Why do Web Designers Charge for Monthly Maintenance?

Your website is done, it looks good, and it’s never worked better. But now your web designer is asking for a monthly maintenance fee and you’re not sure why. If the website works, what else needs to be done? Truth is, there are several important areas that need consistent maintenance to keep your site safe and secure, up to date, and offering the best user experience.

Security

According to a study done by IBM and Security Intelligence, of the more than 75 million WordPress sites, some 86 percent were vulnerable to a hacking exploit found in 2014. The popularity of WordPress and its foundation as an open source platform makes it a prime target for hackers. That’s why new updates are constantly released in an effort to stay one step ahead of any vulnerabilities found in the latest version. Without a routine update schedule it’s easy to back-burner this essential security step. A delayed update is the equivalent of rolling out a welcome mat for hackers hoping to infiltrate your site. Once they’re in, there’s no telling what they might do with your new website – and how much time and money you’ll spend fixing the trouble they caused.

Blocking hackers takes a two prong approach: constant updates and constant monitoring. That’s why we are constantly updating the system that drives our client sites, testing and tweaking to make sure their individual sites continue to work beautifully with the new revisions. We also employ the services of a third-party vendor to constantly monitor all of our sites for unusual activity, block suspicious users, and even compare the current files to offsite versions of the same files to see if there have been any unauthorized changes. We also pull weekly backups of each site just in case the system is breached so that we can have you back up quickly. If your web designer isn’t providing these services, ask them what they’re doing to keep your site safe.

The Latest Information

Few successful websites are built and left alone. Instead, successful websites are constantly being updated and revised. Whether that’s an active blog or the latest offer your company is offering to customers, content updates are key to having a great website not only for users but also for search engines. That poses a problem for someone who’s not sure how, or doesn’t have the time to, add the latest news to their site. That’s where we come in. Just type up your new material and we’ll distribute it to your customers or clients both on your website and via mass email communication.

Mass email is a great way to stay in front of your clients and provide them with valuable information. Content marketing via blog posts can be a helpful method for boosting your search engine ranking, but mass email can help drive initial traffic to your new material, thereby increasing page views, connecting with your client-base, and providing another metric (in this case email click-through) for testing the relevance of your messaging. We think it’s so important that we made it part of our monthly service.

Offer a Great User Experience

Like so many things in life, website management can be done the easy way, or the right way. Tools like WordPress make adding new content to a site easy, but they don’t offer insight on what material might be most beneficial. They don’t ensure your new content is formatted properly. They miss opportunities to cross link around the site.

All in all, they don’t provide the experience that comes with being a professional web designer. The experience that can help ensure your site offers a great experience for your users. Part of being an entrepreneur is learning to delegate tasks to specialists who have a unique ability in areas you need help with. Allowing a professional to handle the task of keeping your site updated, formatted, functional, and beautiful will ensure the best experience for your clients and customers (and it’s one less thing for you to worry about.)

Conclusion

An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure, and your website is no different. Simple maintenance goes a long way to keeping your new website safe, secure, updated, and working beautifully. The costs may seem like a pain, but they’re nothing compared to starting your project from scratch after getting hacked or losing business due to malfunctions. In the end, it’s a small price to pay.