Why Your Business Can’t do Without a Website Care Plan

August 28th 2022 | By Steve Grant

Most people would never deny the need for maintaining their vehicle. A service and regular oil change at the local garage are vital if you’re going to have a safe, smooth ride. Many wouldn’t disagree that a boiler and heating system need a regular professional service either. And we all know the importance of expert IT support when it comes to making sure our business technology systems and networks are always up and running.

So it often comes as a surprise that the same logic isn’t always applied to website maintenance. After all, if your website isn’t online, fully functioning and doing an ace job of presenting your business to your audience, then you could be missing out on vital leads and sales, which could directly impact your business growth plans.

Look after your website, and your website will look after you

It’s so important not to think of a website as ‘one and done’. Even if you’re running an SEO campaign, in fact, especially if you’re running an SEO campaign, you need to be looking after your website. Because otherwise, how can it look after you, and your business goals?

Imagine if you’re investing in SEO or have an SEO maintenance plan running. It’s doing well and visitors are flocking to your website. But when they get there, they find things wrong with it.

Its SSL certificate might have expired, flagging up a security risk for visitors.

You may have uploaded some new images or videos without first optimising them, so now the pages are loading so frustratingly slow that no one wants to stick around to wait for them.

Unexpected system bugs might be playing havoc with the way the site is running.

There might be broken links, annoying to visitors, and fatal for search engines.

Question: Do you know how to effectively resolve all these issues yourself? These are not just ‘remotely possible’ issues. They are issues that happen all the time. Every day. And some of them have the potential to negatively impact on user experience, others could completely bring a website to its knees and take it offline altogether.

So, if you don’t have the expertise in-house to sort these issues out, you are going to need a website care plan. Otherwise you could be risking losing potential new business, and damaging the brand reputation you worked so hard to build.

Why do I need a website care plan? What are the benefits?

There are more benefits to having a website care plan than you might first imagine.

Website performance, uptime, page loading speed and security are all dependent on your site software (WordPress, for example) and plugins functioning on full power, operating safely and benefiting from the latest updates.

If you regularly add content to your website, or make changes to the design, but these updates aren’t carried out under an expert eye, there is always the risk that things can get ‘broken’. Issues may arise that you may not even be aware of. Issues that may impact on the visitor experience, and your search engine rankings too.

Website software and plugins need updating regularly. SSL certificates need renewing and site security needs monitoring. Spam needs managing. Web data needs backing up.

All of this is covered by a website care plan. But a word of warning: choose your care plan wisely, because they’re not all made equal.

Website maintenance has the power to supercharge your website loading speed. Good news for visitors, good news for Google.

What’s included in the Figment website care plan?

The aim of our website care plan is to maximise the performance of your website so that it stands the best chance of delivering on your business growth goals, whilst saving you time, and protecting your reputation.

The features included in our website care plan are designed to please your visitors, and also to build trust with the search engines.

Actions such as improving page loading speed, enhancing site security, fixing broken links and generally smoothing the user experience all clock up brownie points with Google. And these are all features that are included in our website care plans. And we’ll make sure your site is GDPR compliant too, for further added reassurance.

Our website care plans come in package form, so you can choose the one that best suits your needs, and your budget. Here’s what you can expect:

• Support/Help Desk – expert support when you need it most. Submit your ticket, and we’ll allocate it to one of our in-house, UK-based experienced experts.
• Bug Fixes – fixing issues that could be preventing your website from performing at its best, or worse still, functioning altogether.
• Advanced Spam Protection – a premium, state-of-the-art service that stops you getting flooded with spam, but makes sure you get the enquiries you need.
• WordPress Upgrades – if you don’t keep your site up to date, you won’t be able to benefit from the latest features, and will miss out on vital security patches.
• WordPress Training – using WordPress but not 100% confident that you’re getting the most out of it? Our video training will boost your knowledge and skills.

• Staged Updates – updating your site and nervous how it will look? We’ll put those updates on a staging site for you, so you can check and approve them before they go live.

• Google Analytics – if you’re baffled by your website stats, we’ll make it all as clear as day for you, and help you get the most out of your web traffic.

You really should consider the above must-haves for any website care plan. Anything less is just not going to cut it if you want a plan that’s really going to have your back.

Our approach to website care and maintenance is a methodical one. We’ll never start anything, especially installing updates, without first running a backup of a client’s site.

When we do run critical updates, we follow up with a scan to detect any issues. Our software maintains a record of plugins we’ve updated, so if there is anything off-colour, we’ll be able to pinpoint exactly where the problem originated from, and deal with it, right there and then.

The aim of our website care plan packages is to maximise the performance of your website

But wait! There’s more…

There’s something that not all website care plan providers include. And that’s website hosting.

The fact is that some web maintenance companies just don’t want to be involved with, or responsible for, website hosting. The trouble with this is that you can never be assured of the quality and performance of hosting. If a problem arises and it’s not clear whether it’s down to the website, or a result of a hosting issue, if you have two separate providers, that whole ‘it’s not our problem, it’s theirs’ scenario rears its ugly head.

Simply put, here at Figment, we are fully accountable for everything. Our website care plans also include hosting. Not just any old hosting. Great hosting. So that’s added peace of mind, and saved time and potential frustration all round.

Figment website hosting is fast, secure and scalable. Powered by Google Cloud, it’s designed to give your website visitors the best possible online experience, as well as maximising conversions.

With Figment web hosting, you get:

• A faster loading website – popular with Google and visitors alike.

• Data compliance reassurance – from cookie control to data retention and recovery, this hosting package keeps you on the straight and narrow with GDPR.

• Military grade encryption – giving your website visitors the peace of mind they need to transact with your site.

• Online security guard – preventing risky intruders getting onto your site and causing trouble.

• Uptime monitoring – 24/7 monitoring to make sure your website remains up and running, so your customers have round the clock access and you reputation stays intact.

• Fully managed server – with your server taken care of by experts, you won’t have to worry about maintenance or other issues that typically arise with managing a server.

• Nightly backup – if something should go wrong with your website, you’ll need to be able to restore it, and fast. The only way to make sure that’s possible is through regular backups. Ours are run every night, so if there’s a need to restore the site, it will be the most recent version.

Not all website care providers also do hosting.

Why can’t I just maintain my own website?

Maintaining your own website could cost you more than you might think. You may be keen to save money, but in reality, it could be a false economy.

Say for example you respond to an alert within your WordPress admin to update a plugin. You think you’re doing the right thing by going ahead, then a little while later you find something’s wrong. How would you know what changed and how to revert the changes?

If you didn’t back up your site before you ran the update, and you only have a very old backup to restore from, maybe even just the original site files, you could risk losing all your recent content changes, contact forms and enquiries, orders and all sorts.

Prevention is cheaper than cure

As the saying goes, prevention is better than cure. And it’s most certainly cheaper too. You will for sure find that it costs more to fix a website than to maintain one.

Inexperience and a lack of ongoing care can leave gaping holes in the functionality, appearance and security of your website. You can try to fix these holes yourself, in which case you may do more harm than good. Or you can pay an expert to fix them.

Just like with a vehicle, or a boiler, it costs more for an emergency callout to resolve a problem, than it does to maintain it properly. Regular servicing keeps a car or boiler running smoothly. And regular website maintenance via a website care plan helps keep a site running smoothly.

You will for sure find that it costs more to fix a website than to maintain one.

Free up your time to do what you do best

Maintaining a website calls for technical expertise and experience. Would you not be best leaving it to the professionals? Freeing up your time to do what you do best, focusing on growing your business and serving your customers? You wouldn’t leave your business in the hands of someone who didn’t know what they were doing inside out, so why would you do the same with your website?

You could consider a website care plan a type of insurance policy, reducing your risk of losing leads, missing out on sales and damaging your reputation, which are all things that can happen if a website is not functioning correctly.

Is your website protected by a care plan?

If your website is not protected by a care plan, you could be putting your business growth plans at risk.

At Figment, we combine our award winning web development, SEO and technical expertise with our top rated client service commitment to deliver a website care and hosting package that’s brimming with features and benefits.

With our service, you’ll enjoy jargon-free support from our helpful specialists, and with guaranteed response times, you’ll have that all-important peace of mind. Our aim is for you to feel you can rely on us as if we were your own in-house team.

Care plan packages

Choose from five care plan packages to suit your specific needs and budget. All packages include a support desk and allowance, advanced spam protection, bug fixes, expert consultations, WordPress upgrades and WordPress video training.

Other options include Google Analytics and WooCommerce support, priority and out of hours support and a dedicated webmaster.

Hosting packages

In terms of hosting, there are also five packages on offer. All include round the clock uptime monitoring, nightly backups, speed optimisation and SSD storage for superfast site loading, a fully managed server and security protection.

The gold, platinum and diamond packages also include a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is a group of interconnected servers distributed across the world. Websites that use a CDN are known to experience on average 50% reductions in load times, sometimes more. CDNs speed up content delivery by reducing the distance between where content is stored and where it’s being summoned, responding to user requests a whole lot faster. So it’s good news for your website visitors, and great news for Google.

As well as speeding things up, a CDN also guarantees an uninterrupted service in the face of internet problems. Servers can go down, networks can become congested and connections can be interrupted. But because a CDN is made up of multiple servers, in the event one stops working, a backup will automatically take over. Some CDNs are able to route around network congestion, a bit like your satnav rerouting you around roadworks or heavy traffic.

Websites that use a Content Delivery Network are known to experience on average 50% reductions in load times, sometimes more.

Ready to learn more about website care and hosting from Figment?

To discover how Figment can help you get the most out of your website and protect your sales and reputation with a website care and hosting plan, you are welcome to get in touch with our friendly team.