To get the best from your website, it must be looked after. A good analogy is with a garden. A newly planted garden will be in excellent condition but without the necessary care and maintenance it will soon fall into neglect. The same is true of a website where content and software can easily become outdated. In order to protect and improve the return on investment you achieve from your site, we offer a range of support and maintenance services.
Backup and Restore
We will backup your website on a weekly basis (or more frequently if required) and keep the backups safely. We will then restore your site if it ever becomes corrupted.
Software Updates
We will update your Content management System (CMS), for example, WordPress, and associated software (e.g. plugins) to ensure your site is running at its best. Keeping all the base software up to date also helps ensure that known security vulnerabilities are dealt with. If you are not keeping the software underpinning your website up to date you risk being hacked.
An estimated 37,000 websites are hacked every day. (source)
Website Amendments
Based on your needs, we can design, develop, test and implement required changes to your website. These may be to add new functionality, amend the content or to develop a new area of the site to adapt to changes in your business. With this service we operate as if we were your in-house web development department including the provision of email and phone support.
Website Reporting
Our full maintenance service includes quarterly reporting on the search engine and technical performance of your website. The report covers the following areas as a minimum:
- number of visitors in the period
- number of pages/visitor
- time on site
- visitor location
- most popular pages
- search engine position for a set of agreed keywords
This information can be extremely useful in determining changes that are needed to improve search engine optimisation. We will interpret the data and use this to suggest amendments to your website to maintain and improve its search engine placement.
This regular monitoring of your site allows us to keep it in top condition when used in conjunction with our ‘Website Amendment’ services.
Hosting
Reliable hosting is vital to ensure maximum uptime and best performance of your website. Unfortunately, there are many companies that offer poor quality web hosting and very limited support.
Over the years we have honed down the list of hosting providers and offer 2 packages to clients. The first is on shared hosting which is economical and reliable but which is not suitable for sites where performance is critical. Our second package offers the same reliability as the first but is faster and will also alert if any problems with the website are encountered such as attempts to flood the site with requests.
Summary
Having the right support and maintenance for your website is critical for its success. We can combine the services you require into a fixed fee, annual contract which allows you to acquire the support you need at a fixed price.
This article goes into more detail about the benefits of having a support and maintenance plan for your website and this post discusses how to recognise errors on your website that could frustrate visitors and potentially be the cause of lost business.
