Website Maintenance
Websites need regular attention and care to remain secure and run smoothly. Whether you want to do the minimum to keep your site healthy or give it daily attention, Seashore Web Services has a plan to meet your needs.
No contract is necessary, you can cancel at any time.
Monthly Care Plans
Description of Services
Updates
If your website uses a CMS like WordPress it is important to always run on the latest version of the platform. Websites are vulnerable to malicious threats such as hacking, so WordPress developers frequently release updates with fixes to new security breaches and vulnerabilities. When new versions of WordPress are released, updating your website to that new version promptly equips your site with the most recent security features. Similarly, Themes and Plugins are the targets of hackers, and likewise require prompt updating to apply security patches and protect your site as a whole.
In addition to security concerns, keeping WordPress/Theme/Plugins current lets you benefit from on-going feature improvements that make running your website easier and navigating it on the front end more efficient and pleasing for your site’s visitors.
SUMMARY: WordPress, Theme, and Plugins checked daily for updates. When updates are available they are made immediately.
Backups
You may already appreciate the value in regularly backing up your computer as a safeguard to unexpected events such as hard drive failure, file corruption, malware, etc. Your website is also comprised of photos, graphics, documents, and applications that are similarly subject to corruption whether accidental or malicious in nature. If your website crashes it’s imperative to have an up-to-date backup available to recover a working version.
SUMMARY: Simply put, all your website data. This means all your site’s files, content, media, and databases. Further your backups are stored on a different server than where your site is hosted.
Broken Links Scan
Web crawlers such as Google’s Googlebot gather information from every webpage it can find. The purpose of crawling is to try and understand what each webpage is about and then organize that information in a search index. Since there is no central registry of all web pages this crawling process is ongoing. When crawlers encounter a broken link on a webpage they stop crawling that page and therefore that page is not indexed and is not searchable by web engines.
Broken links can also discourage visitors to your website. When a broken link is encountered the reaction is often discouragement, and the tendency is to move on to the next google search result. The result is less time spent on your site and less opportunity for business.
Dealing timely with broken links is important for maintaining search result ranking, good user experience, and ultimately uninterrupted revenue.
SUMMARY: Scan all posts and pages of your website daily for broken links, fix them where possible, and notify you otherwise.
Detailed Client Reports
Monthly client reports provide the dates and version numbers of all WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates performed, as well as site backups. Depending on your support plan reports may also include the details of security and performance scans.
SUMMARY: Monthly report in PDF format that details the date and result of each service performed. For example, with updates you will know the date they are performed along with the old and new software version numbers.
Security Check
Website malware is unfortunately a concern for even small business, non-profit, and personal websites. Attacks are launched every day, and the disturbing part is that malware can be on your website for months without you even noticing. Pro-actively scanning your website on a regular basis is the best way to stay on top of vulnerabilities.
Blacklisting is another security issue to monitor. A blacklist is a list of domains, email addresses, or IP addresses flagged as spam or harmful content. When a website is blacklisted, search engines remove the website from its search results in an effort to protect browsers from harmful content. Removal from search results can prevent a company from capturing business online.
SUMMARY: Scan all pages on your website to identify any files that become infected with malware, flag site errors and outdated software, and issue an email notification in the event your website becomes infected so you can deal with it right away. Note: this service does not include cleaning the site.
Performance
Slow websites decrease customer loyalty and business profitability. I optimize all images used on your site, limit the number of fonts used, remove unused plugins, and adjust settings at the server level to improve speed.
Creative & Technical Support On-Demand
Once a new website is built and launched, you may think the process is complete and nothing further needs to be done other than keeping up with annual hosting plan renewals. However websites live on the internet, and as such are subject to changes within that environment. It isn’t uncommon for a feature or page on a website to go down, and sometimes whole sites can crash. When this happens updates to existing code or other fixes are needed to return the affected feature or site to normal.
As a tool for informing a membership or attracting new business, websites are a continuous investment that require fresh content, design updates, feature improvements, and content changes. At times you may want to add pages, add creative enhancements to existing pages and content, change a photo or logo, add a new online form, check your form submissions, change colors or apply a new section or page layout, need help talking with your hosting company… just about anything you want to do for your website I can assist. Simply call, email, or text message me with your on-demand technical support issue or design challenge in need of a creative solution.
SUMMARY: Adding or editing pages / posts / images, content changes, performance updates, bug fixes, etc. Support time does not roll-over to next months.