The Massive Value of Louisville Web Nerds’ WordPress Website Help and Support Plans

We’ve written before about the cost of not keeping your website up to date over time. It’ll cost you in more ways than one. It’s a huge problem that plagues small businesses. The good news is, Louisville Web Nerds was created to help solve that problem.

Our Support and Maintenance options were designed to perform several key technical services that go into running a website smoothly, some on the front end of a website, and some on the back end.

This is all delivered at a low monthly cost, far lower than an in-house employee or a large agency would charge for the same services.

Some web hosting and domain companies even charge for many of the services we’ll outline here, but none offer all of them together in a package deal, and they’ll often charge you extra when you actually need to use them for support.

How Our Packages Support Your Business

First, we’ll solve your technology problems. From there, we’ll keep your website content up to date over time. This is a powerful pair of services that means you’ll never have to worry about your website.

Here are some problems that we see most often with small business websites. I won’t go heavily into these. We’ll just list them for now, but as you can see, it’s a lot, and with our support plans, you won’t have to worry about any of these.

The list goes on… I could probably make a list of 50 of these that we see all too often.

Each and every one of the issues above can and will result in poor user experiences and lost business, and we solve every single one of them and more with our support services.

Keeping up with the rapid pace of changing technology in the web world is hard. It’s something that no business owner should be expected to do.

That’s what we’re here for, and why we designed our support services the way we did.

We provide not only the back-end services to keep your website backed up, fast, secure, optimized, and running on modern technology, but we also keep the content of your website up to date over time.

And we do this all in a single package.

As I write this post (subject to change), our packages range from $99 – $249, depending on the amount of updates you need, and the number of websites we need to manage.

Let’s explain this a little bit by going into what we do with each part of the service, and see what we can do to quantify that value even further.

Routine Support and Content Updates

This service alone is enough to justify the cost of any of our support plans. Most small business owners would much rather run their businesses than worry about updating their website.

In all of our plans, we include at least simple content updates, so if you ever need a new page created, an existing page edited, a phone number updated, new features built, etc, we’ll take care of it for you included in the cost of your plan.

This is one of our main differentiators. Many providers will host your website and charge you for many of the services I’ll list next, but they’ll leave it up to you to update your website, or they’ll charge you an additional hourly fee to do it.

Your time is valuable, so we would rather you leave the web stuff up to us so you can focus on your business.

We’ll keep your website updated for one predictable flat monthly rate.

Secure Off-Site Backups

There are dozens of add-ons to WordPress to back up your website. Some of them even claim to be easy to use, and they are.

But they all have one major problem. Without custom configuration and professionally managed off-site storage, the backups really don’t do a whole lot of good when you need them.

Why? Because all of these add-ons store those backups on your webserver and require the WordPress admin panel to be working correctly to access and revert to them.

This is a problem because when WordPress breaks, you can’t access the admin portal in a lot of situations, making the backups essentially worthless for the average user.

These locally stored backups also tend to build up in size over time unless you manually delete each one, which slows down your site with each one. And if they ever fail to happen, you’ll never know.

Our backup process uses professionally licensed software and a secure cloud storage location to back up your website each week. If there is ever an error, we’ll know about it immediately through custom configured alerts with each installation.

Through this process, if we ever need to restore from a backup, we just grab the file from our cloud storage, run a script from the webserver (not using the WordPress admin panel), and restore the site to its most recent stable version.

Firewall Management and Security Monitoring

We’ve rescued our fair share of websites from hack attempts (and successes) over the years. While this is rare, when it happens, a website will quickly get delisted from search engines and become essentially unusable.

On top of that, without proper security measures in place, any type of website is vulnerable to attacks which slow it down for its end users.

We keep up with the latest security happenings with WordPress and have deployed settings to protect our clients’ sites against break-in attempts accordingly.

And if anything ever happens to your site on our watch, we’ll fix it as part of your support plan, at no additional cost.

Many companies charge a minimum of $200 to clean a hacked WordPress website. It’s likely that’ll never happen with our security settings, but if it does, you won’t be on the hook to pay more for it.

Weekly Software and Plugin Updates

WordPress evolves very quickly. Software providers typically update their software about once a week, if not more. WordPress and theme designers release updates about once a month.

These can range from new features, to security patches, to performance optimizations, and more.

Because of this cadence, we perform software updates on all of the websites we manage once a week, following a full backup.

This ensures that all security features are patched as soon as they are available, and software and servers stay updated with the most recent and modern installations.

I’ve seen companies bill up to $300 a month for this service alone. We include it in your support package along with everything else.

Weekly Proactive Crawl of all URLs

Have you ever tried to test every single URL on a website to make sure it’s working correctly? It takes a lot of time, and there is no one that has the time to do that each week, not even us.

That’s why we use software to do it for us.

We have professional licenses to a few monitoring tools which we use to monitor the health of our clients’ websites. The one we use most often is Screaming Frog.

We use this to check for broken links, missing images, broken javascript or CSS files, 404 and 500 errors, and the other issues that can come up with routine updates.

Through this process, and high-level manual checks, website quality gradually increases over time, and remains at a high level thereafter.

Many agencies charge hundreds of dollars per month alone just for this service, which is taking things way too far for most small businesses. We include it within all support packages as an added benefit.

Performance Optimization

There are several areas of web performance that are often neglected by even some skilled designers. We make sure sites are set up to use aggressive caching, image compression, the latest version of PHP, and more. We also make sure databases are optimized and performing well, and will use CDNs (content delivery networks) on larger sites to offload bandwidth.

We also make sure sites are not bloated with unnecessary plugins and heavy javascript-based code. While these types of software can do cool things, it’s usually not worth the performance drain.

All of this combined creates faster websites with better experiences, which are proven to increase business revenue.

Again, we include this service in all of our plans and every website we build and maintain.

Uptime Monitoring

Downtime can happen. Servers break. Networks get congested. Software updates can fail. It’s a fact of life with a website.

Has your website ever gone down? Maybe it has and you just didn’t know about it. Are you sure it’s up all the time when people are trying to reach it?

For all of our clients, we know the instant when a website becomes unreachable. Using proactive monitoring technology, we will get an email and a text message alert if any of the websites we monitor go down for any reason, whether we host it or not.

We’ll then diagnose the issue, work with support reps as needed, and make sure the website is down for as short of a time as possible.

If you were to purchase uptime monitoring on your own, you’d pay close to $20 a month for it. It’s included in your plan with us, and we’ll be on the hook to monitor it.

Email Deliverability Through SendGrid

Many of the older websites that come to us for redesigns have an old email delivery system that may or may not actually deliver email messages through forms.

You’ve probably had it happen to you before. You fill out a form on a website, and never hear back from the owner.

We make sure this never happens to the websites we manage. Through our partnership with SendGrid, the global leader in email deliverability, we route all emails through their servers, which is delivered from an email address that we know won’t get blocked. This setup virtually guarantees that business opportunities won’t be missed because of poor email settings.

Just one missed email from a prospective client can mean hundreds or thousands of dollars for your business.

Many agencies would charge a premium for this service, and a Professional SendGrid account costs $15 a month. You get to take advantage of it in our plan as an included benefit.

Miscellaneous Technology Support

Last, but not least, we’ve been doing this stuff a long time, since the early 2000s. If you have a technology question, toss it our way and we’ll do our best to answer it, or we will point you in the right direction, and we won’t tack a fee onto your bill for it.

We typically bill $75 an hour for technology consulting, but we’ll go ahead and answer your questions as part of your support plan. We want our clients to succeed, so why wouldn’t we support their businesses, right?

An Incredible Partner for Your Business

As you can see from everything above, we have packaged several hundred dollars worth of services into one powerful support package that makes perfect sense for any small business.

Our goal is to be an efficient strategic partner for your business.

If you need someone to take care of your website so you don’t have to, we hope you’ll check out our plans and drop us a message.

To get started, you can visit our support plans page to learn more, or go ahead and contact us today.