Your business needs to have a plan with actionable items as a go-to guide for keeping your business functioning online. From the basic content side to server/security, having a plan is essential to ensuring your website stays the ideal medium for driving business and ensuring reliability .
Keeping your CMS up-to-date will help with security and keep the messaging on par with your brand.
What your Maintenance Plan should include:
- Routine content updates
- CMS security updates
- Server updates
- Performance and accessibility updates
- Site backups
Routine content updates
With any site we build, it will come with a content management system giving you the ability to perform updates on your own. But you are busy and sometimes it’s best to outsource the things that you normally don’t do on a day-to-day basis.
Examples of these content updates are:
- Addition of new staff
- Adding blog posts to the site
- Optimizing images or content that can help with SEO
CMS security updates
Your website should have an SSL certificate, but that isn’t enough to keep it up-to-par. Implementing Security updates will help to keep applications and server operating systems protected against security vulnerabilities like viruses and malware that can live within the site.
Examples of these updates are:
- Patches to the CMS that help ensure little to no vulnerabilities within the code.
- Version updates to the CMS and updating modules.
Server updates
The server is the hardware that the site sits upon. Like your computer at home, it needs to be updated with the latest patches and virus protection.
Examples of these updates are:
- Network monitoring to make sure there isn't any unauthorized activity
- Keeping web servers patched and up to date to help ensure the web server isn't susceptible to vulnerabilities
- Using a firewall and SSL to monitor HTTP traffic
Performance and Accessibility updates
Your website is your business’s Mona Lisa, an ongoing project that is never perfect. Google has put more emphasis on site performance over this last year with the Core Vitals Updates, which gives a greater weight to loading times and site speed.
Accessibility updates are another area to remember. Prioritizing accessibility will ensure that everyone can comfortably navigate your website and engage with your business. We have an ADA checklist to help you understand the details of what’s involved as well as a great description of ADA Compliance: A vs. AA vs. AAA.
Examples of performance and accessibility updates would be: decrease file sizes of images to improve performance, ensure proper display of header tags and readability, and cumulative layout shifts.
Site backups
We can custom tailor a backup plan for your website, allowing you to choose how often we want to back up (Daily, Weekly, Monthly). Having this backup is insurance for your website to ensure that the latest content is always visible.
Monthly backups can be as little as $10/m and daily is generally $75/m.
Conclusion
As a living, and breathing part of your business, your website should be the center of your marketing and sales efforts. We have standard solutions, but can also customize a plan that best suits your needs. Our typical monthly maintenance plans range from $250 to $1250, based largely on site size and normal monthly traffic volume.
In addition, we help businesses with website design, SEO, content marketing, Paid Search, and Social Media.
Reach out to us with your questions, and we would be happy to discuss.