll get your site setup with our management tools.
- Setup server-side security scans and run our first scan – Time to find out if anything is there that shouldn’t be.
- Setup and run backups – We automatically backup your site at specified intervals to an offsite, secure location that you always have access to.
- Setup uptime monitoring – We monitor all of our members’ websites from five different locations across the US every minute of every day. (Learn more)
- Cleanup WordPress – There are a few things we remove from WordPress, such as auto-updates (we’ll take care of that for you now) and the annoying Health Check widget.
- Setup Visual Content Monitoring (Premium Members) – We take a baseline screenshot of up to five critical pages on your site; every day our software does this again automatically and compares against the baseline. If things change, we get notified and take a look. (Learn more)
- Setup SEO Tracking (Premium Members) – We configure our SEO software to start monitoring your site and build out the initial reporting so we can start improving your organic rank and increase traffic.
- Account audit – We’ll make sure that the only accounts present on your site are the ones that should be there.
- Plugin audit – We check each plugin to be sure that it’s up to date and maintained by its developer, and provide a list of those that aren’t or that need licenses.
- Theme audit – Do you have a child theme? We’ll check and let you know, and we’ll take a look at your active theme to be sure it’s up to date and configured properly.
- Comments/SPAM audit – Comment and form entry SPAM is something that can really bloat a database. We check to see how your site is faring and make recommendations if SPAM is an issue.
- Security audit – More than just a quick scan, we look at configuration settings and WordPress features to be sure your site is safe and secure. We also run a full server-side scan of your site to look for existing issues.
- Redirects/Broken links audit – This is something a lot of other maintenance agencies miss. We crawl your entire site and find every link that’s redirecting, broken, and set to not be indexed and review them. Then, we provide you with a list of recommended next steps.
- Form tests – There have been many, many times where we tested a form only to discover the notification didn’t make it. This is crucial to get right.
- Optimization/performance audit – Based on our initial performance testing, we’ll create a list of recommended next steps to make your site load faster than ever. (Learn more)
- Initial optimization – There are usually a few quick wins we can achieve during the audit. If there are, we go ahead and implement them so you start seeing improvements right away.
A Proper Audit Takes Time
That’s why we charge for it. Your first month will cost a little more than our regular monthly rate, but in return, you get a comprehensive audit that serves as a launching pad for great things.
We perform quarterly audits throughout the year so we can keep everything moving in the right direction, all while we continue to maintain your site on an ongoing basis.
This is what we believe expert WordPress maintenance should be, and if we were in your shoes, we wouldn’t settle for anything less.
Have questions about The Launch Plan or OUR services?
We’re here and happy to answer them.
