Website maintenance is the discipline of consistently assessing your website for errors, performance and updating it regularly for relevance. Proper maintenance includes auditing outdated plugins, website backups, page speed, SEO performance, broken links, security vulnerabilities, and visitor analytics.
Maintenance can even include content and design updates by a web developer.
Website maintenance includes reports that measure and track your website’s overall performance. Unfortunately, many churches often overlook website maintenance. As a result, many WordPress websites are not well maintained and quickly become vulnerable. The lack of care then threatens the time and money you’ve invested in a website.
Maintaining a website is crucial to secure the investment you made in an online presence.
Now you may be asking yourself, am I able to upgrade and maintain the website myself? Well, we’ve put together a list of how to keep your website maintained, then you can determine if the job is right for you.
Here are several steps you can take to ensure that your website is properly maintained.
A checklist is helpful if you know how to deliver it. Unfortunately, too often, many churches attempt to maintain their websites without the proper knowledge and skill. Some churches have the capital to hire a full-time web developer to handle all maintenance, while other churches cannot afford to hire a full-time web developer. When churches cannot afford to hire a full-time web developer, website maintenance services come in and solve this problem.
Website maintenance services simply handle all the technical ins and outs of your website. It’s like having your own personal go-to web developer without all the HR and necessity of a full-time salary.
If your company could use the savings but still have a dependable website developer, this is a recommended route.
The cost of website maintenance services varies based on what the service provider offers. However, we’ve seen pricing that can range from $50 – $400 monthly.
Website maintenance service is an investment. So a question to consider is this: would you rather pay an employee $3,000 – $6,000 a month or a small fraction of this to ensure your website is maintained?
Not all website maintenance service providers are equal. But based on our research of different service providers, here is an overview of what your website maintenance service should include:
Website Backups
A website backup is a copy of all your website data. You will want to ensure that you have at least 30 days of backups. Backups can vary. There are usually website file backups and database file backups. We recommend a full backup which is a combination of your website and database files. It is crucial to backup your website daily as websites can get malware. You can immediately restore your website to a previous uninfected version through a backup. You can also use website backups to move from your website from one agency to another seamlessly.
Performance Checks
A performance check provides you with the insight to understand what is happening with your website. It includes information about your website’s page speed grade, which affects your Google search results. It also has a breakdown of what could be slowing down your website.
Security Scanning
Security scans quickly identify a website infected with malware or known vulnerabilities. Therefore, a daily security scan is necessary. The scan report will show you where it is coming from and how to remove it. Untreated malware will affect your user experience and also spread throughout your website.
Uptime Monitoring
Uptime monitoring is the process of inspecting your web hosting server and ensuring that it is up and running for the public to access your website. Uptime monitoring will instantly notify you if your website is offline. The uptime monitoring will also provide minute-by-minute details on when the server went down and when it came back online.
Link Monitoring
Link monitoring inspects your website for broken URL links, response codes, and broken links on any content. Broken links lead website visitors to a web page error notice. In addition, broken links affect your search engine scores and lead to a bad experience for your visitors.
Google Analytics Report
Google Analytics is a service that tracks and reports your website traffic. These details will show you your most popular pages, what location visitors are coming from, and measure your month-to-month progress report.
Unlimited Updates
Unlimited updates is a web development service that provides basic content and design updates. Content updates include adding/removing content to pages/post and adding/removing image(s). Design changes include changing your logo/slogan, changing your theme colors, and changing current images. This service saves companies a lot of money as many pay web developers by the hour. Web development hourly rates can range from $75 – $150 per hour.
Is your website currently up to date? Do you have the web development skillset needed to deliver proper website maintenance?
If you are considering a website maintenance service, we would be happy to help you. We offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. We don’t provide website maintenance services through a contract. You can simply subscribe to one of our servicing packages based on your needs. We can help you.
Visit our website maintenance services page to view our subscription options:
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