It’s not maintenance … it’s peace of mind!
Your website is the most valuable tool for your business. Thus, ensuring it continues to run optimally should be the number 1 priority of all business owners. To achieve this, it requires regular attention. With our Care Plans, you can relax and watch as your website is cared for and maintained, at a fraction of the time and cost it would take to do it yourself.
With a Website Care Plan:
- You will always have support in place to quickly respond to your website needs.
- Your website software will be kept up to date, and less vulnerable to issues/hacking.
- You will have a recent copy of your website on hand to restore if needed.
- You will pay a lower hourly rate for any changes/fixes required.
Our Care Plans focus on 3 different elements, giving you the flexibility to choose a package that suits your business needs.
Software Management
Modern websites have lots of moving parts and keeping the software up to date ensures a site continues to function optimally. Outdated plugins become vulnerable, so regular updating reduces hacking attacks. Much like a car, the better you maintain your site, the better it will continue to run.
Security
Web security is important to keeping hackers and cyber-thieves from accessing sensitive information. Without a proactive security strategy, businesses risk the spread and escalation of malware, attacks on other websites, networks, and other IT infrastructures.
Support
Website support is often overlooked but a crucial component of business operations. Having an expert team on hand to deal with issues and requests in a timely manner is paramount to business success.
With a Website Care Plan:
- You will always have support in place to quickly respond to your website needs
- Your website software will be kept up to date, and less vulnerable to issues/hacking
- You will have a recent copy of your website on hand to restore if needed
- You will pay a lower hourly rate for any changes/fixes required
Our Care Plans focus on 3 different elements, giving you the flexibility to choose a package that suits your business needs.
Our Website Care Plans
Modern websites have lots of moving parts and keeping the software up to date ensures a site continues to function at its best. It also reduces the likelihood of being hacked, due to vulnerabilities in outdated plugins. Much like a regular car service, the more you maintain the backend of your site, the better it will continue to run.
Annotations
1- Plugin updates for up to 10 plugins for Basic/Bronze and up to 20 for Silver/Gold ($2/m per additional plugin)
2- Care Plan clients pay $140/hr instead of our regular $180/hr for any support/website change requests. (Coding work $160/hr instead of $200).
3- Standard support response within 2 business days. Priority response within 1 business day
4- Daily site backups to secure third party server (stored for 90 days).
5- Manual site backup prior to software updates, ensuring a physical copy of the website at the exact moment prior to updating. A snapshot before and after allows us to identify any changes to the site the software updates may have caused and rectify immediately.
6- Maintenance Mode switched on prior to updating the software, ensuring users cannot submit data or purchase items during the upgrade. Site activity during updates can potentially fail, or worse, break the site.
7- ‘Immediate vulnerable updates’ ensure any software version that becomes identified as a security risk gets updated within 2 business days, rather than waiting for the monthly software update.
Care Plan FAQs
Why should I sign up to a Care Plan?
Modern websites have many moving parts and need to be regularly managed to ensure they continue to function optimally. A website is one of the most important tools a business has, so keeping it up to date and minimising the risk of hacking or incompatibilities is crucial. A Care Plan provides ongoing support, so that everything is kept up to date. It also means you are investing in a relationship with us to manage the website, so you have an immediate point of contact whenever something is required.
Which plan is best for me?
The level of management should depend on the importance of your website. If it’s a core part of your daily business activities, then investing in a higher plan makes sense. It all comes down to risk versus reward, and the higher the plan, the higher level of support. If you require regular content updates then the higher plans are also more cost effective, as you save money by including hours within the plan. For e-commerce sites or other functionality, you should be choosing the Silver plan at a minimum.
What can the website support time be used for?
If your website is an important business tool, we highly recommend support time (Silver and Gold plans). Having support built in allows us to manage any issues/troubleshooting that may arise due to software updates or the general running of the website. If you don’t have this support built in, whenever an issue arises, we will need to contact you for approval to proceed with fixing it (at our hourly rate). This could increase the length of time your website is down and inaccessible to your customers. Support time on Silver (1hr) is used to manage any issues that arise, without the need for your approval to action. Support time on Gold (3hrs) can be used to both manage issues and for content updates to your site.
Website support be used for:
- Running PHP updates
- Optimising the site database
- Configuration tweaks to fix display issues after software updates
- Content changes to your website
- Consulting (to discuss business strategy)
Can I roll support over to future months?
You cannot roll support over to future months. Support is built into the care plans to ensure we can respond to issues immediately and action fixes accordingly. It also allows us to provide content updates at an even lower hourly rate.
Why should e-commerce sites have Maintenance Mode enabled prior to updating?
Enabling maintenance mode ensures that no-one tries to submit/purchase anything while the software is being updated. If the site is live, a submission may fail, or even worse, potentially break the website. Maintenance mode means visitors cannot access the site during the updates, minimising the risk of things breaking.
Why do I have to pay more if my site has more plugins?
If a website has more plugins, then more time is required each month to perform these updates.
What is the benefit of performing the updates on a test server?
For higher plans, we can also create a separate environment to update the plugins and test them before going live. This is particularly important for businesses who need to ensure maximum uptime and avoid potential issues associated with updating software.
What are immediate vulnerable updates?
New versions of software are continually released to improve features, patch security issues and ensure ongoing compatibility. Sometimes a plugin can become vulnerable, meaning they are at a higher risk to hacking. If you’re on a plan that includes ‘immediate vulnerable updates’, we will ensure the plugin is updated to the new safe version within 2 business days of the notification. Clients on the basic plan will be notified of the vulnerable plugin and can choose to wait until their monthly software updates, or request an immediate update, which will be charged at the ‘Care Plan’ hourly rate.
MORE ABOUT OUR CARE PLANS:
- Support can be used for emergency maintenance, adjusting pages/content, backend optimisation
- Support time cannot be rolled over to future months.
- Discounted ‘Care Plan’ rate for website changes is $140/hr. Standard rate is $180/hr.
- Discounted ‘Care Plan’ rate for coding work is $160/hr. Standard rate is $200/hr.
- Pay month to month with no lock in contracts.
- All prices are pre-GST.
Get in touch to start your website care plan