Why you need a website maintenance plan

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Why you need a website maintenance plan

Jun 13, 2022

Having a website can feel like a big expense. Whether you’ve spent the time creating it yourself, or invested in having a web designer create it for you. My job though, is to of course help you see that having a website for your business is probably the most important thing you can do.

You can read more on why you should have a website for your business here but once you have invested in getting a web designer to help you, what happens after the launch of your site? Will your web designer leave you hanging? Will you have to keep everything updated yourself? Let’s have a look at the help and support your web designer can offer you once your site is live.

Why you need a website maintenance plan

Most web designers will offer ongoing support to you after your website is launched and they shouldn’t leave you hanging to work out how to use your own site and make changes. Once I have launched a client’s website I offer them 4 weeks of support and any small tweaks needed to be made at this time are included. I also create video tutorials enabling my clients to edit the content they need to and showing them how to add and optimise their own blog posts.

I believe it’s so important to demystify the behind the scenes of wordpress website for my clients and to empower them to make the changes they need to rather than depending on me to do the work for them. At the same time though, I am always around to offer a level of support to my clients if they get stuck too.

Your website should be a work in progress

As well as ongoing maintenance for your site, it’s so important to remember that your website should always be seen as a work in progress rather than something that’s done and dusted. So many websites are allowed to get out of date and not showcase latest work and this can be really off putting for potential clients as well as bad for SEO. Find out more in this blog post on why your website should always be a work in progress.

Content updates and additions

Your web designer should offer you options for ongoing support in terms of adding new content to your site in the form of blog posts, updating images, latest news, offers or text edits that are needed. Of course once your website is launched, it’s important to consider whether you are happy to take the time to do these things, or if you’d prefer to get the help and support of your website designer to do these things for you.

SEO

In terms of SEO specifically, Google loves fresh content, so new images of your latest work, offers and news are important to keep your site growing in terms of search rankings. Blogging is one of the best ways you can do this. By blogging frequently around specific keywords that your ideal clients would use to search for products or services like yours, you’ll be keeping Google happy as well as helping to promote and grow your business.

Back up and recovery

What if something happens to your site? Let’s say you’re working on creating some content and then accidentally delete something from your site? Or what if your website gets hacked? Luckily website back ups are a thing and if you opt for a website maintenance package, your site will be backed up frequently, meaning that the latest version of it can be restored and you’ll be able to get things up and running again quickly. Similarly, if you delete something, I can simply restore the latest update before those changes were made and your site will be good to go. Without the support of your webs designer through a website maintenance plan, keeping a back up will be your responsibility.

Updates

If you sign up for an ongoing website maintenance plan, your web designer will be able to keep an eye on what’s going on with your site. WordPress sites use plug ins which are like apps to add features to your site and themes to build out your site. These will need to be kept up to date for a number of reasons. When these are left and aren’t updated, your site is more vulnerable to hacks and also out of date themes and apps can slow your site performance down or in the worst case scenario, stop your site working altogether.

Performance issues

As you’ll probably be fully aware, as content and website consumers we have very short attention spans with so much going on online and far too many distractions these days. Along with Google not favouring sites that are slow to load, your website visitors won’t hang around if your site is slow to load. Just think about your own experience of this. How annoying is it when a site doesn’t load quickly enough? If you have your web designer on your side with a website maintenance plan, they’ll help you monitor your site performance and speed so you won’t have to get in to all the tech knowhow of how to do this yourself.

I offer website maintenance plans to all my website clients as I know how time consuming website maintenance can be for business owners. You shouldn’t have to be responsible for the maintenance of your site, or be expected to learn how to become a tech wizard so you can do it yourself. I offer different levels of support depending on your business and your needs. Here’s a little look into what my website maintenance plans include:

Hosting- The cost of your website hosting is included in my plans

Plugin and theme updates-

Back ups

Website optimisation

Monitoring and security

Monthly reporting- You’ll get a full report on how your site is performing

A discount on my hourly rate

Time from me per month to add new content and updates to your site

A review call to see how we can improve your site over time

Rembember if you go it alone, you’ll be in charge of all the above and if you take out a maintenance plan, you’ll get a 30% discount on my hourly rate for extra work going forward too.

Find out more about my website maintenance plans or get in touch to see how I can help you keep your site happy and help your business grow.

get in touch

About the designer...

Hi! I’m Katie. Helping busy business owners create bold online brands and stand-out, non-boring websites is my jam. I’m passionate about giving once-upon-a-time-website DIYers, ambitious entrepreneurs and founders back the time to focus on doing the things they love the most in their businesses, giving them clarity in their online presence and the confidence to grow big!

Through this blog and on social media I share my advice and best practices with business owners on how to build strong brands that will start attracting their dream customers and website that work by focusing on strategy and business goals.

When I’m not working with inspiring business owners or designing wedding cakes, you’ll probably find me dreaming of what my next meal will be, the best fruit garnishes for a gin and tonic or where we’ll travel to on our next adventure.

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