They say “everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance”, but it’s got to be done. The question is by who.
Support and maintenance is boring. But important work often is.
You don’t want to do it. Internal IT teams are often too busy to do it. You may even question whether it matters, as it’s a service that mostly goes unseen. Until something breaks. Or your site is compromised. Support helps prevent problems and can come to the rescue if they do occur.
My service includes
- Additional security and spam-prevention measures
- Regular scheduled off-site backups
- Uptime monitoring, immediately alerting if your site goes down
- Regular scheduled software updates
- A staging site, hosted by me
- My developer software licences, as appropriate
- A monthly check-over where I look for issues
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before
Let’s talk through a few scenarios where maintenance can help.
You called your user account ‘admin’ and your password was ‘Timmy14’. Now your website has been hacked.- Your blog posts and contact forms get inundated with spam.
Prevented by security measures.
- A potential customer submits your enquiry form, but you never got an email. So they phone you up to complain, or post a negative review online.
- The emails your site sends to users land in junk.
- Solved by a developer who can get your emails delivered.
- A billing hiccup at your domain registrar or web host, such as an expired bank card. Now your website is down.
- An unexpected spike in traffic has taken your website down during a busy period and you’re losing out on sales.
- Spotted by uptime monitoring.
- WordPress and plugins on your site have not been updated since it went live. Now, that ‘update’ button might as well be labelled ‘self-destruct’.
- Your web host updates their server software and the old software your site runs on breaks. Now your website is down.
- Prevented by scheduled software updates.
- You’re trying to move a website to a new host, but your old hosting was closed down too soon. Now you don’t have a copy of your website data and files.
- Your site was compromised but you didn’t notice. Now all the backups on your server are corrupted.
- Solved by regular off-site backups.
- It’s unwise to make a major change directly onto a live site, but you have nowhere else to test first. You try it and it messes up your site.
- You want to build new features for your site, but need somewhere to review work in progress and for sign-off.
- Solved by a staging site (a hosted copy of your website).
- Someone on your team installed or deleted something they shouldn’t have. Now your website is broken.
- A plugin has changed the way it presents content on the front end of your site and a discussion needs to be had about how to move forward.
- Spotted by an another set of eyes looking after the site.
- Managing a bunch of annually renewing software licences for plugins you don’t really understand is a hassle.
- If you need licences for more than one site it can get expensive.
- Taken care of by unlimited developer software licences.
I can make these techie worries go away with my web maintenance. With the service in place, you get peace of mind that your website is in capable hands. I have two offers, depending on just one question:
Did I build your website?
If the answer is YES
I will have offered you maintenance when your site launched. I understand people don’t always want to go ahead right away, so welcome back!
The service is billed monthly, with no long-term commitment.
If the answer is NO
That’s fine too. There will be an initial mini-project to familiarise myself with your site’s construction before you come on board.
After that, the service will be the same as if I built the site myself.
If you also need a content or development support retainer, I’d be happy to discuss that with you.