Website Maintenance

Like your car, your WordPress website has many moving parts. Over time, some of them become outdated and break down. Did you know that the plugins you use to perform various functions on your website are all written by different developers in different software companies? Plugins are often used to make banners scoll, make forms work, allow people to sign up for classes, handle your url redirects from another website or in some cases when you change a page, display your blog posts, display your testimonials and much more. WordPress issues ongoing updates to its platform, and if any one of those little plugin developers has not tested their plugin with the new version, then something on your site will break. Sometimes the plugin developers go out of business or stop updating their plugin and you’ll need to find another plugin to do the same thing, which always requires development time. It’s a lot like the software you use on your computer when the operating system is updated. And if you don’t keep all of the software up to date, then your website becomes vulnerable to hackers.

In addition to technical updates, most small businesses will want to make ongoing content updates to their website. It may be listing an upcoming event, adding a speaking event to a media page, describing a new service or adding a testimonial. In our experience, most small business owners don’t have the time to update their website, even if they know how.

When was the last time you had to rely on a backup for anything? It doesn’t happen frequently but when you need it, you REALLY need it! Don’t just rely on your web hosting company to perform backups, best practices are to also maintain an offsite backup just in case.

Your WordPress theme controls the look and feel of your website. On top of that theme, your developer may have made other customizations to colors, fonts and style. Every few months most theme developers make updates for WordPress core software functionality, enhanced security, and bug fixes. If your developer has made changes to your theme and you accept the theme update, you may wipe out all of those customizations. The solution? A child theme. A child theme separates the style and function files from the theme file which protects your changes from being overwritten and speeds up development time. When we maintain your theme we’ll start by creating a child theme structure and then apply changes as they are released. Note that in order to have access to those changes you may need to have a software maintenance plan with the theme developer but we’ll let you know if that is a requirement.

Broken links, which generate that annoying 404 Error page when clicked, are not only problematic for website visitor experience, but will cause Google and other search engines to penalize your website as well. Sometimes external resources you link to may no longer be valid and sometimes the links break within your own website. Perhaps you updated a page name and did not create a 301 redirect. Even if you updated the link within your own website, it is possible that other websites referenced your page in a blog or directory and that link will now be broken. It is a simple fix, but one that left unchecked can damage your SEO and your business credibility. Our link checker service will find and fix links where possible, or set up 301 redirects or escalate any issues to you for guidance in the event the new and correct link is not obvious.

Sadly there are armies of offshore workers who manually seek to promote websites through “black hat” SEO means. They will pretend to comment on your blog, but really are finding a way to add a backlink to the website they are promoting. You may see something like “I enjoyed your post (insert link to undesirable product here)”. Unfortunately there is only so much prevention that can be done with software. You can add a CAPTCHA word or image to your website which will prevent spambots from adding to your site, but a real person can still enter the required code so that won’t block their spam comments. What to do? You could block your blog from comments entirely but then you’ll miss out on valuable interaction. We suggest holding comments for moderation. As part of our monthly spam cleanup we’ll review comments, block spam urls, remove any inappropriate comments and leave only apparently valid comments for you to moderate…a MUCH easier task than sifting through 100s of spam entries!

Unlike WordPress, Squarespace and Wix are platform solutions where most of the technical stuff is taken care of for you. This does provide limitations for SEO, but they can be viable solutions for the do-it-yourselfer. However we do receive requests from clients who would like to activate their blog functionality, post articles they write, add images to their gallery, post their Mailchimp newsletter content to their website, add or update pages, add a testimonial, or add an event. These tend to be ongoing requests and it is nice to have an element of predictability to your website maintenance.
That is where our maintenance plans come in. We will provide a monthly budget of development hours for content writing, graphic design and web development that roll over so you never lose them. If you submit a request that goes over your balance of hours, we’ll spread it over a couple of months for you, and if you have a short term more significant request, you can upgrade your plan to a higher hours balance for a month or two and then downgrade again. Just let us know before your next billing cycle.

Plus all of our maintenance clients receive priority over any ad hoc requests.

If you have a shopping cart on your website, you already know you need regular updates, and you need them fast.  You may be adding products, changing prices, changing shipping rates, updating product weights, barcodes, changing or adding product images. Your shopping cart is the lifeblood of your business and it must be accurate.

Our shopping cart maintenance plans include a 24 hour SLA on any pricing changes and all other change requests receive priority over our non-maintenance clients.  We’ll also take care of adding new option sets such as for color or style, adding or suppressing products, changing descriptions or images.

• Did you simply copy/paste the product descriptions from your suppliers?  If so then your pages are not receiving SEO credit from Google and should be rewritten.
• Did you simply copy images from the website for your products?  Look out for copyright infringement actions by the image owners who scan the web looking for their images.  Be sure to only use original or stock images or those approved by the manufacturer.
• Are you running a sale and need a home page banner?  Our graphic designers can take care of that for you and our web developers will add it to your website.
• Would you like some content written in a way that is compelling to your target audience?  Our writers will do that too.

Broken links, which generate that annoying 404 Error page when clicked, are not only problematic for website visitor experience, but will cause Google and other search engines to penalize your website as well. Sometimes external resources you link to may no longer be valid and sometimes the links break within your own website. Perhaps you updated a page name and did not create a 301 redirect. Even if you updated the link within your own website, it is possible that other websites referenced your page in a blog or directory and that link will now be broken. It is a simple fix, but one that left unchecked can damage your SEO and your business credibility. Our link checker service will find and fix links where possible, or set up 301 redirects or escalate any issues to you for guidance in the event the new and correct link is not obvious.

Sadly there are armies of offshore workers who manually seek to promote websites through “black hat” SEO means. They will pretend to comment on your blog, but really are finding a way to add a backlink to the website they are promoting. You may see something like “I enjoyed your post (insert link to undesirable product here)”. Unfortunately there is only so much prevention that can be done with software. You can add a CAPTCHA word or image to your website which will prevent spambots from adding to your site, but a real person can still enter the required code so that won’t block their spam comments. What to do? You could block your blog from comments entirely but then you’ll miss out on valuable interaction. We suggest holding comments for moderation. As part of our monthly spam cleanup we’ll review comments, block spam urls, remove any inappropriate comments and leave only apparently valid comments for you to moderate…a MUCH easier task than sifting through 100s of spam entries!