Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. In fact, all of our plans will allow you to stay on your own web hosting. While our WordPress Hosting will increase the performance, stability, and security of your website immensely, as well as make it far easier to manage, using your own web hosting is just fine if you don’t want to switch.

Hosting services can be added to any of our packages for an additional fee.

Pricing depends on the complexity of your project. You can get an idea of what kind of pricing you may be looking at by visiting our services overview page.

Louisville Web Nerds aims to keep pricing fair while providing a high level of service to our clients. We do this through minimizing facility costs, making efficient use of technology and software, keeping personnel costs low, keeping marketing costs low, and overall adhering to the cost standards of a bootstrapped business.

Typically our custom website builds start around $2,000. There are ways to cut that cost if you’re open to less customization. Some sites can be up to $5,000 or more depending on features desired.

For all monthly support agreements, we’ll set you up with an auto-billing arrangement in advance of your services. We use our secure payment providers (Stripe and PayPal) to set you up once, and this will be paid automatically each month.

You can use your PayPal account, a credit card, or a bank draft. All payment details are kept secure and encrypted with our payment processing partners. We do not store or transmit any payment information.

All monthly support agreements must be auto-paid. We will not process paper checks outside of one-time project work. We are a lean business and do not issue paper invoices for recurring work.

If you have a large project, we will invoice that separately to be paid by check.

The answer here is maybe. We do not offer troubleshooting or error fixes on an hourly basis. These projects tend to be very time-sensitive and require intimate knowledge of a website. Since our first priority is our loyal support clients, these types of issues will need to be solved with a monthly support package only.

If you’d like to sign up for a monthly support package for us to fix your site and prevent this situation from happening again, we’d be happy to help. Otherwise, we’ll need to keep our attention on our clients only, as they have paid us to keep their websites running smoothly. If your issue is not time-sensitive, we can look at it on a first-come-first-serve basis.

There are a couple of ways this is accomplished. WordPress is not exactly performance friendly by default. We use a specific caching setup that takes advantage of server memory to serve your web pages instead of loading them from the database every time. This is more intense on the processor of your web host (sometimes they don’t like this), so we use a setup that will load your pages quickly, and still play nice with your host. Once this is set up, it works in the background like magic as long as it’s kept updated.

Additionally, we use a few compression methods that reduce the size of the objects that need to be loaded each time your website is accessed. This includes CSS files, Javascript files, and images. The aggressiveness of how this method works depends on the website.

If you have a quote from a “budget” designer, or large company promising to build you a website, there is a reason that quote is so low. Either the work will be low quality, or the company will relentlessly try to sell you addon services afterward.

Our prices are not bottom dollar, but are very reasonable vs larger agencies due to our low overhead model, and we will not bother you once a week for services that you don’t want.

We will update your website with software patches once a week, which will keep them very current. We also do a high-level test of your website each week to make sure everything is still working properly. We recommend you do this from time to time as well. You’ll never have to worry about keeping your software up-to-date.

On all of our plans, we will install and configure proactive monitoring software on your web server to keep your website secure from the latest threats. If something does happen we will investigate and fix the issue against your normal maintenance hours.

Additionally, we recommend all clients use SSL encryption as a best practice. We can set this up for you and will simply bill you the annual fee to maintain it. SSL is difficult to undo, so we ask that you make sure you are committed to your business before going full SSL.

Additional security measures can be deployed as well, but for most sites they are not needed.

For all plans, we will enable weekly backups (at minimum) on your web server using a custom software configuration that can restore your website to the most stable state in just a few minutes.

We do this using a secure off-site storage repository, in the event that the website produces an error that caused the back-end tooling to be inaccessible, which happens in the event of most crashes. There is no backup software that allows this without custom configuration, which we do with all of the sites we support.

Of course. If you ever go over your allotted time with the plan, we will let you know in advance. You can either elect to wait until next month’s billing cycle to continue with the updates to your website, or you can elect to be billed at an additional project rate.

Yes, but this does take time. It should be noted that there may be a travel fee for all on-site visits in excess of an initial in-person meeting and this will count towards the monthly support amount. Remote meetings are included in the pricing.

All of our plans work on a retainer basis and offer a maximum amount of hours per month. If you do not meet your maximum, you’ll still pay your monthly rate for our availability and monitoring of your website, as well as backups, software, and routine WordPress updates. Keeping your website running well is not trival, and is extremely valuable. We do not take it lightly.

There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes. This is actually in your best interest. We provide you a maximum number of hours per month so you can build out your website over time without worrying about paying by the hour (unless you choose to).

If you aren’t using your hours on an ongoing basis, we’ll either recommend additional updates proactively, or we’ll adjust your plan to better fit the needs of your business.

Yes, we offer financing for up to six months on all large projects. This is a great way to spread out the cost of your website build over time if you don’t have the up front cash. We do this quite often for clients on a budget.

You can see more details on our payments and financing page.

We operate from 9 AM – 5 PM EST, Mon – Fri. We provide 24/7 support for urgent issues such as website downtime or other critical errors that render a website unusable. Typically we do not provide maintenance services after hours unless it is by choice.

Routine maintenance requests outside of business hours will incur a $100 after-hours fee and may be subject to additional hourly rates. If you may have urgent upcoming maintenance needs, such as a marketing campaign, please give us a heads up and we will do our best to respond quickly during these times.

If you’re an existing client, we’ll provide you with an email address where you can send your routine maintenance requests. We do not handle maintenance requests over text or phone due to the nature of how websites work. Email is the best avenue for communication. If you have a critical support issue, we’ll provide you with a phone number that is monitored 24/7.

For routine maintenance requests, we aim to handle these within 1 week or less. Typically maintenance requests are taken care of within a few days. Support is offered 24/7 in the event of a downtime event. We can be reached by phone and will respond as quickly as possible in these scenarios, usually in less than 30 minutes.

All of our services are flexible and month-to-month. If you find that you need more or less time, simply get in touch with us and we’ll make the necessary adjustments.

Just toss us an email and we’ll finish out the hours you have for the current month, and we’ll part ways without a hassle.

Please note that if you do decide to cancel you will lose your current pricing and will be subject to the normal rates if you decide to sign up again or need additional support.

You’ll also need to pay the non-support hosting pricing if we are hosting your website, and we will no longer update or monitor your website.

We’ll also uninstall all of the supporting software and licenses that we use to maintain your website.

We prefer to operate on monthly agreements because this keeps your website in the best shape possible. If this is not possible for your business, you can always get in touch with us to ask if we can help you, however, please understand that our first priority is to our monthly clients and we may not have the capacity to get to your project right away.

Your best option, if you only need updates a few times a year, is to sign up for the Personal option.

This will get you 1 hour per month. We can work with you to use this time to do the updates you need. Additionally, we will still keep your website software updated, monitored, backed up, and secure for you as part of your agreement. This is a great deal.

If you would still like the peace of mind that our monthly support services offer and you cannot pay the monthly rate, get in touch with us to see if we can work something out.

Yes. We have a long history of web expertise and offer a variety of other services. You can see a list of these on our services overview page.

No. We can offer best practices and guidance for these activities, but due to their time-intensive nature and frequency of these activities, our services do not include these activities, however, we can refer you to our partners if you would like to get in touch with us.

Currently, the bulk of the work for LWN is done by its owner Cody Wheeler. LWN operates as a side business, with most of the implementation work being done on nights and weekends.

Since this is a small and efficient operation with carefully thought-out operating procedures and delicately managed capacity, this allows plenty of time to cater to clients’ needs as well as build new websites. If capacity ever becomes an issue, a notice is added to the contact page that we are not accepting new business until additional capacity becomes available. This has happened just a handful of times, but sometimes it’s needed to make sure we’re taking care of clients.

We do work with a couple of contractors and design resources that allow us to cater to needs outside of our expertise from time to time, but we prefer not to do this due to the complexity that this requires. We find that keeping things simple is better for everyone.

Since LWN is built with reliability and a long-term relationship mindset, and most of the work is done by the owner of the company, clients do not have to worry about the constant turnover of large agencies.

LWN has been in business since 2017. Its owner, Cody Wheeler, has been building websites since 2001 and using WordPress since it was created. We are veterans of the web and digital marketing industry and you are in good hands.

In the situation where work needs to be done on an hourly basis outside of a monthly support plan, we do offer these services. Please see our consulting page for current rates.

Rest assured our rates are far different from many agencies who will charge in excess of $200 an hour and build in the cost of things like internal project management, lunches, gifts, conferences, office space, swag, high overhead, and more.