What is web maintenance and why is it important?
Broadly speaking, web maintenance covers all the things you do to maintain a website. This ensures your website is working correctly and performing well.
When people think about creating a professional website, web design is usually the main thing that comes to mind. However, what a lot of people don’t realise is that quite a bit more work actually goes into running a successful website.
Website maintenance commonly involves:
- Performing website testing, and regularly checking the overall functioning of your website
- Fixing identified vulnerabilities and website security issues
- Updating SEO to maintain your website’s ranking in search engines (including regular research, analysis, and implementation of the highest performing keywords)
- Improving page loading speed and responsiveness
- Making other necessary updates to improve user experience and function
- Keeping plug-ins up-to-date and secure, and removing any broken ones to improve speed and performance
- Creating new reCAPTCHAs to reduce the amount of spam being received through content forms
- Installing software updates
- Renewing SSL certificates
- Monitoring and reporting on performance
- Making regular back-ups
- Completing any content-related website updates (for example, amending, removing, or adding content)
- Performing emergency technical support (for example, if your website goes down, glitches, or is hacked)
You might think, “Well, I’m happy with the website I’ve got. Why do I need to continue maintaining it?” The answer is that even if you’re happy with your website’s overall design and the way it’s working at present, ongoing and regular website maintenance is still essential.
If your website is not properly maintained, you are risking a number of issues, including lost business and revenue as a result of website outages and technical issues. You will also be risking security issues, such as hacking.
What does the web maintenance process look like?
At Tomedia, we offer a variety of website maintenance packages to meet our clients’ needs. We specialise in affordable and low-cost solutions that help our clients keep their website maintenance costs down, whilst offering them a premium standard of service.
Our standard website maintenance package is as follows:
| Inclusions | Pricing |
| Site fixes Monthly backups Site health reports Safe CMS and dependencies updates Google Analytics setup and monitoring Google Search Console setup and monitoring Facebook Pixel setup and monitoring (if applicable) Content updates, reviews, additions, and removals Extra pages (due to additions, events, etc) | $500/month for up to 1 hour per week of support (9 to 5) NB: Additional support is available at $150/hour. We will always discuss this with you get your approval for any additional hours prior to commencing any extra work |
If you require more or less support, or would like to add additional services to create a more tailored solution for your business, we would be more than happy to design a custom web maintenance plan for you.
We also offer a range of add-ons that our customers can add to their existing website maintenance plan. One of the most popular add-ons that we offer is content delivery networks (CDN), which can help to speed up your website’s loading times, secure it against attacks, and reduce website hosting costs.
Here’s what the web maintenance process looks like at Tomedia:
1. Initial consultation
At our initial meeting with you, we’ll start by asking you some general questions about your business. This helps us to get a better idea of your business’s goals, so that we can develop a maintenance strategy that is aligned with and optimised for these.
Some of the general questions we might ask are:
- What does your business do?
- What products or services do you offer?
- Who are your current and potential customers?
- What are your long and short-term goals?
We’ll also look at what your website maintenance routine currently looks like, and what your needs are moving forward.
For example, you might be completely new to the idea of website maintenance, and need help developing a maintenance routine completely from scratch. Or, you might do some web maintenance at present, but want help to develop a more comprehensive regime that looks after your website from all angles.
At this point, we may also perform an initial site health audit of your website, so we can get a better idea of where it’s at currently.
Once we have a better idea of where you’re at and where you’re headed, we will provide you with our recommendations on how best to maintain your website moving forward.
We will also provide you with some information on the different maintenance packages and add-ons we have available, so you can choose the one that works best for your business needs and budget.
2. Plan
Once you’ve decided on your ideal package and add-ons, we will develop a more detailed maintenance plan for your website. This will outline in more detail the different techniques we will be using, the steps we will be taking to implement them, and a timeline for overall implementation.
We will then present this plan to you for your approval.
3. Implementation
Once you’ve approved our recommended maintenance plan, it’s time for us to start implementing it.
Exactly what this phase looks like will vary depending on the package that you’ve chosen. Essentially though, we’ll be undertaking the agreed maintenance works and making the necessary changes to optimise your website’s performance.
Get started
At Tomedia, web maintenance is what we do. From Blogger and WordPress websites to Shopify, Woocommerce, Wix, Squarespace, and custom hosted websites: if you’ve got a website, we can help you maintain it.
Website maintenance can be offered as a standalone service, or as part of our more comprehensive suite of website management services for business owners. This also includes website design and hosting services. To find out more about our other website services, click here.
To find out more about how our web maintenance services can help your business, contact us today at [email protected] or 0419 697 016.