What does website maintenance mean?
Introduction
Website maintenance can cover a lot of different things but, in short, it’s the essential upkeep that keeps your website and the platform or CMS it’s running on up to date.A quick website maintenance checklist would include:
- CMS updates include:
- Security patches
- Updating plugins
- Fixing anything that might have stopped working as a result of the updates
- Cross-browser testing, to ensure the site is working in new and updated browsers
- Device compatibility, to ensure the site is working for all supported devices, including new releases
- Server-side updates including regular backups
- Support, including help with using the CMS
- Bug fixing – which can be very important for complex or functional web apps
- A guaranteed response time to queries
Website maintenance packages even often include additional services such as hosting costs, additional design, development or marketing services and out of hours support.
website.
Why does website maintenance matter?
Regular monthly website maintenance is what will keep your website up to date, safe to use and working brilliantly. A failure to do regular upkeep can leave your site vulnerable to hacks, bugs and browser incompatibility.
The first reason to have a website upkeep service is for security. This is especially true if you are using an open source platform such as WordPress.
Because it’s such a widely used platform with thousands upon thousands of themes and plugins, it’s particularly vulnerable to security problems. Even their dedicated security plugins need regular updates to stay secure.
If you don’t use an open source platform, it’s still likely that your website uses one or many open source libraries, plugins or frameworks available, such as jQuery, Bootstrap, Foundation.
It’s usually best that a developer completes those updates for you, as they often have knock-on effects for the design or functionality of a site – particularly if your web product is bespoke.
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 prioritized 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.
What’s the cost of maintaining a website?
We’ve outlined 4 different levels of service for website updates, but how much does it cost to maintain a website?
Remember, these are just average website maintenance costs at these different service levels. Some agencies will quote higher, some lower, and some won’t provide them at all! But this should be a rough guideline for what you can expect to pay.
-Reactive, or Pay as you Go updates This will be charged hourly, with prices that would be ₹1200 per hour.
-Proactive Maintenance Usually somewhere between ₹4000 and ₹8000 per month, depending on the complexity of your website or system.
-Proactiv Plus, maintenance + additional work This will depend entirely on what additional work you expect to need, so will probably be somewhere upwards of ₹12,000 to ₹18,000 per month.
-Total Support This will often require staff to be available on call, so comes at a much higher cost. Expect quotes from ₹15,000 to ₹35,000 per month for extended hours, and ₹25,000 to 65,000 depending on the requirements or more per month for 24/7 support.
