Website maintenance:
what is it and why do you need it?
The difference between website maintenance and website support
Website maintenance refers to the ongoing process of updating, optimising, and managing the infrastructure of a website to ensure it functions smoothly and remains secure. It’s akin to doing a regular MOT to make sure that the mechanics of the site are working correctly and involves a variety of tasks, such as updating software and plugins, improving page load speed, and monitoring and remedying malware and uptime issues.
Regular website maintenance is essential for security, as it helps protect against cyber threats and vulnerabilities. It also enhances user experience by ensuring the site remains functional and easy to navigate. Additionally, search engines favour well-maintained websites, which can boost your search rankings and online visibility.
Neglecting maintenance can lead to issues like slow performance, outdated features, or even website downtime, which can hurt your brand reputation and revenue. In short, maintaining your website is crucial to keeping it reliable, competitive, and aligned with the evolving needs of your audience and business goals.
Website support covers all the other tasks required to keep a site working well for users, such as ensuing enhancing site features, improving the visual design and layout of pages, and ensuring ongoing compatibility with modern browsers and devices. Read more about about our support offering here.
What does website maintenance include?
The most common site maintenance tasks that all websites need include:
- Security updates to guarantee the website is safe and secure
- Backups to ensure no data is lost
- Website performance checks to make sure the site is loading and functioning as it should
- Monitoring of the code base, database and server environment to ensure malware and up-time issues are spotted and resolved quickly
But there are other areas that you may want to consider too! There are different types of website maintenance available which will contribute to your website running smoothly and effectively. Other areas that should be considered include the following:
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Maximising page speed to allow your web pages to load quickly to avoid potential customers clicking back and visiting another website. Page speed can be improved numerous ways which include removing areas of code not needed, reducing image sizes and the order in which the site is loaded.
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Fixing bugs and updating software is crucial to any site. If these are ignored, the site can run slower and even become incompatible with browsers. It can even lead to security breaches so staying on top of this is a priority.
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Repairing broken links across the website which can typically occur from time to time. These happen if an internal link has been entered incorrectly or if the page they are going to is no longer available. This can cause frustration for users and search engines alike.
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Ensuring your website is accessible to all users, including those with physical, cognitive and sensory disabilities. Requirements include text being in plain English, using a legible font, a clear colour contrast and using a logical site structure so it’s easy for users to find what they are looking for.
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Get browser compatible so all the different browsers and operating systems available can read and translate your code. To do this, your website needs to be cross-browser compatible.
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Being GDPR compliant, ensuring that your site is following the most recent legislation. Your website needs to have cookie notifications and cookie related tooling, along with having a compliant consent mode setup. Because data management legislation continues to evolve it is important to keep on top of the compliance standards and the related website tooling regularly.
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Adding new regular content to your website keeps your content fresh and updated which will be beneficial to Google as well as users. Google favours fresh quality content and rewards websites by increased visibility in the search results.
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Ensuring your site is mobile compatible is key. Google uses mobile first indexing which means it will rank your website based on the mobile version. The majority of searches these days come via a mobile device so this is another reason as to why you will want your site to be mobile friendly.
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Functionality testing to make sure all the features and content on your site are working correctly, to allow users to navigate the site and administrators to keep it up-to-date in the back-end.
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Social media integration so you have a more streamlined user experience and can connect and engage with your audience more effectively. Displaying share and follow buttons in suitable places across your website will help engage your audience and also grow your following.
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Optimising meta data is a crucial task in helping both users and Google alike to understand what they are going to see when landing on your website. Page titles and meta descriptions should be kept up-to-date and be present on all pages of your website. It’s also important to ensure that they are optimised correctly so that Google doesn’t cut them off or decide to rewrite it’s own version!
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Connecting and reviewing analytics so you can see how your website is performing and what areas of the site you may need to take a closer look at. Analytics keeps a record of data so that you can see how many people came to your website, how long they stayed, what pages they visited and what interactions they made.
How often should you perform these website maintenance tasks?
For our Drupal clients, if cost were not a consideration they would have their site’s health and performance checked on a weekly basis, but in the real world for the vast majority of clients a monthly or quarterly service is more than sufficient. We provide a wide range of frequencies to suit all needs and budgets, and offer fixed price annual contracts so you know what your overheads will be. We’re available to discuss your requirements and provide a recommendation based on your specific needs whenever you’re ready to talk.
For our WordPress clients we offer either a manual option (similar to our Drupal approach described above) or a cheaper automated service that will run updates on the core installation, themes and plugins on a weekly basis. The automated option suits the majority of our WordPress client sites but for some clients with very complex or business critical assets the extra attention of a manual update is often a better fit. A quick call to discuss your situation is often enough to identify which option would suit your site the best.
How much does website maintenance cost?
The cost depends largely on which platform your site is built with, WordPress or Drupal. Drupal sites typically tend to be more complex and take more time to manually update. Our standard costs for core CMS, themes and plugin/module updates performed on a quarterly basis is £765+VAT per iteration for Drupal, and for WordPress it’s £510+VAT per iteration. If updates are done more frequently we offer cheaper rates per iteration.
For WordPress we also offer an alternative automated solution that will update the site once a week. Most of our WordPress clients choose this service as it is both cheaper and updates are applied more frequently. We offer different pricing for small sites for individuals, for charities, and larger more complex commercial sites, with prices starting from as little as £450+VAT per year.
We also offer other maintenance services on a tailored basis to suit your needs. These can include tasks such as the monitoring and resolution of broken links, ongoing server health checks, page speed monitoring, accessibility compliance monitoring, and more. If you’re looking for a bespoke set of ongoing maintenance tasks give us a call to start exploring the options.
Why use Pedalo for your website maintenance needs?
Everything you need
We will meet all of your WordPress and Drupal needs by providing regular updates, hosting, security protection and ongoing assistance so your website is always up-to-date.
Tailored to you
We will take our time to get to know your organisation to ensure we are able to support you where we can make the most impact.
Technical expertise
We’re armed with technical expertise in the WordPress and Drupal areas. We have more than two decades of experience which helps us troubleshoot any issues you may be facing.
Simple & cost effective
Our offering across WordPress and Drupal maintenance is flexible meaning you pay on demand for what you need, when you need it!
Website maintenance FAQs
Can I perform website maintenance myself?
Yes you can, but the question really is, should you?
What if something goes wrong with an update, will you know how to fix it? And have you got the time to keep on top of the technical knowledge required to ensure that the site is in a healthy condition? In reality, probably the best option to save time (and money) is to let an expert take care of things, freeing you up to focus on the things that you do best.
What are the consequences of not maintaining my website?
There are a range of things that can go wrong if a site isn’t maintained, from broken functionality and layout problems, to poor search engine rankings, and even being hacked. Maintenance of the software will reduce the likelihood of all of these issues coming to pass, and having a regular backup procedure and disaster recovery plan will mean that if the worst does come to pass we can quickly restore the infrastructure and get the site back up and running with minimum fuss, saving stress, lost time, and potential lost revenue.
What types of issues does your website maintenance service cover?
Our core maintenance service covers the management and maintenance of the website software and database, ensuring that security and feature upgrades are applied regularly and any resulting issues are resolved swiftly. As part of this service we also run regular backups and scan for malware and up-time issues.
We also offer additional maintenance services that cover server maintenance and monitoring, advanced backup and disaster recovery procedures, content monitoring, page speed monitoring and analysis, and advanced infrastructure monitoring and optimisation. If you’re interested in discussing other requirements please give us a call on 020 8747 3274 or send an email to [email protected].
How do I report a technical problem?
We are happy to work however works best for you, so an email or a phone call is fine. We use Trello as our ticketing system, and will provide you with a custom Trello board so you can raise tickets directly via that too. Any query or task, whether it comes through as an email, phone call or is added by you directly to the Trello board, will have an associated Trello card with a unique ID, allowing both parties to have a full overview of the status of the task and an audit of all the dialogue about that task as work is being done.
At the end over every month we’ll let you know how much time has been spent per card and give you a breakdown of any chargeable time used. We aim to pick up any new tasks within two hours, lining them up in our schedule to be worked during the next available slot. We offer Service Level Agreements too so that you can rest assured that your tasks are being handled in an agreed way at all times.
Do you provide 24/7 support?
We don’t currently offer 24/7 support. Our core hours are 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday, but our flexible team will nearly always be working both before and after these hours. Typically we will have a number of team members available at all times between 14 and 16 hours a day.
With advanced notice we do offer support during weekends, early mornings and late evenings, so should your organisation require specific periods of additional support at predictable times, such as during an annual conference or similar, we can be on hand to ensure things run smoothly and issues are picked up and resolved swiftly.
Can you support me if my website has been hacked or showing server errors?
Yes, absolutely, we frequently help organisations that find themselves with a broken or hacked site. Typically we’ll perform some or all of the following tasks:
- Take the site temporarily offline
- Backup the site
- Change all the passwords
- Scan the code-base and database for malware
- Check and clean any suspicious or infected files
- Compare core files with the latest official downloads from the WordPress or Drupal sites
- Check for and remove backdoors, whereby hackers create new vulnerabilities within the installation enabling them to log back in following a clean up procedure
- Reinstall themes, plugins and modules where practical to ensure they are running on the most recent clean code
- Update the core CMS installation to the most recent version if practical
- Harden the CMS and server security by restricting or removing certain permissions, removing certain files, installing security monitoring plugins or modules, altering the login URL, applying a reliable CDN solution, restricting access to certain directories to specific IP addresses, and monitoring for IP addresses where suspicious activity has been detected and blocking them
- Check for and remove unauthorised user accounts
- Apply advanced monitoring for malware, ongoing performance issues, and suspicious activity
If your site has been hacked or has stopped working and you’d like a quote to fix it contact us by phone or email now.
How long do technical issues take to resolve?
Typically a technical issue presents it self as a bug, and bugs by their nature are like puzzles that you only know you’ve solved once you completed them. As such it is very hard to predict exactly how long any one bug or technical issue may take to resolve. There are also a wide spectrum of types of technical issues, from simple front-end styling bugs, through to complex functionality issues.
Where we can provide an estimate, assuming the client wants to know a timescale, we’ll provide one but in circumstances where that’s not possible or practical our approach is to keep clients informed on progress and give them information as we work through issues so that they are up-to-date on the current status and spend of a task and are empowered to make good decisions.
We typically aim to pick up any new task within two hours, booking it into our schedule for the next available slot.