Aftercare
In the same way that your clients’ minds, bodies and souls need regular tuneups and adjustments, any website needs regular love and care.
Whether I built your site or someone else has made it & isn't quite there for you. Whether you're after someone to take care of the lot or just be available for occasional advice and help.
I'm here for you.
To find out all that's involved, scroll down a little.
Aftercare Pricing
Complete Care
Complete Care gives you freedom to have most changes you might want simply handled for you each month, such as adding a few pages or blog posts, tweaking wording for SEO or updating staff images.
Plan includes: Preventative maintenance (Backups, Software Updates, Security Scans, Speed and Uptime Monitoring), a monthly report of visitor numbers, plus my time for making requested changes up to a cap of 3 hours. This is enough for significant month-to-month changes, but should you need a bigger change within the month I'm available at my hourly rate – See Webside Assist for details.
Routine Care
Complete Care gives done-for-you tweaks and changes each month to keep your site fresh and try out different wording, add a blog post or other regular maintenance tasks.
Plan includes: Preventative maintenance (Backups, Software Updates, Security Scans, Speed and Uptime Monitoring), a monthly report of visitor numbers, plus my time for making requested changes up to a cap of 1 hour. This is enough for basic month to month changes, but should you need a bigger update within the month I'm available at my hourly rate – See Webside Assist for details.
Self Care
This is a hosting only plan for people who want hosting and DNS taken care of for them, but can generally handle website maintenance themselves – See What's Involved.
Of course if you hit a snag, I'm there for you at my hourly rate – See Webside Assist for details.
Webside Assist
A simple hourly rate to get you moving again.
Whether you need content posted on your website or figuring out an update that hasn't gone right, I'm happy to help you out. Just shoot me an email. This is also my rate if you're on a monthly plan and some months need more than what's included.
For preventative maintenance and better pricing for regular changes, check the monthly plans above.
Website Maintenance: What's Involved
There are two sides to website maintenance: Content and Tech.
Tweaking the content regularly to try different wording, measure the results and optimise the site over time can make a big difference to your website's impact. and responding to feedback you get from clients and monitoring the number of visitors you get.
Tech maintenance is about the parts that you don’t even notice until something goes wrong: Backups, software updates, security and uptime monitoring, malware scans, checking all your links to other sites still work and more.
The Content Side
It's worth keeping your site up-to-date for several reasons:
- Visitors will get frustrated if any basic information like opening hours aren't current
- Posting relevant content regularly, like little news articles, thoughts or fact sheets can invite discussion, grow interest and get people following links to the full articles on your website from social media
- Content that's regularly updated, genuinely informative and relevant to your readers is exactly the sort of thing Google is looking for in your website – there's other search optimisation you can do but this is a big one
I can't write your content for you, but with an Aftercare package just shoot me an email, a Word document or leave a virtual "sticky note" on your site (I'll show you how).
I can proofread what you've written and put it up on your site, adding stock images or other touches to give a polished, professional look.
I can also put you in touch with other professionals if you need help with messaging, copywriting or other areas of your marketing strategy.
The Tech Side
There are quite a few tasks involved in keeping a site running at its best:
- Uptime monitoring: if the site goes down, make sure it's acted on within a day, not a month.
- Security checks: getting hacked could be a real headache, whether the hack is visible to your clients or just a waypoint for a hacker to launch further, bigger attacks that look like they came from you.
- Website & Database Backups: A good, recent backup is your safety net. As you hopefully have backups for all your devices, keeping your website backed up means you can recover from mistakes, hacks or even the hosting provider losing a hard disk.
- Check for Broken Links: You can only control your own site, so if a resource or article of yours links to another site and that site changes, it can leave "broken links" on your site that don't work any more. These are frustrating for visitors and can have a negative impact on Google rankings.
- Software Updates: It's really bad for your site's security to let its software get out of date, and keeping plugins and themes up to date can also help with site speed and performance on Google.
- Visual Check: Automation only gets you so far. A monthlhy visual check can make sure the site is actually behaving correctly, not just "good enough for the automatic check".
- Test Speed: Several things can cause a site to slow down, from database bloat to a host underperforming. Occasional checks can help keep the site quick for your users and higher in Google's rankings.
- Database Cleaning: If you're using WordPress, its database can build up clutter over time. It helps to clean that out periodically.
- Review and Renew: Hosting and any relevant software licenses may need renewal, and occasional consideration about whether they're still the best option for you.