You've made a great choice by signing up for a Cornershop Creative's maintenance / support plan, and now it's time to onboard your site to our support systems.
Typically this process involves:
Kick-off
Migration to Cornershop's preferred hosting platform, Kinsta
Installation of support tools
Onboarding audit/health check
Kick-Off and Discovery
During this phase, you’ll have a chance to meet with our Support Director and members of our Support team to go over your plan's coverage and features, Cornershop's support process, and your specific onboarding. After that call, our Support Director will request a few items:
Credentials/access to Wordpress, domains/DNS/hosting, etc.
Information on migration if migrating to the Kinsta hosting plan
Discussing the setup of Cloudflare, a performance and security tool for DNS that can improve site speed and reduce bad traffic
It is important that all information requested in the above items is completed as thoroughly and quickly as possible to avoid delays.
Audit
During this phase, the Support Director and developer will review key areas of your site to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the site's overall health. 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 plan. The Support Director will send this document; afterwards you can 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. We’ll outline any available updates that should be performed (please note that due to potential breaking changes, theme updates are not covered under Cornershop plans) and review any child theme and customizations made.
Plugins
Plugins add functionality to your site, without custom coding. As these are developed by third-parties, they often need regular updating, which we take care of for you each week as a part of your 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 look out 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 to receive updates.
Any plugins that are significantly 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, which 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 an SEO analysis to identify critical technical and content issues on your site that may be preventing a higher search ranking. We’ll provide you those findings and an overall recommendation for next steps to make sure you have a good baseline for SEO performance on your site.
Security
The number two cause of security breaches on a WordPress site is out of date plugins. The number one cause is password/login 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 collecting personal information or processing 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 usually your site will need to 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 the migration date is set, we’ll schedule the migration and make sure the site is ready to be migrated.
On migration day, we’ll let you know when the migration has completed. Most migrations take just a few hours - and then your site will be live 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)
Visual regression testing setup
Support ticketing platform (Freshdesk)
After we’ve added you to all tools, the Support Director 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.