Your website is essential to your business. Keep it running smoothly by giving it the care it deserves. Our core offer includes:
Security Hardening
24/7 security monitoring keeps hackers out
WordPress Updates
Weekly updates of Core, Theme and Plugins
Offsite Backups
Enjoy peace of mind with daily and weekly backups
Performance Optimzation
Improve site speed and keep your visitors around
BentonWebs offers three very affordable tiers of services that support your business , organization or project to thrive. Tiers two and three are customized just for you.
Please contact Todd at (760) 731-4855 or at [email protected] if you have any questions or to explore what will serve you best for tiers two and three which are each uniquely customized for you.
Backup, Security and Performance Services
$35.00 / month and a $99.00 sign-up fee
We offer affordable yet comprehensive maintenance services to keep your site up-to-date and secure from hackers, spambots and other threats. Read the description below for all of the details.
Description
The need
Fundamentally, security is not about perfectly secure systems. Security…is risk reduction, not risk elimination. It’s about employing all the appropriate controls available to you, within reason, that allow you to improve your overall posture — reducing the odds of making yourself a target and subsequently getting hacked. WordPress Security CodexWordPress powers more than 37.6% of all websites on the internet. With hundreds of thousands of theme and plugin combinations in the WordPress ecosystem, it’s no surprise that security vulnerabilities exist and hackers seek to exploit them. However, there is also a very strong community that supports the WordPress platform to ensure these vulnerabilities get patched as quickly as possible. As a result, weekly plugin and theme updates — as well as uptime and security monitoring — are vital to keeping your website safe and functioning properly, especially in light of the recent increases in “brute force” and other attacks. To learn more, visit: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/.
No site is completely immune from being hacked (as we have seen from recent news stories and wikileaks revelations), however, our job is to make it difficult for hackers so they move on to someone else’s site. And if your site does get hacked, we’ll know about it instantly and be able to remove the malicious code and restore the site.
Why hackers do what they do:

How hackers exploit WordPress sites:

How do you know you’ve been hacked?
Clear indicators of a hack include:
- Website is blacklisted by Google, Bing, etc.
- Host has disabled your website
- Website has been flagged for distributing malware
- Readers complaining that their desktop AV’s are flagging your site
- Contacted that your website is being used to attack other sites
- Notice behavior that was not authorized (i.e., creation of new users, etc…)
- You can visibly see that your site has been hacked when you open it in the browser: Examples:
- Defacement – digital graffiti is found on your site
- Links on your site that take you to another site
Potential Repercussions
It depends on which of the above has happened, and if your site actively sells goods or services or not. If you make a living from your site, it can be very costly. At minimum, it’s a nuisance. It takes time and therefore money to remove the offending software/hack — sometimes upwards of 5-10 hours to root out all problems.
What we will do
- Daily and Weekly Backups: Backups are extremely important – not only in case your site is hacked but also to protect against errors caused by updates to the WordPress core software, plugins and themes. If your site was created by BentonWebs, we already do weekly backups to your hosting account but you also need a daily backup. And these backups need to be stored somewhere other than the same server that is hosting your website – in case your host’s server goes down or they inadvertently delete your site (which we have had happen previously). We’ll do that for you using Dropbox and we’ll keep 4 weeks of weekly backups.
- Weekly WordPress Core, Theme and Plugin updates: All these various forms of software are updated regularly to add additional features/functionality and to patch security holes. Hackers look for and often exploit vulnerabilities in the WordPress core code and within plugin and themes. Fortunately, WordPress developers and external security experts discover these vulnerabilities and notify the appropriate parties so they can release updates. However, your site needs to be updated as soon as possible after the patch/fix is released. These updates are now happening so frequently, that unless your site is being updated weekly, you are at much higher risk of being hacked. We will update your site to the newest versions of these apps on a weekly basis. We perform these updates on your production/live site and test. If there are issues, we roll back to a previous backup. Then we create a staging site where we investigate the issues, so we can then perform the updates on the production/live site.
- Security Hardening: We’ll install the leading WordPress security plugin – WordFence – and tune it to make your site less vulnerable to potential hackers. This plugin features a variety of tools to harden your site: brute force attack (robots trying to guess passwords) prevention, firewall, etc. We’ll also set it up to scan for files that are not in the existing repository of WordPress core and plugin files so that if a hacker inserts malicious code (malware, spamvertizing, etc.) we’ll know about it and be able to remove it right away.
- Support, troubleshooting and removal of problems: This not only includes being hacked, but also unexpected issues that arise as a result of WordPress, Plugin or Theme updates. For example, one of our client’s site pages were turned into random illegible characters by an update to one of the plugins. Whenever this happens, it takes time to figure out what happened and fix it. We’ll do that as part of your monthly fee. We’ll also fix forms not working and other maintenance-related issues.
- Add SSL/TLS (https://):
Using a secure connection is an important part of WordPress security. If your site starts with ‘https://’ and is green (in most browsers) or has a lock icon, that indicates it is using SSL/TLS. Signing in via HTTPS and having your visitors complete forms via SSL/TLS insures that your login information is sent encrypted across the network and that someone listening in can’t steal your or your clients’ username and password or data. Google and Firefox started giving a warning if someone fills out a form and the page is not SSL/TLS. If your site isn’t already SSL/TLS, we can install one for free using Let’s Encrypt. This setup is included in the $99 one-time setup fee.
- Performance and Security Optimization: The performance of your site – how fast your pages load – is very important. If people find your site, but it takes too long to load, your visitors are going to give up and go on to something else. Google knows this and therefore now includes site speed as one of their ranking factors. So, how do you speed up your site? By using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN speeds up your website by loading static resources (images, javascript files, html, stylesheets, etc.) from a data center nearest to your user, instead of from your web hosting server. Physical proximity has a very real effect on load times, so this can drastically improve your page load times. But it’s not just about speed – using a CDN also frees up your bandwidth by handling the transfer of most of your large files. A CDN also protects itself and all the data it stores as well as a website’s origin from any data breaches or internet hackers. The most common data threat are various forms of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. A CDN has proper techniques for preventing, detecting and correcting different forms of DDoS attacks. Prevention measures such as HTTP load balancing have an always-on approach, making sites less vulnerable to attacks. Detection systems within a CDN look for suspicious behavior and highlight the need for additional investigation and action. An example of a detection might be a traffic surge in which case the CDN provider has systems in place to automatically notify those responsible for the website. Corrective measures such as secured DNS will block out unwanted requests while continuing to allow trustworthy requests to continue being served. Finally, if your server goes down, Cloudflare will serve your website’s static pages from their cache. We will set up the Cloudflare free plan for your website. Cloudflare is one of the top 5 CDN’s and has a free plan that covers many of the basics. We will tune it using the same settings we use for our own site.
- Uptime monitoring: We’ll add your site to our Uptime Robot account, which provides free monitoring of your website’s uptime and it will notify us if your site goes down so we can investigate and get it back up.
$150-300/mo depending on your needs and goals.
$400 one-time set up fee
Includes all of the components of Tier One plus the following:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in Google’s -- or another search engine’s -- search results. SEO focuses on rankings in the organic (non-paid) search results.
The two main factors determining where you place on a Search Engine Results Page are:
- On-page SEO factors
- On-page SEO factors are all the things you can influence on your own website. All kinds of technical aspects of your website are important for the chances of your website to rank in the search engines. The structure of your website, your site speed and the content of your site are important on-page SEO factors.
- Off-page SEO factors
- Next to on-page SEO factors, there are off-page SEO factors. These off-page SEO factors are a bit more difficult to influence, though. The most important off-page factor are the links to your site. The more (relevant) sites link to your website, the higher your ranking in Google will be.
The need
Without action in these two areas, your site will not rank well in search engines, if at all (with the exception of possibly ranking your business name or site name). This will drastically limit your site's traffic and undercut the main purpose for having a website, which is enabling your target audiences to find you and purchase your products and/or services. In order to prevent this from happening, we will take action in these two areas, resulting in greater site traffic for the relevant search terms for your business or organization.
What We Will Do
There are many parts that make up the integrated whole of on-and-off page SEO, which is why we recommend an ongoing campaign. The work of building links, testing and validating the best keywords and having engaging content that your visitors will read can't be done in a month. However, since the results are measurable with tools such as Google Analytics, you'll know whether your investment is providing a worthwhile return or not within the first six months. At that point, we expect you will choose to continue since your return should be significantly exceeding your investment.
Setup fee includes:
- Google, Bing, Yahoo Indexing
- Submit XML Sitemaps to Google, Bing, Yahoo
- Google Search Console setup
- Google Analytics setup
- Install Yoast SEO plugin
- Develop a keyword strategy with you
- Develop a content strategy with you
- In-depth evaluation of the competition
Monthly fee includes SEO and Reporting
Use proven SEO tools to do:
- Comprehensive on-page SEO – title tags, meta descriptions, keywords and keyword phrases, alt tags, original quality web content creation (in conjunction with you), internal linking, etc.
- Careful link building (off-page SEO) – by hand, on diverse domains with high domain authority.
- Analysis to learn from trends, traffic and more. Use this to evaluate and make improvements on an ongoing basis.
- Reporting of results on a monthly basis so you can see the impact of your investment with us.
$400-650/mo depending on your needs and goals. $400 One-Time Set Up Fee
Includes all of the components of Tiers One and Two, plus the following:
The need
An important element of helping a business to thrive is nurturing the relationship between your business and your clients and prospects. This can vary widely depending on the business or organization you run -- from providing valuable information in the form of newsletters or blogs that keep your clients engaged in what you provide and therefore "top of mind," to providing special offers, promotions or other incentives to encourage them to engage with you. It all depends on what makes sense for your organization.
Additionally, it is difficult for some businesses to lead their market in search engine results due to the length of time they have been in business (if it is shorter than their competitors) or other factors, such as the already established inbound links that competing businesses have built. In these cases, where it may be difficult to reach the first page in search engines through non-paid search (SEO), you can pay to reach clients and prospects through paid search -- also known as Google Ads and Bing Ads -- or other strategies such as remarketing or utilizing tools such as Outbrain, which uses behavioral targeting to recommend articles, slideshows, blog posts, photos or videos to a reader on popular sites that link back to your site.
With an extensive background in all forms of marketing -- from copywriting to public relations and from advertising to email marketing, we can help you create a strategy and implement it to help your business meet its objectives.
What we will do
We'll have an in-depth discussion with you about your sales goals and your current marketing strategies to discover areas for improvement. Based on these conversations and our understanding of your business or organization, we'll co-create strategies to test and we'll implement these strategies to see which have the best return on your investment of time and money. Then, we'll work to improve those over time, while periodically testing new strategies as new technologies are introduced. This might include:
- Email marketing or blogging
- We'll work with you to create a regular communication so you to stay in front of your clients and prospects or create special sales offers to encourage people to buy. We'll build special landing pages associated with these campaigns.
- Online advertising
- Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising, LinkedIn Advertising, Outbrain, Remarketing and a whole host of other strategies that are best suited to your organization and your goals.
Note: These fees included in our services above do not include the cost of the ads themselves (through Google, Facebook, Bing, Outbrain). These fees are separate. Please discuss this with us if you have any questions about expected investments in these services.
Choose Your Package
Tier One: Backup, Security and Performance Services
Tier Two: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Most Popular!
$150-300
Per Month- Also includes all features of Tier One
- 400 One-Time Setup Fee
Tier Three: Blogging/Email Marketing & Advertising
$450-600
Per Month- Includes all of the features of Tiers One and Two
- 400 One Time Setup Fee