We’re so excited that you’ve selected Cornershop Creative to maintain and support your site! As a part of the Cornershop maintenance program, there are several steps in the process of onboarding. Depending on your plan, you may not need to complete all steps below, but our Support team is here to answer any of your questions.
Steps as a part of onboarding may include the following (optional items depending on support plan marked with *). If Cornershop just built your site and you are joining the maintenance program post-launch, you’ll skip right to the last step:
Kick-off and discovery
Audit*
Migration*
Installation of support tools
Kick-Off and Discovery
During this phase, you’ll have a chance to meet with our Support Manager and members of our Support team to go over what is included in your plan, our support process, and your specific onboarding process. After that call, our Support Manager will send an onboarding packet with a few items:
Credentials worksheet
Discovery worksheet (for M+S plans)
Information on migration (if migrating to Kinsta)
It is important that all information requested in the above items is completed as thoroughly as possible and in a timely manner as to not delay the subsequent steps in the process.
Through our kick-off conversation and the discovery worksheet, we’ll get to know more about you, your organization, and your site.
If you are migrating to Kinsta, this is also when we’ll discuss a migration date. More information on that is below in the Migration section.
Audit
During this phase, our Support Manager and developer will review key areas of your site we’ve identified as important to get familiar with in order to best maintain your site. Following our audit, you’ll receive a report with our findings and recommendations, as well as accompanying estimates for anything that is not covered under your maintenance plan. Our Support Manager will send this document; afterwards you have a 2 week window to schedule an optional follow-up call to discuss any items in the audit.
The areas we look at during this audit include:
Theme
Our team will review your theme, which is the visual foundation of your site. If it is a third-party theme, we’ll outline any available updates that should be performed (please note that theme updates are not covered under Cornershop maintenance plans) and review any child theme and customizations made. If it is a custom theme, we’ll make note of the framework it is built on and get an understanding of the development tooling and how that aligns with our development practices.
Plugins
Plugins add functionality to your site, without custom coding. As these are developed by third-parties, they often need regular updating, which we’ll take care of for you each week as a part of your maintenance plan! This part of the audit allows Cornershop developers to become familiar with the plugins that are running on your site, and to look out for any red flags. During this portion of the audit, we’ll review you plugins for:
Plugins that should be removed (i.e. banned, not in active development, poses a security risk, or are installed but not active).
Premium plugins that won’t update via an automated process and/or require licenses or credentials.
Any plugins that are severely out of date that could have adverse impacts during the next update.
For plugins with their own add-on ecosystem, such as WooCommerce, we’ll review add-ons currently active and their license status.
Media Library
If you are hosting on Kinsta, hosting costs are already included in your maintenance fee. As with most hosting platforms, your site has a finite amount of disk space available. During this portion of the audit, we’ll run Media Deduper to identify ways to conserve disk space by finding potential duplicate and unused images, as well as flagging videos and other large files to be reviewed and transferred from the Media Library to a third party storage option.
Speed
Google PageSpeed is a powerful tool to help better understand how performant your site is - one of the factors Google takes into consideration for SEO. We’ll run your site through Google’s PageSpeed Insights and share the findings and recommendations on how to improve your site’s speed.
Accessibility
Accessibility is a term regarding the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible, especially for those who have impairments that prevent them from using a website in a traditional way. In order to assess your site’s accessibility, we’ll run it through an accessibility checker and identify the issues and degree of severity, providing a baseline estimate to improve your site’s accessibility.
SEO
We also run your site through our SEO crawler Moz to identify critical technical and content issues on your site that may be preventing a higher search ranking. We’ll provide you those findings with an explanation of what they are and how to address them, and an overall recommendation for next steps to make sure you have a good baseline for SEO performance on your site.
Security
The number one cause of security breaches on a WordPress site is out of date plugins. The second one is password insecurity. We’ll take this time to make sure you have two-factor authentication set up for all admin accounts, as well as reviewing inactive accounts that could present security risks. We’ll also keep an eye out for other potential security risks, such as if you collect personal information or process transactions through Wordpress, and make sure you have property security measures in place.
Specific Requests
Lastly, if there is anything not covered in the above that you’d like our team to explore, we’ll start that process here and provide next steps in the audit.
Migration
Migration starts with selecting a date for the migration. Our preferred day of the week for migrations is Tuesday, but can be scheduled anytime during business hours Monday through Thursday. It is important to note that your site will display a ‘maintenance mode’ alert for a brief period that day, and your staff will have to pause any updates on the site (a ‘content freeze’) between close of business the day before until Cornershop has confirmed the migration is complete. This is to make sure there is no data loss that occurs during the migration. We recommend choosing a day/week without any major events happening for your organization/company, so that the migration has minimal impact on your operations.
Once we’ve got the migration date set, we’ll work with your new host, Kinsta, to schedule the migration and make sure the site is ready to be migrated.
On migration day, we’ll let you know when the migration begins and provide updates during the day. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours - and then your site will be living safely on Kinsta.
Installation of Support Tools
Depending on your onboarding plan, the last step in the process is adding your site to our support tools. This includes:
Uptime monitoring service
Security protections via WordFence
Management platform for automated plugin updates (depending on host and plan)
Virtual regression testing script
Support ticketing platform (Freshdesk)
After we’ve added you to all tools, our Support Manager will send an email completing your onboarding to Cornershop Support.
We look forward to assisting you and maintaining your site moving forward. Many of your questions can be answered in our KnowledgeBase here, or you can reach out to support@cornershopcreative.com.