The importance of Website Maintenance

Website maintenance isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. Your business’ online presence is key to winning over customers and maximizing business growth.

In fact, it’s vital that you have website maintenance done on a weekly or monthly basis, so that your business doesn’t suffer security breaches, lagging site speed or more. After all, a bad first impression means you may struggle to get sales and retain customers.

In addition, website maintenance for small businesses has a direct impact on:

• Brand image
• User experience
• Security
• Sales strategy

Without site maintenance, you risk not just the security of your site, but also turning off potential customers with slow, outdated or unappealing webpages. You can mitigate these risks by including maintenance and updates into your monthly budget.

What Is a Web Maintenance Plan?

A web maintenance plan involves all areas of your site that require ongoing support and updates. This comprehensive plan is used to ensure top performance of your website, including security, speed and up-to-date content. Often a web maintenance plan will also define the tools and technologies required to achieve top performance – from monitoring dashboards like Google Analytics to status pages such as Instatus.

What Does a Web Maintenance Package Include?

The best web maintenance plans will cover all aspects of your website, so that nothing falls through the cracks. This includes website maintenance and updates such as:

• Security updates and fixes
• Web performance monitoring and optimization (especially speed issues)
• Updates to web content (including SEO, CTAs and broken links)
• Server maintenance
• User experience optimization (on-page UX, accessibility, etc.)
• eCommerce optimization (especially the checkout process)
• Regular backup
• Browser and device testing
• Active and passive monitoring
• Emergencies (such as unplanned outages or hacking)
• Analytics (including optimization suggestions and A/B testing)

What Is the Payment Structure for Website Maintenance Plans?

Typically, this service is offered as pay-as-you-go, retainer hours, or a monthly website maintenance plan or package. Before you craft a website maintenance agreement with your developer partner, be sure to understand your payment structure options.

• Pay-as-you-go site maintenance is when you pay for the updates and monitoring that you want, as you use it. Though this may be right for very small websites, it isn’t usually the best option because it’s hard to budget for your needs. It also means you have to be proactive about requesting the website maintenance and updates that you want.
• Retainer hours (ask about this) means that you pay for a certain number of developer hours per month and can use them freely as you wish. For example, if you pay for 10 retainer hours per month, you can make use of this time to ask for user experience optimization, or request certain updates. Once you’re out of hours, you’ll have to pay additional fees for more work.
• Monthly website maintenance plans or packages involve a defined set of tasks that should be performed every month. Often these plans offer the most holistic approach to your maintenance needs, as developers will complete a checklist of tasks without your prompting. Monthly website maintenance packages may even have different tiers available, so you can choose the level of site maintenance that your business needs.

Website Maintenance Plan Examples

As you dig into potential monthly website maintenance plans or packages, keep in mind that every provider has their own definition of what website maintenance includes. Be sure to read your website maintenance agreement thoroughly, so that you don’t get any surprises down the road.

To give you a sense of what to expect, here are some website maintenance plan examples. As you’ll see, each tier includes a different set of services and developer hours. It is easiest to give your developer ALL of the changes at once, so they can keep track of the time used. If it goes over the allotted hours, you can either pay the difference or upgrade to another tier. If you would like to set up a custom tier based on your needs, we can definitely do that, just click on the GET IN TOUCH button and send us a message!