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, 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, contact forms and media library get flooded with spam comments and submissions.
Problem solved by security measures.
- A potential customer submits your contact form, but you never got an email. So they phone you up to complain, or post a negative review online.
- The email messages your site sends to visitors land in their junk folder.
- Problem solved by a developer who can get your emails delivered to people’s inbox.
- 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.
- Problem solved 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.
- Problem solved by scheduled software updates.
- People managing the site have more access than they really need. Someone on your team made a mistake. Now your website is broken.
- Former employees, external suppliers, support personnel etc still have admin access.
- Problem solved by good user account housekeeping.
- 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.
- Problem solved by a staging site (a hosted copy of your website for testing).
- 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.
- Problem solved by regular off-site and archive backups.
- A change or downtime at an external service has affected your website.
- 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.
- Problem solved by an another, experienced 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 fast.
- Problem solved by unlimited developer software licences.
I can make those 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. Here are some comments from happy clients:
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.