Care plans: Health insurance for your website
The scariest thing for a business owner to hear may be “Your website has been hacked.” If you are lucky, your website will only be down while it is restored (from a backup prior to the hack) or while the system is thoroughly cleaned. Either way, downtime risks lost sales. If the above scenario gives you the shivers, know that a care plan can save the day.
All software needs ongoing maintenance and updating, and your website is no exception. Your website is an essential part of your business, and downtime, or even a poor-performing website, can really hurt your bottom line.
Often business owners don’t think about the upkeep of their website until they have visible problems. By then, it’s often too late because they’ve already lost traffic or missed the big sale.
Not maintaining your website is like failing to take your vitamins or washing your hands and then missing several days of work when you go down with the flu. No one thinks the worst will happen … until it does.
The #1 reason to have a care plan is to protect your website.
Care Plans to the rescue
A care plan maintains and protects your website in a number of ways. Here is a list of things you can expect from a good care plan:
• Regular software updates – These updates are the preventative care your website needs to keep your risk of a hack or data breach as low as possible.
• Backups – Knowing your website can be quickly restored if something does go wrong gives you peace of mind. We backup most websites daily and keep a long history of backups archived in case they are needed.
• Security monitoring – Our care plans come with security monitoring that proactively monitors and protects websites from malware and other malicious threats 24/7. If a problem arises, it can be identified and solved quickly.
• Performance monitoring – Speed tests and optimization will keep your site loading quickly, and with a care plan will be carried out on a regular schedule.
• Support and development tasks – A care plan gives you access to web professionals when you have a problem with your site or need help making a change. Our care plans include a generous allowance of support and development tasks each month.
• Reporting – Possibly the best thing about a care plan is the report you will receive at the end of every month with an overview of the care your website was given along with information on your basic traffic statistics, page speed, etc.
Will I save money doing it myself?
Many people don’t even realize how affordable it can be to have a professional take care of their website. Sure, a tech-savvy business owner or employee can usually keep their own site updated. But is it the best use of your time, and, therefore, your money?
You should spend your time doing the things in your business that you enjoy and are uniquely qualified to do. We like to refer to it as your sweet spot. Updating website software is typically only the sweet spot for us nerdy web developer and IT types.
Keeping your website updated, secure, backed up, and performing well can be time-consuming as well as quite tedious. When you are doing it yourself, you are more likely to put off some critical tasks, putting your website at risk. Updates also don’t always work as expected. When this happens, it will likely cost more to find someone to fix the problem than the care plan would have cost, to begin with.
So an effort to save money can actually cost far more in the long run, either in lost income and productivity due to a security breach or downed website, or from the productivity lost on the time spent trying to DIY it.
Professional care plan providers don’t panic when there is an issue during an update or wonder if the backup really worked. We’ve seen it all and fixed it all before. We are more efficient because we are doing it several times a month for different clients.
We like to think of the care plans as an insurance policy against disaster. The cost to fix the issue is often well more than the amount invested in a care plan over the course of a whole year. Just like a car or your health, it costs more to fix it than it does to maintain it. And this is best left to the professionals.
By securing an experienced WordPress company to care for and support your site properly, you are actually saving potential lost revenue, productivity, and customers.
Want information about Excelss care plans? Contact us “Here”.
