Websites as Long-Term Infrastructure
We don’t think website support should be intimidating or expensive. If you’re looking for WordPress website support for your business, it’s important to understand what’s involved and what goes into supporting a website long-term. Websites play a critical role for every business. The scale and infrastructure of the website depends on the type of business you run.
Maybe you just need a landing page style website for your investment firm to share with key partners. Perhaps you’re a law firm that provides resources to help draw in new clients. Or, maybe you’re a technology company in Raleigh that has a website with large amounts of information about your products and services. The more complex the website, the more complex the infrastructure. If your website was well planned, cleanly built, and maintained by a professional team, it will have a longer shelf life. The simpler the website, the easier it is fix it up if any of these areas are found lacking.
Planning for the Full Website Lifecycle
It’s important that your website support is well planned. Our team provides professional WordPress website support for businesses by creating our support plan ahead of launch. If it’s a website we are taking over, we conduct an extensive audit of the site to understand how it was built. That audit allows us to create an appropriate plan and support package for each client. We offer competitive packages that keep your updated, secure, and looking great.
The website lifecycle typically incudes a few key milestones and iterative events. The design, build, and launch of the website is the first phase. Depending on how well the website was built, and its complexity, will directly impact the effort needed to maintain it long-term. At CH Web Agency, we design and build websites to grow with your organization. After launch, the website will move into support with routine updates and security patches. Each year we will relicense any software the website relies on and continue updates throughout the year, including regular bimonthly patches.
In addition to the typical updates, we also support new campaigns and updated branding. As your business adds new services and new campaigns, our team is ready to support and add the corresponding landing pages, SEO articles, relevant graphics to make sure you meet your target goals.
What Proactive Website Support Includes
Our team is actively monitoring your website for any issues. We have website monitors that track whether there is any down time and are notified right away. Downtime is rare and our hosting service provider has an estimated 99% uptime. Because of our systematic approach to updates, we mitigate potential disruption to your website. As you time passes after launch, our team will make updates and recommendations to keep your website secure, responsive, and reliable. We can scale up or down our support to match your business needs each quarter. It’s important to be proactive when providing WordPress website support for businesses.
Managing Updates Without Disruption
Our updates are scheduled and planned for. This mitigates unexplained errors on the website. While not impossible, it is unlikely that there is a critical error or major issue with our websites. You might wonder why that is. The reason is that updates are planned. The website will typically break after plugins, themes, or code versions are updated. If nothing is changed, the website won’t break. We check to make sure our websites are compatible with code updates. If there is an error, we’ll hold off on that update until we’ve resolved the compatibility issue. What does this mean for our clients, that our websites are reliable for local businesses. You shouldn’t have to report errors.
Emergency fixes are when there is an error that wasn’t accounted for and we need to patch the website. This would usually happen as a result of some edge case. An example would be a form submission that does some calculations with the submission. If the code wasn’t designed to handle the input appropriately, there could be some error. We test our websites thoroughly before launch, so again, these types of errors are rare.
Risks of Deferred Website Maintenance
Regular website maintenance is critical to keep your site safe, secure, and working as intended. If you defer website maintenance, it opens you up to vulnerabilities with plugins and lower engagement from a lack of activity. It’s critical to make regular updates to your site. Update text to be more relevant, update the backend and code to make the site safer, and check for any issues across devices so you don’t miss out on potential new customers. The Chapel Hill Web Agency is a professional website design agency that offers web design and development services across North Carolina.
