From the moment someone first visits your website, everything from the design to the functionality, easy navigation, user experience, coding, testing, and a plethora of other things the amount of time, energy, and money that is invested into creating a stellar premium Website for your company is astounding.

While it is an absolute essential requirement to have an effective premium Website created for your company that translates into sales for your company, here’s what you need to know after your website has been created.

Don’t allow your investment to go to waste!

Don’t allow everything invested into your brand new premium Website for your company go to waste! Before your website is even completed, you should have a clear roadmap in place for what to expect after your website is created. Perhaps you had thought about these things before or during your website creation project, however it is essential to know and have at the very minimum even a preliminary plan in place of what to expect after your website is created so that everything that has been invested into your brand new Website for your company can reap the rewards month after month and continue to build upon it’s successes, small or large as they may be.

Think about it. Say you hire a website design and development agency to create a premium Website for your company. You procure the web design agency to help you in planning, designing, strategy, creation, development, testing, approvals, tweaks, and final deliverables. Finally after your brand new, wonderfully made premium Website is delivered and launched, they say to you “Here you go! Good luck and Congrats!”. Without the prior keen insight and knowledge of knowing what to expect, you might think to yourself “Great! Thanks!” thus leaving your new website on your old website hosting plan and servers. Then, randomly, within the first month, for what seems like a blink of an eye, your site has been hacked, destroyed, and deleted, with no possible way of ever restoring it! This happens more than you can imagine. You would hope that the web design and development agency you hired would have a backup, only to no avail, they delete all their websites once it’s been launched. Or should they happen to have a backup of your website, sometimes the Website Design & Development agency charges up to $500 or more for a “Restoration Fee”. Even after all this, you’re still left vulnerable should another attack come along.

The lesson here is to make sure you have a web design and development agency that will be with you not only during the creation of your new company website, however with you for the lifetime of your company, growing with you each and every month.

Top 5 Things To Look For in a Website Maintenance Monthly Plan

1. Tech Support and Updates

The #1 easiest method for a hacker to get into your website is through plugins installed on your website that have not been updated. Each plugin installed on your website is an opportunity for a hacker to get in. While it may be simple for someone who knows how to update plugins, there’s 2 things to consider:

1. You want to run your company, not deal with the maintenance of your website. While you at first blush might say to yourself that it only takes a few minutes to update plugins, realistically taking the time out of your week, every week to remember to do this, is very little chance typically of happening. Even if you hire an employee of yours to do this for you, you’re subjected to hoping that a large part of the website’s security is based on an employee remembering to update plugins every week.
2. If the website was built clean, meaning that it’s clean coded, then typically when updating plugins, you shouldn’t have any issues. However this isn’t always the case. Say for a moment, that you decide to update your plugins, and there is a conflicting “glitch” with a new feature added to a plugin through the update, and winds up taking down and destroying your website. What’s worse, is if this happens, and you don’t check your website thoroughly to make sure there are no conflicting issues anywhere on your website, customers will find this out for you, and you lose customers, until hopefully one of them eventually decides to notify you of the issue. Until this time, you’re left losing massive amounts of customers until the issue has been reported to you, and then having to request the help of your web development agency to go in and fix the issue, thus costing you even more money to have them go in and fix it.

2. Monthly Website Maintenance

Sometimes randomly, forms stop submitting and working correctly. This can be caused from any number of things: configuration issues, the website email servers gone bad, the form call functions are disabled or not working properly, a hacker was able to get into your website and installed malware that caused the forms to also not to work anymore, or any other number of reasons.

Forms not submitting correctly, is one of many issues that can arise if the website is not being thoroughly tested on a monthly basis. The cost of not having your website tested each month is lost sales, lost customers, and customer satisfaction. Make sure you have a web development agency that can manage, test, fix, optimize, and ensure that your site is properly working at all times and at a minimum of a monthly basis.

3. 24/7 Uptime Monitoring

While having the proper hosting is essential to making sure your website is always online, even the best hosting can’t guarantee your website will be online 100% of the time. This is where you need to have a web development agency that is monitoring your website’s uptime and downtime 24/7/365. Whether it’s for a few minutes, or a few days, any downtime on your website is costing you sales, customers, and customer experience.

There are different methods to take to asses the reason for the downtime of your website, however you need to have a Website Design & Development company that can not only monitor, manage, and assess the downtime, however also make sure to do whatever necessary to get and keep it back online with as little to no downtime as possible. While there are certain precautions you can take like redundant servers, and CDN’s, you should always have a web development agency that is tracking the uptime of your website for you so that they can ensure no visitor to your website experiences any downtime.

4. Proper Hosting

Having the proper hosting is essential for your website and company for a few reasons:

1. Hosting helps significantly in the the loading speed of your website. It’s estimated that a visitor to your website will only wait up to 5 seconds for a website to load before they become impatient and click off of your website altogether, thus going to a competitor’s website next and they never come back to your website ever again. Make sure you have a web development company that can place you on a proper hosting that is known to have the resources and bandwidth in place to handle the load of your website and visitors. A great resource for the best hosting company we’ve found is www.LeviHosting.com They offer fair prices, and the products they offer are top notch, not only for hosting, however email accounts, domain name registrations, domain renewals, domain transfers, online storage, group calendars, SSL Certificates, and much more.
2. Very few non tech savvy people know this, however google knows what other websites are on the same hosting servers as you. If you’re on a cheap hosting plan, there’s a good chance, there’s over 500 other websites on the same hosting server. Some of these websites could be anything from pornography, gambling, drugs, or any other illegal activities. Sort of like you don’t want to be associated with them in the first place, best to be on a hosting plan that detours from this heavily. If for no other reason, not only does google see your website associated on the same hosting server as all of these other websites, if any of these other websites gets hacked or has an influx of visitors to their website, not only takes down their website, it also takes down all the other websites on that server, including yours. Make sure you have a web development company that can help you in choosing the best hosting package that is right for your company.
3. Some hosting packages offer daily malware scanning. This is absolutely essential. The last thing you want is for a visitor or customer of your website to be filling out a form on your website, only to have prying eyes being able to steal their information and use it for their own benefit. Having daily malware scanning is not enough. You need to have a web development company that can manage this for you on a monthly basis and instantly remove any malware that has been placed on your website, ensuring your peace of mind for the health and online safety of your customers.

5. An Emergency Plan in Place

Even with everything in place above, there are times when no matter what preventative measures you put in place, if your website goes down from something with the hosting, or if a hacker is determined to get into your website, typically…they find a way. This is why you need to have an emergency plan in place. Make sure you have a web development company that is managing not only the uptime of your website, however if they determine that there’s no way to salvage your website or get it back online in a reasonable amount of time, they need to be able to have a backup of your website that they can load onto a fresh and separate hosting server, and then have the knowledge to point your domain to that new website hosting server. This helps ensure that your customers experience little to no downtime, thus saving you massive amounts in potential lost sales and customers.

The Solution

We at Levi Marketing, offer website monthly maintenance plans for your Website that give you the peace of mind so that you can focus on running your company. Visit https://levimarketing.co/website-maintenance-services to view our plans and sign up today!