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Why you need a website maintenance plan for your website

A website maintenance helps protect your website from bad things happening to it. A website maintenance plan will decrease the likelihood of your business losing money.

What is the cost of a website maintenance plan?

Website maintenance plans can vary in price and you can expect to pay anywhere between £50 – £250 per month. This depends on a variety of factors including support hours needed and features.

What’s included in a website maintenance plan?

Plugin, Core and Theme Updates

One of the main services of a website maintenance plan are Plugin, Core and Theme Updates. These three things work together to give you the finished website. If you don’t update these things hackers may find a way to get through the back door of your website. If your website gets updated on a regular basis it helps stave away the bad things.

Plugin Deletion

Too many plugins can slow down or cause a security concern for your website. It’s recommended to ask your web developer to delete plugins which aren’t needed.
Your web developer should also recommend deleting plugins that are out of date. Outdated plugins can leave the backdoor open to hackers and bots.

Backups

What is a backup? A backup is a copy of your website stored offline or online (or both). If something bad happens to your website you can use a backup to restore it to its original condition.
Depending on the level of support you choose a backup is usually created once every day, week or month.
I recommend for larger websites such as E-commerce to update your website at least twice a week.

Up-time Monitoring

Up-time monitoring means monitoring the website on a regular to see if it has gone down at any time. This is usually a technical issue causing the downtime including Domain name expiry.

Security Monitoring

Threats can happen in all forms including Brute Force and Malware injection. A well secured website is a happy website and will help ensure your business won’t lose any money.
Features of a security plugin:

  • Brute Force Detection
  • Admin Login URL file path change
  • IP Logging
  • GEO Blocking
  • Malware Scanning

Spam upkeep

Every website is subsceptible to spam – this includes bots commenting on blog posts. As part of the spam upkeep service these messages or comments get deleted on a regular basis.

Speed Optimisations

Did you know? Page speed is an important website ranking factor in Google? Every new image that gets uploaded to your website will need optimising for speed. Your hosting server also plays a big part in page speed so recommendations will made on this. Other factors which can effect speed of a website include:

  • CSS Delivery
  • Javascript
  • Plugins Installed
  • Caching
  • Sitemap Caching
  • Image Optimisations

Support

Making sure you have support in a website maintenance package is very important. Why is this?
If something goes wrong with a website form who are you going to turn to? A website developer of course. What happens if an image disappears off a website? Again you will turn to the website developer.
Things will happen to your website whether you like it or not. Technologies change, software goes out of date and sure enough you will need someone to fix it.

Google Analytics

You need a great way of actually finding out who is visiting your website. Google Analytics is perfect for this and shows you daily, monthly and yearly who is visiting. Google Analytics also shows you what individual website pages are being visited.

Is Hosting included in a website maintenance plan?

Your web developer may include hosting within the cost of your maintenance plan. The reason why they do this is simplicity. By keeping everything under one roof there will be no surprise costs to the customer.

Taking care of your website so you don’t have to

A website maintenance plan gives the business owner peace of mind. They know that if someone professional is taking care of it they can carry on with their own business.
Some business owners also worry that if they touch the website something could break.

Website Maintenance Plans Questions and Answers

Is website consulting included in a website maintenance plan?

Website consulting is usually an extra charge to a website maintenance plan. Web developers will go away and spend their time coming up with ideas to improve your business.

Is content marketing included in a website maintenance plan?

Content marketing is an extra charge to a website maintenance plan. Content marketing includes creating new web pages, blog articles and infographics. By creating more optimised content you are feeding the search engines with content. The more content you have on a website the better chances of getting more leads.

How many small updates can you have in a plan?

You will need to discuss with your web developer how many hours you are likely going to need. A brochure website isn’t going to need as many hours compared to an e-commerce website.

Do email addresses come with maintenance plans?

Professional web developers usually create professional addresses on behalf of the client. Clients are usually responsible for the monthly billing & costs.

If I need something custom created for the website does a plan cover this?

Anything custom created for a website is usually out of scope of a maintenance plan. Usually you will need to ask for a separate quote when you need more functionality.

Do plans come with submission to Google?

When a web developer takes on a website they will usually add your website to Google and look for any errors.

What requirements do web developers need to access your website?

Web developers only need access to the WordPress website itself. This means the Admin username and password. Once a web developer has access they will usually add a separate admin username/password.

Is Email Support included in a plan?

Many web developers will look into these problems. If there’s anything too complicated you will usually need to contact the provider.

Contact Digital Burst Media if you need help with your website.

If you need help with your business website then please feel free to get in touch.

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Nathan Wilkins

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