Frequently Asked Questions
Why Should I Choose Your Service?
- During the years we have been designing & developing WordPress websites for companies, we noticed something that the business owners and managers have in common; while they understand the importance of having a WordPress website to promote their business, they just do not have the time to manage it (sound familiar?).
- With this in mind, we spent years researching and identifying ways to provide businesses the best website security and support services at affordable prices.
- Web Hawk was formed for business owners and managers like you. Allow us to utilize our vast experience to secure and support your website.
Can I Customize My Plan?
- Yes you can! Reach out to us through our Contact Form and we will work with you on creating a custom plan.
Is There A Contract?
- There are no contracts. You can cancel anytime and you will not be charged after your period runs out.
How Can I Pay?
- We accept all major credit cards including MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and American Express. Payments are auto drafted on a recurring basis (monthly or yearly) until you decide to cancel.
Is There A Setup Fee?
- All fees associated with setting up your website to the Web Hawk server resources are currently waived. Setup cost may vary on plan requirements.
Is A Discount Offered For Multiple Websites?
- Yes, we can create a customized quote. Contact us here and let us know how many websites you would like to include.
Do You Support Custom Websites?
- Custom websites have various modifications to the template, theme, widgets, or plugins that were outside the scope of the original developer. This may require us to get familiar with these changes to ensure we can care for your site.
- Simply put, we should be able to, but let us check out your website first to ensure we can properly care for it.
- NOTE: There may be a fee increase do to the additional resources needed to take care of a custom website.
Do You Support Multisite?
- Yes, but we will need to review your website to determine if the Multisite setup allows us to provide you the best security and support.
Do You Support WooCommerce?
- Maybe. WooCommerce websites can be somewhat finicky to the point that things can "break" when a major WooCommerce update rolls out. We will need to review the WooCommerce setup to see if our services are a best option for your website.
Can I Change My Plan?
- DOWNGRADES: You may downgrade at any time, but the service and payment will not be reflected until after the current monthly/yearly period is over.
- UPGRADES: You may upgrade at any time. We will prorate the remainder of any given month/year payment.
How Do I Cancel My Plan?
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- You can cancel your account by submitting a Support Ticket through your client area. We will remove our plugins from your website along with any FTP accounts created for access.
What Passwords Do You Need After I Sign Up?
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To be able to manage all aspects of a website we need access to two things, your WordPress Website and WordPress Hosting.
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You may either create a new account for us or you can provide us with your admin account details and we will create our own admin user on both accounts (WordPress website and host). People usually give us two things to make things simple, their WordPress admin credentials and their hosting account admin credentials.
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We always create our own users so there are no password reset conflicts. This also makes it easy to remove the user account should our services no longer be needed.
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NOTE: We take security very seriously and understand how much trust it takes to share this level of access to your website with us. All information shared will be via secure methods.
What Are The Next Steps?
- When you sign up, your payment confirmation page will include a secure submission form that allows you to submit information needed to get started on your website (you can also update at a later time).
- We will then install plugins that will allow us to properly secure and support your website.
What Plugins Are Installed On My Website?
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We will install a "WPWS Connector" plugin, along with other plugins (e.g. Free Tutorial Videos, Performance, Security) based on your service level.
Does It Matter Where I Host?
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Yes it does. A high quality host is especially important for business websites. We will work with most hosts, but not all. This will be determined when we do a host assessment.
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NOTE: If you had problems with your host or if they are not providing the recommended WordPress environment, we can make suggestions based on your website needs and budget. We can even help you migrate to a new host if need be.
What Are My Responsibilities As a Client?
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As you know, your website is an important part of your business and deserves your attention. We ask that you check in on the website from time to time to ensure it is up to your expectations and/or nothing seems odd.
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If there are problems, please submit a support ticket as soon as you are able so we can work on it (who knows, we may already be working on it!).
When Should I Submit A Support Ticket?
- You should submit a Support Ticket when you notice any of the following:
- Your website is suddenly not loading in a browser and/or is running slow (Uptime, Performance).
- People who try to access your website or purchase something are seeing a warning (Security).
- You noticed your website core, themes, plugins are outdated (Updates).
- You see anything out to the ordinary (e.g. additional user account, odd pages, weird text on the page).
- Please be as descriptive about the problem as you can, you can even attach a screenshot if you think it is helpful.
- You can also submit a Support Ticket if you want a backup copy of your website (Backups) or a customized activity report of your website (Reports).
How Do I Submit A Support Ticket?
- There are multiple ways to submit a Support Ticket:
- A Web Hawk icon will be installed on your admin bar (top of page), click on that icon and you will be directed to the Web Hawk Support Ticket submittal page.
- If you do not have access to your WordPress dashboard, you can also log into your Client Area through Web Hawk's website and submit a Support Ticket through there as well.
What Is The Response Time Of A Support Ticket?
- Our goal is to resolve your Support Ticket within 1 business day. You will be notified if the turnaround time will take more than that.
- In the cases your business website is down and/or hacked...keep in mind we are most likely already working on it (depending on your service plan).
What Are The Support Hours?
- Our business hours are 7am - 7pm (CST) Monday - Friday.
- We monitor websites for security, performance, and uptime 24/7/365.
- We honor major US holidays.
Can I Make Changes On My Own?
- Yes you can! Your website belongs to you and we are here to support you. As a matter of fact, we install complimentary WordPress tutorial videos to guide you through basic website updates, thus saving you development costs.
- If you are having trouble, or decide you do not want to make your own update (perhaps you just do not have the time), just submit a ticket with your request.
Where Are You Located?
- Our HQ is located in Austin, Texas and our Web Hawk office is located in Bee Cave, Texas.
- We are a combination of full time and contract employees, some of us are at the offices while others work remotely throughout the United States.
What Is Backed Up And Where Is It Stored?
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We backup the your WordPress website along with the database. The daily backups are kept in a secure cloud server (AWS).
Why Daily Backups?
- Whether you make updates to your website or not, there are still constant changes going on internally with your website. We want to ensure we have the most recent version of your website/database in the event we need to utilize a backup.
Can I Have Access To The Files?
- Yes, send us a request and we can send you a copy of the latest backup.
How Many Backups Do You Keep?
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We keep the backups for 90 days.
What Could Cause My Website To Go Down?
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Unfortunately there are MANY reasons why a website could go down. Anything from coding errors to server overloads, from hacking to host problems (another reason to have a good host) can cause the website to go down. If your website is down, we will figure out the reason and work to get it back online asap.
How Do You Know When My Website Is Down?
- We have a utility that monitors your website activity all day, every day. When your site is down for 5 minutes, one of our reps is alerted to take a look into the situation.
Will I Be Notified If My Site Goes Down?
- If you want us to tell you when your site is down, we will. Clients typically want to know if a site is down for more than a couple hours.
What If My Host Has Uptime Problems?
- The tradeoff with a low-cost host is typically less uptime reliability. We should be able to determine if your host is good for your business website.
When Are The Updates Done?
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We perform updates during the hours when there won't be much traffic to your website. A key focus is to make sure there is no impact to the website while it is being updated.
Is There A Limit To How Many Plugins & Themes I Can Have?
- Hmmm, interesting question. We will need to review your website to see how many plugins and themes. There may be additional fees if there are more than 30 plugins to manage (it really depends).
What About Premium Plugins and Themes?
- We will review all plugins and themes and let you know if any of them could create an issue. Reputable premium and theme providers send notifications when an update is required.
Why Do I Need To Update My (Core, Plugins, Theme)?
- While the website still may work without updates, keep in mind it will be vulnerable to hacker attacks and be much more susceptible to crashing.
What About Plugins/Themes I Do Not Use?
- Our general recommendation would be to delete plugins and themes that are not used, since that could slow down your business website's performance.
Is Load Time Really That Important?
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Welcome to the "instant gratification" age. Studies show that people are becoming increasingly impatient....and this can impact how long they wait for a page to load.
How Can You Optimize My Website's Performance?
- There are many factors that can affect a website's performance, from hosting to comments & images you have on the site. We review your website and determine the best way to optimize it.
How Will You Monitor My Site Performance?
- We will install a plugin that will constantly monitor your website's performance. As a matter of fact, we will be notified if your website's performance gets worse so we can determine the cause and work towards a solution.
What Type Of Performance Improvement Should I Expect?
- This will be hard to know until we are able to review your website. Once we get a better feel for both, we should be able to generally know how much your website's performance could improve.
How Bad Is Malware?
- Malware can come in all shapes in sizes...from getting you blacklisted by search engines to making you pay money to getting access to your site (ransomware).
- See for yourself, Google "Malware and Impact on Small Businesses"
What Is A Plugin Vulnerability?
- There can be thousands upon thousands of lines of code in each website plugin. Hackers try to find ways to sneak into the code and "inject" their own code in order to get access and do harm to your website.
- Our scanners detect these vulnerabilities and let us know about them so we can work to resolve the issue.
How Will You Secure My Website?
- We will monitor your site for any vulnerabilities and brute force attacks (e.g. hackers trying to login to your site).
- An additional firewall layer is installed to keep bots & attackers from hacking your website.
- Your website will be constantly scanned for any type of malware. Instead of just "alerting" you about it, we will remove it on the spot. This services typically costs $300+/clean up, but is included in the Security Pro & Premium packages.
What Do I Do If My Website Gets Hacked?
- No one can catches every security issue, even with 24/7 monitoring. While we have security measures in place to prevent hacking incidents, hackers are always looking for ways to "make a name" for themselves by finding a way to hack into a site.
- That said, if we can not remove the hacker's presence, we will restore the site from a backup.
Will This Constant Scanning Slow Down My Website?
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Good question! All the security scanning and malware cleanup (if needed) will be done utilizing our server space. Your website server won't notice a thing, which allow it to allocate more of its own server resources to keep your website online & fast.
Will My Website Be 100% Safe?
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While we will do our best to keep hackers from getting in and doing anything malicious with your site, nothing is 100%. That is why our plan includes malware removal and website restore (an expensive option for companies that don't have this feature).
What About My Security Plugins?
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Our monitoring system should work with your plugins. While there are many plugins that monitor security threats, none that we are aware of will completely remove the malware...at least without additional cost.
Do You Remove Malware?
- Yes we do. We are confident our monitoring and security systems will prevent any malware attacks from happening. However, "Murphy's Law" may kick in and it could somehow happen...if so, we will remove the malware at not cost (for listed plans).