When you buy a website, you’re making an investment in your business — a website maintenance plan is the most important thing you can buy to protect that investment.
Your website is the hub for all your digital marketing efforts (and many of your non-digital efforts as well). It’s the place you’re always sending people who are interested in your products/services.
It’s valuable — really valuable.
This is value that grows over time. The more content you put on your website, the more you update it and change it, the more you edit it to make it really shine, the more it’s worth to you.
This is something that you want to be maintained — and maintained well. The last thing you need is for a hacker to break your website and throw all that work in the garbage.
If you’re looking into a website maintenance plan, here’s the bare minimum that you should be getting out of that plan.
1. Website Hosting
A good maintenance plan should include website hosting. Unless you’re experienced in hosting your own website, why would you try to go it alone?
Managing your own website hosting is more than just setting everything up. There are tasks that must be completed on a regular and semi-regular basis to ensure your host is doing everything it’s supposed to do.
And if there’s a problem, you need to have a clear idea of how to handle it. In some cases, website hosts will take care of a problem for you, but not always — they might need you to do some things, and if you’re not experienced with how websites work, you might not be able to get the problem fixed even with their help.
Using a maintenance company, you can typically get access to premium hosting without paying the premium hosting price. You would pay the same price for hosting alone as you would for your entire maintenance plan — hundreds of dollars.
Bargain hosting is a get-what-you-pay-for situation with slow load times, frequent outages, and terrible support — you’re also on your own if anything goes wrong. With a maintenance plan, you have someone who knows what they’re doing watching your website. Your website is going to be much faster plus you won’t have to deal with outages yourself.
2. Daily Website Backups
At a minimum, your website should be backed up every time a change is made or software (plugins/themes) is updated.
We recommend daily backups so you can easily “roll back” if anything goes wrong. This protects you from user errors, malware, and bad software updates.
However, one of the biggest reasons you should back up regularly is in case you get hacked. If someone targets your website for any reason, they could do all kinds of nasty things to it, including deleting it entirely.
If you haven’t backed up in weeks or months, this can be a huge problem, especially if you’re putting new content on your website regularly. Even if you have the content stored somewhere else in Google Docs or Word docs, you still have to put it all back up there — it’s a giant pain.
3. Weekly Software (Plugin/Theme) Updates
WordPress core files, themes, and plugins are regularly updated to add functionality to your website — but more importantly, they play a critical role in keeping your website secure. You need someone on your side to manage these updates for you.
If you miss an update, it could compromise the security of your website, and sometimes, the updates can conflict, meaning you need to know how to fix issues that arise from conflicts in the code itself.
Most people cannot do this on their own. It requires a deep understanding not just of WordPress (or whatever content management system you use), but of the computing languages underlying the CMS.
If you don’t know PHP — if you don’t even know HTML and CSS — then you probably want to have someone on your team who does… you know, like your website maintenance plan provider.
4. Enterprise Grade Network Security
Your average website host is not going to stop your site from being hacked. You need an enterprise-grade firewall and security team on your side.
Even if you think no one would ever hack your site, you need this protection. Hackers don’t necessarily hack valuable websites — even relatively “worthless” websites can be turned into spam tools for the hackers.
Hackers attack thousands of sites at a time to steal whatever data they can and leave a mangled mess behind — if they don’t just delete your website entirely.
Hackers go for low-hanging fruit, and they’re not all just focused on making money or stealing — some of them like to cause chaos for the sake of causing chaos. They think it’s funny.
If you don’t have enterprise-grade network security, you are the low-hanging fruit.
Your client data and online reputation are too important to risk.
5. Uptime Monitoring And Performance Scans
If anything happens and your website is down or not loading correctly, you risk losing revenue, damaging your brand, and losing the hard-won trust of your clients and prospects.
A great website maintenance plan will include automatic website scans that alert the maintenance team immediately if anything happens to your website so they can take corrective action.
The last thing you need is to check your website for the first time in a few days or a week and find out it’s been down the entire time.
If you are taking care of website maintenance yourself, you’re not going to know the moment your website goes down.
6. Website Changes & Updates
You have too much to do in your business to worry about updating your website, posting new content, and changing content to ensure your site is always up-to-date and relevant.
A great maintenance plan will include time each month to make these changes for you. Even if you’re already creating content regularly, do you have the time and patience to put it all into your website correctly, to change all the settings correctly, to ensure the content is optimized for SEO?
Paying someone else to take care of it gives you back time, time you can use to do something far more valuable for your business.
Above and Beyond Website Maintenance
We include marketing coaching calls in our maintenance plans to help you do more with your website.
You made an investment in your site, and we want to see you use it as a high ROI asset in your business. We’ll meet quarterly or monthly to review your marketing and help you improve your strategies.
Get the Website Maintenance Plan That’s Right for You
From a basic website maintenance plan with everything listed above to a plan that helps you transform your website into a marketing machine, the right plan for you is just a click away.