Website support and maintenance is the continuous process of keeping your website’s security and performance at peak levels. It’s not simply one task but rather a complex web of interrelated activities.
No website is 100% safe. However, an effective website support and maintenance service secures your business from the financial loss and reputational damage inflicted by those who don’t care how hard you’ve worked to build your company. Your visitors can enjoy a faster and seamless experience with improved functionality and performance.
When was the last time you…
- Fully monitored the security of your site and your SSL certificate for vulnerabilities?
- Checked your website and page loading speed and fixed any issues?
- Updated your CMS (e.g. WordPress) software and updated all your plugins?
- Had service issues with your current hosting provider?
- Maintained your hosting control panel area?
- Checked the status of your GDPR compliance?
- Backed up your website files and databases to an external server (not your hosting company’s)?
- Audited your internal capacity to recover quickly and efficiently from a cyberattack?
1. How much is your website worth to your business?
Whether you have a “brochure” website or a dedicated e-commerce platform, your website has value. If you trade exclusively online, your website IS your business.
Websites are living entities. They aren’t just created and left. They are a complex and interdependent environment of software, programs, plugins and hosting services that work together.
2. WordPress CMS Updates and Plugin Updates
As separate entities, you should update these programs and plugins and check for improvements and vulnerabilities. This ensures that your website works properly.
Updating your CMS and plugins on a strict schedule is important. Companies like WordPress continually release updates for security and performance. Your website will perform better and be better able to withstand cyberattacks.
But have you ever updated your operating system on your laptop and suddenly something critical does not work? Understanding the compatibility issues of software is also important.
3. Testing security and SSL certificates for vulnerabilities
For most small businesses, and especially for ecommerce businesses, this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where you lock your front door and your back door. You then slide the bolt across and turn on the alarm system.
A secure website engenders trust and it shows your customers that you care about their data and financial information. Website security and SSL certificate compliance is more transparent these days as even the most basic antivirus software highlights vulnerabilities to your customers. If you cannot demonstrate that you care enough about your site visitors to protect their data and their financial information, they will move onto a business that will.
“If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime — which is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021 — would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China.”
There are people and organizations who spend their entire time looking for ways to destroy our businesses. No business and no individual is completely safe from threats. But the harder you make it to gain access to your website’s (and your business’) sensitive data, the more likely they are to move on to an easier target.
4. Improving your website speed
“The highest ecommerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 0-2 seconds.”
Page speed has been a ranking factor with Google since 2010. Put simply, page speed matters. Improving the page load time of your site means dealing with both simple issues (optimizing and compressing images) and complex tasks (such as reducing the number of HTTP requests on your site).
5. Hosting Issues
Does communication lie at the core of all human activity? Perhaps. However, if your website is suddenly invisible to your customers, speaking with a hosting company can challenge even the most patient of us. Understanding the technical issues and then implementing the necessary fixes may take time depending on your company’s internal resources.
Your hosting service has their own infrastructure. If you log into your hosting control panel and you don’t know what it all means then the reality is you don’t have a hope of fixing things when something goes wrong. I’m sorry, but that’s a little bit of tough love there.
6. Disaster Recovery
What if you’ve done everything you possibly can and the worst still happens?
Having an off-site, full backup of all your website files and databases is essential…as is having the capacity at your fingertips to fully restore your website and ecommerce architecture to a functioning level. An easily accessible, full backup mitigates your losses and the potential loss of trust.
You shouldn’t rely on your hosting solution to do this for you. Their backups are not performed daily. If your website is stored on a shared server, there is no guarantee that any of their backups will be available to you quickly.
If you’re losing money by the day (or the minute) you need to maintain control.
“DR may be dying. The term DR, that is, not the actual process of disaster recovery, there is a move in the industry to replace the phrase with “IT resilience.”
Paul Crocetti, TechTarget Contributor
7. Internal Capacity
Many companies have an employee who handles their day-to-day IT tasks.
Specialist website support and maintenance services have extensive experience dealing with hosting problems, website crashes, security breaches and incompatible updates.
As a business owner, you simply need to be completely confident that you have the internal capacity to identify and fix issues at speed in order to minimize the cost to your business. In short, do you have a disaster recovery plan and do you know how to implement it?
8. Website support and maintenance packages
It’s easy to point out the problems, isn’t it? And the solutions might not be easy.
If you have a small website, it’s possible to learn how to maintain and secure your website yourself. As a business owner, you may be a technological expert. But you’re probably not. Your skills and expertise lie elsewhere. There is a steep learning curve to implement and maintain a stable and functional website.
You may have a current support and maintenance contract with an exisiting company. At Egg, we have found that our clients leave other service providers for two major reasons – slow service and non-responsiveness during a critical time.
Some clients have learned too late that if a company has very little experience in building websites, they are unlikely to be able to maintain them, keep them at peak performance and secure them against cyberattacks. They’ve also learned that if a service provider is too large, they often pay for a package that doesn’t suit their needs and they don’t get the personal service they require when they desperately need it.
Egg Design has over a decade of experience building, maintaining and securing websites. We deal with businesses large and small so we can tailor a website support and maintenance package to your specific needs. We’re known for our quick response time and we maintain a telephone support line. After all, if the worst happens, do you want to tap away at a keyboard or do you want to talk to the person who can sort it out?
Ultimately, our clients view the performance and security of their website as hugely valuable to their business. That’s why they come to us. And that’s why they stay.
If you’d like us to review your current website and recommend a package, get in touch.
Or you can simply call us now to discuss our packages and to talk through any concerns or questions you have.