Tell me if you’ve heard this story before
Step 1. You’re a small local business. You engage a web designer for a new website or a refresh.
Step 2. Web design happens. New look, new content, fresh functionality. You’re really excited for your site’s (re)aunch.
Step 3. Your new site is launched, woohoo! You pay the final invoice, and your designer moves on to their next project.
Woohoo, your new website’s launched!
Step 4. A year passes.
Step 5. There’s a few things slightly broken on your site, but nothing major. You know you should be blogging regularly, but you’re not sure anyone reads your posts (in fact you have no idea how many visitors you get). When you login to WordPress you see notifications and red lights but you’re not sure what they mean. You don’t want to break anything, so you just ignore them. You’ve got a thousand other more urgent things to deal with!
Step 6. You let things slide, and don’t look at your site often. Another year passes.
Step 7. Someone tells you they tried to access your site, but got a security warning that it was hacked. You have no idea what’s going on. Your web designer from years ago isn’t available. Anyway, this isn’t a design thing, so are they even the person to talk to?
How did it all go so horribly wrong?
Your website needs ongoing management
Anyone who buys a car or a house knows it needs ongoing maintenance. Your car needs its tires attended to, oil changes, realignment, brakes checked. Your house needs its gutters cleaned, heating serviced, repainting or reroofing from time to time. You know that if you don’t do these things, it’ll fall apart on you and stop working.
Websites are just the same. Even if you don’t plan to make regular changes to the content or design, changes in its environment (hosting, visitor patterns, other linked sites, not to mention malicious attacks) can cause problems if you don’t keep an eye on them.
Ongoing website maintenance involves:
- Regular backups
- Installing updates for the software your site runs on (WordPress, plugins, and themes)
- Scanning for malware and hackers
- Filtering spam from your blog comments
- Uptime monitoring, and alerts to tell you if your site goes down
- Regular audits to check for broken links, slow loading pages, and other problems
- Reporting on website traffic and customer leads generated
Web designers do fantastic work, but most of them won’t take care of your website long-term. And most small businesses don’t have the in-house expertise, or the time, to do it for themselves.
We now offer monthly WordPress maintenance plans
After seeing several local businesses in this situation, and helping a couple recover from problems that completely trashed their websites, we realised that there was a real need for ongoing website maintenance services.
So, we crunched the numbers, and we’re now pleased to be able to offer month-to-month WordPress maintenance plans for small businesses. These start at $79/month, and could save you thousands if your site has serious problems.
If your website isn’t well maintained, the cost of recovering from an outage may be as much as your entire original website plus all the time you’ve spent on it since then. Can you afford to rebuild your website from scratch?
We’ve been looking after WordPress sites for more than a decade, and you can be assured we provide the same level of care and attention to your website as we do to our own.
You’ll get:
- Regular reports by email or via our dashboard
- Reliable, trustworthy management of your site by experienced professionals
- Someone local to call with questions or problems
- Peace of mind
Relax. Your website’s being looked after.
Special offer for local small businesses
Because this is a new service, we’ve got a special offer: we will provide free setup, worth $299 ($499 for premium plans) to the first two Ballarat-based small businesses to sign up for our WordPress maintenance plan.
Get in touch to talk to us about how we can take care of your WordPress site.
Conditions: your business must be based in Ballarat or surrounding villages, have no more than 10 FTE staff, and you must sign on for 6 months (ordinarily we have no minimum term).
