How long does website maintenance take

With regular website updates and maintenance, your business will attract and retain customers, offer useful content, and maintain good search engine rankings. Website maintenance can be a total pain. Investing in upkeep services seems like a smart thing to do. Hire a web and marketing team in-house. This is a more expensive option.

Hire a variety of specialized freelancers. Hiring freelancers is less pricey but it requires good coordination and communication. Hire a web maintenance company. Working with a web maintenance company is a smart option.

It will have all the resources you need for web maintenance, including strategy, marketing, and programming services. Do it yourself. If you decide to handle the web maintenance yourself, be prepared to invest an ample amount of your time and patience.

The majority of web maintenance companies offer three types of plans , including:. Maintaining your Wordpress website on your own can be time-consuming and frustrating. Working with freelancers may result in poor coordination and unsatisfactory maintenance of your website. Hiring an in-house team is a highly expensive option.

This leads us to your last and best option: working with a web maintenance company like Exai. A website servicing company can take care of your website and improve its performance and security fast and on budget. Exai is the best solution for building, hosting, and maintaining your website. Our services are vast and include web management, hosting, and maintenance services. Exai is doing auto updates so it can keep your website up to standards. Website Maintenance Services.

Ecommerce website. Mobile friendly website. Alternatives to Wordpress. Website redesign services. CMS website builder. Managed hosting. Convert Facebook Page to Website. Nice to meet you! Site is Down or Not. Contact us. Let's chat! Renew your website domain name. Consider updating your website design. Review each page of the site to make sure its content is accurate.

Find your best-performing blogs and consider updating them. Update your web graphics and photos. Update your meta descriptions and meta titles.

Make sure that the website is mobile-friendly and it displays nicely on all browsers. Test and update popups, forms, and calls to action. Check to see if anything needs to be changed or updated with your advertising and marketing campaigns.

Restore the most recent backup to check your backup health. Test your website loading speed. If it takes more than three seconds to load, you should talk to your web developer. Analyze website statistics. Check your local search visibility.

Check your website for errors and if there are any, fix or redirect them. Update your core plugins and website software. Post one or more blog posts to give relevant information to your customers and improve your SEO traffic. Check for broken links. On that website, you experience slow load times, spamming messages greet you every 5 seconds, and broken links are everywhere. You will probably feel annoyed and frustrated.

Now imagine that you land on a professionally maintained website. You see a beautiful website design, find relevant content on the blog, and move through the website with ease. Website maintenance helps keep your brand front-and-centre in the minds of internet users. This will help you pinpoint any issues that emerging before your users do, avoiding any damage to your traffic, reputation or bottom line in the process.

Website maintenance services come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Most agencies or individuals will allow you to pick and choose which services you wish to take advantage of, tailoring the expense accordingly. To give you an idea of what a website maintenance package can offer, expect the following to be at the core of most agreements. Discuss your maintenance needs with your website maintenance agency or provider, ensuring that you are getting everything you need to for your investment.

The costs of website maintenance vary wildly, depending on the type of website that you are running. A basic blog site that is purely used for information purposes should cost very little to maintain. You may be tempted to do it yourself in-house by tweaking and checking copy, but we always recommend seeking professional support.

The more features your website contains, the most expensive regular maintenance will be. For a guideline cost of this, think back to how much you spent on your website in the first place.

This should give you an idea of what you should be spending on maintaining it. As a guideline, the sliding scale of expense — from lowest to highest — for maintenance of different websites will be:. No reputable website maintenance service will quote a price without at least addressing the content of the site.

Shop around when looking for website maintenance services, settling upon a provider that offers appropriate services at a budget to match. Most website maintenance packages are divided by the range of services provided. Obviously, the more you are asking for in terms of maintenance, the more detailed and thus expensive the package will be. As always, this is a guide only — different providers will have different tasks assigned to each level. Contact Creative. We really cannot stress enough that website maintenance is best left to experienced professionals.

Agencies or freelancers that specialise in website maintenance know exactly what to look for and will nip potential problems in the bud with a minimum of fuss. If you insist on attempting website maintenance yourself, follow these steps to get started with the basics:. You could use a broken link checker , but that will not help if the eventual website has been hacked or redirected.

But we wary of just hitting the update button — installing updates can sometimes cause unexpected problems, so make sure you take a full website and database backup first. Ensure it is still meeting the needs of visitors and matches up with the latest SEO algorithms. A good point bears repeating. If at all possible, utilise the services of experienced professionals when it comes to website maintenance.

It may cost you a little initially, but it can save you untold sums of money — and a lot of time — in the longer term. As with all matters pertaining to online business, you have two options when seeking external help with your website. You could hire an agency, such as Creative. The latter approach will usually be a little cheaper, but just be aware that you get what you pay for in the world of website maintenance.

Website maintenance is the act of ensuring that your online presence remains operational, relevant and appealing to visitors. Usability is another big concern, especially for more functional websites. If you have an ecommerce store, booking calendar or a web app, there's a high likelihood of small bugs, broken links and issues cropping up from time to time.

It can have a knock-on effect on accessibility too. If you host with your website maintenance provider, they will usually also provide server-side updates and backups of your site for protection.

That means that if anything goes wrong with the server or the site itself, they will be able to restore a backup and keep things running as smoothly as possible. A lot of website maintenance contracts also allow for additional work to help with your web product and business growth. This can be in the form of additional features or functionality on the site, improving your website conversion rate or even ongoing SEO and marketing services.

The last big reason that you should think carefully about getting a web maintenance service is priority.

Clients who have an ongoing maintenance contract with their developers or digital agency, are going to have guaranteed turnaround times. That means their issues will be prioritised over clients who ask for changes on an ad-hoc basis. So if you have an urgent issue on your site, but don't have a service agreement in place, you're likely going to be at the back of the queue.

There are a few different levels of website support service available, and it's important to choose the right one for your business and website type. If you have a small, simple website without a CMS or built on a custom CMS and you're happy to report issues as and when you find them, then a Reactive , or Pay As You Go, support contract might work for you.

This would mean that you don't have anyone regularly checking your site for updates or issues, and when you spot things that need fixing, you contact your website designers and get a quote for the additional work. If your website is on an open source platform like Wordpress, then it's advisable that you do have a Proactive website maintenance service, even if it's just for essential updates.

A proactive maintenance contract will mean that your digital agency will do regular checks and updates - usually on a monthly basis. For websites on a bespoke CMS, this is great to keep on top of browser updates and device compatibility. But if you have a Wordpress website, or use another open source platform, this service is essential for keeping on top of system and plugin updates. Many of these will be security patches, as open source platforms are a lot more vulnerable to hacks and attacks, so a proactive maintenance service is a real necessity.

If your website is a little more complex, for example if it's got ecommerce, booking or other functionality, you might need a bit more than just proactive support. Instead of just regular maintenance for browser, CMS and device updates, you might also want your agency to set aside time to develop additional features, provide design for new pages or printwork, or even look at marketing for you.

This can be incredibly valuable if you have a more complex website or provide software as a service. We call this Proactive Plus , where all your essential updates are managed, but you also have dedicated time set aside by your agency for additional work.