Which maintenance plan is right for your website?

Before you can select a maintenance plan that is right for you, there are a few things you need to know about running a website.

1. It needs to live somewhere – this is called “hosting”.
2. It needs to be secured – this requires web expertise and should be applied monthly at a minimum, anything longer and you’re at serious risk of getting hacked.
3. It needs to keep up with updates – most sites are built on open source content management system (CMS) where functionality improvements are happening all the time, keeping up will ensure a long life to your website.
4. It needs to be updated regularly – if your site is static and doesn’t get any content updates, you’ll gradually get pushed lower and lower down in search results as your information get more and more out-of-date.

If you need or want help with any of those items, then our maintenance plans are for you. Here’s how you pick which is important.

Firstly, if you already have a hosting account and want to keep your site there and retain a bit more control over it, we can work with that. Hosting is “optional” for all our plans except for rare HTML-only situations. On the other hand, we can host it for you if you want to save those costs and let us handle it for you.

Now, if you only want us to do hosting for your website, you could opt for our ESSENTIALS plan. This plan includes hosting, security essentials, SSL, and access to our affordable and flexible hourly rates for all of our web development services and work tools.

However, as I mentioned above, there’s more to running a website than just hosting.

If you are on the ESSENTIALS plan, your CMS updates, web development requests, and technical support will be billed on an hourly basis. We will quote you on every request so you only pay for what you need (and approve). We can make recommendations for updates to help you along the way.

Applying CMS updates are very important. It’s best to do them every month, as it’s less risky, less complex, and faster in small doses. It is also important for the health of your website that it always be kept up to date. Falling behind on updates will be way more costly in the long run. Applying updates on an annual basis or at even larger increments can take a large chunk of hours to process and can surface many technical impacts on the functionality of your website. If you wait too long to apply them, you might be in a situation where a rebuild it better or necessary.

It’s difficult to anticipate exactly how many hours you would need on a regular basis, but in our experience our experts invest between 1 to 2 hours on average per website per month performing updates, resolving technical support requests, and providing advice and guidance on updating website content. At an average of $100.00 per hour, the costs can add up quickly.

This is why we offer monthly updates in our BASIC plan, which also includes everything the ESSENTIALS plan offers.

If you have a lot of activity on your website and regularly make updates to it, you will need technical support.

This is a reality in website administration. All the platforms claim they are Do-It-Yourself (DIY), but there are simply too many bells and whistles and complexities under the hood that make it impossible for anyone not experienced with web development to make any change they want themselves. Don’t get me wrong, there are many aspects such as changing wordings, replacing images, uploading a blog post or creating a new page that are pretty straightforward and can be done by anyone, but there are lots of other little quirks and gotchas and technical parts where some technical support is called for. The same goes for the content and messaging, it’s hard to know what the best practices are for posting content and presenting information online, some content assistance and guidance is usually helpful.

If you stay on the BASIC plan, your technical support and content assistance requests will be billed on an hourly basis. We will quote you on every request so you only pay for what you need (and approve). We can make recommendations for updates to help you along the way.

In this situation, rather than paying for each request by the hour, we recommend upgrading to our STANDARD plan which includes unlimited technical support and content assistance, as well as everything you get with the BASIC plan.

If you are goal driven and your website is your critical to generating revenue, then a performance boost will help.

We have tools and advanced tweaks we can apply to your site to make it load quickly to ensure that users are happy to spend time on it and fulfill your call-to-actions.

In this situation, you should consider our PROFESSIONAL plan.

We can go above and beyond that to tailor on a marketing strategy for you and add on a monthly performance plan to track and monitor your progress and results. We offer a full fledge digital marketing service as well.

So, in summary, here’s an outline of how you can make your choice:

• You have a tiny or temporary site while you’re cooking up something bigger, go with the HTML-only plan.
• You have a site but are not sure how long you’ll need it for, then go with the ESSENTIALS plan.
• You have a site and your business is stable, but you just don’t make changes to it often, then stick with the BASIC plan.
• Your site is alive and well and your business is evolving or you regularly have updates to apply, then you’ll need the STANDARD plan.
• You’re in growth mode and generating leads and conversions is your main focus, then upgrade to the PROFESSIONAL plan.

Here are the full details of our plans where you can view and compare features.

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns. We’d be happy to help explain everything further to help you make the right choice for your business.

Enjoy this article? Don't forget to share.