Huntsville Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Huntsville, AL Websites

We view web maintenance to be a reactive support service that provides your Huntsville business with the appropriate web developer resources to solve nearly any website problem. There are many examples of website issues that might require service from Huntsville web maintenance companies, including:

• Updating your website platform.
• Keeping apps and plugins updated for better security and functionality.
• Adding new pages whenever you release something new.
• Staying fresh with new blog content.
• Rearranging the navigation menu of your Huntsville website.
• Improving page speed to help you pass Google Core Web Vitals.
• Taking backups of your website's files and databases.
• Changing the look and feel of your website.
• Troubleshooting Google Search Console coverage issues.
• Enhancing technical SEO with structured data, open graph tags, etc.
• Providing solutions to other website problems.

These are just a few of the Huntsville web support services we offer. In fact, Huntsville website support is really anything a web developer or digital marketer does to your website to change it in some manner.

Reactive Huntsville Website Support

Most Huntsville website owners wouldn't want a web developer messing around with their site without their permission. That's why we consider web maintenance a reactive service. You can count on our firm to keep your Huntsville website running smoothly. However, we can provide some proactive web support services for your Huntsville website.

View Huntsville Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Huntsville Website Support

For website owners in Huntsville interested in a proactive management service for some of their website upkeep requirements, we are happy to accommodate! There are several website support services, including platform upgrades, app / extension updates, website backups, performance monitoring, and broken link monitoring, that our website maintainers can handle in a proactive manner.

View Huntsville Website Management Pricing

In addition to supporting Huntsville-area websites, our web maintenance agency also offers Auburn, Birmingham, Decatur, Dothan, Florence, Mobile, Montgomery, and Tuscaloosa small businesses and large corporations help with their websites.

Who Needs Website Maintenance in Huntsville, AL

At some point in time, every Huntsville website will require some form of web support. The reason is simply that the internet is always changing. However, we don't charge a lot for Huntsville website support, so you'll be able to afford it! There are a few reasons why a website in Huntsville might need maintenance:

• Hosting companies sometimes upgrade their servers, removing PHP versions that were used by your Huntsville website. This means you have to refactor your app or upgrade to a newer framework that supports the new PHP version. You can't expect custom web functionality programmed in the past to work forever without any improvements.
• When an ecommerce platform or a content management system releases new versions, they eventually must deprecate the old versions so their teams can focus on maintaining the newer technologies. This recently happened to Magento 1.x ecommerce store owners who were forced to migrate to Magento 2.x, or an alternative ecommerce platform, because Magento 1.x had reached an “End of Life” status and would no longer be maintained or updated by Magento. As a result, Magento 1.x ecommerce businesses in Huntsville were looking for ecommerce developers to help migrate their websites.
• Whenever a website owner falls victim to malware or some other form of malicious activity, the website needs to be cleaned of malware and reviewed for security exploits. This is time-consuming, and often happens when the website owner isn't paying attention to the first two web maintenance examples.
• You need to refresh your Huntsville website content when it's outdated or doesn't explain your organization, products, or services well enough for future visitors. Maintaining your Huntsville website is key to making sure it's working for you.

As you can see, there are many reasons a website may require maintenance above and beyond the obvious reasons of just wanting to update something on the website. It is important to understand the future needs of your Huntsville business when planning budgets and schedules for website maintenance and support.

How We Perform Huntsville, AL Website Maintenance

We have an experienced web support team who puts forth great effort to understand your maintenance needs, schedule your work in a timely fashion, and follow up with your Huntsville business after the tasks have been completed.

Most website support services start with an email from you, the owner of the Huntsville website. Your email gets routed to our ticket system and automatically gets assigned to your project manager. We can then work on the ticket without delay, which leads to faster turnaround and easier internal communication.

Phone or live chat requests follow a similar process to Huntsville web maintenance. We route the support request to the most appropriate web developer on our team based on the nature of the work needed on your website.

Example Web Maintenance Service List for Huntsville, AL Businesses

We are often asked for detailed examples of Huntsville website maintenance requests that might come up after the launch of a website. Here are several examples of Huntsville web support services we've been asked to perform in the past and would be more than happy to provide to you!

Simple Huntsville Website Updates

Changes to your Huntsville website could be as simple as updating a paragraph, swapping images, or adding a new page. Keeping content fresh for search engines and visitors is just normal, routine website support.

Huntsville Site Performance Improvements

If your Huntsville website isn't running as fast as it once was, we can review your website for hosting issues, caching issues, unoptimized images, console errors, broken links, poor queries, and much more. This will help improve page load times, which are beneficial to user experience and search engine optimization.

Platform Upgrades / Security Patches

It's important to keep your Huntsville website updated if it runs on a CMS like WordPress. Updates help improve security and functionality - and they're usually quick, so it might be a simple task.

Extension / Plugin Updates

It's important to update your Huntsville website's plugins and extensions to reflect the latest changes by the developers. It's similar to updating the CMS platform since it helps patch security and functionality issues.

Google Search Console Fixes

Did you get a report from Google Search Console telling you about a coverage issue? If so, we'll look at the coverage issues, fix them, and update you on the status. Make Google happy, and you'll rank higher throughout Huntsville and beyond!

Add Structured Data

Do you ever see product prices or reviews in Google organic search results? This is brought to you by structured data, which is a standardized way of describing the content on the web page, whether it be of a local business in Huntsville, and ecommerce product or some other common data type.

Add Open Graph Tags on Your Website

Adding Open Graph Tags to your website will help search engines better understand your page content and improve the appearance of your website in social media platforms when people share links of your Huntsville business.

Add Google Tag Manager

Interested in using Google Tag Manager for managing custom scripts? No problem at all! We'll happily install Google Tag Manager on your Huntsville website and teach you how to use it.

Add Conversion Tracking

If you are interested in understanding the benefit of an online advertising campaign for your Huntsville website, it is important to setup conversion tracking. This will help you understand where your conversions are coming from, such as a Google search or a Bing Ads campaign.

Image Compression (Optimization)

Is your Huntsville website slow because of large images? Not a problem! Using our image compression tools, we can compress all your images and even set up recurring compression for new images!

Setup Live Chat

Do you want to try live chat on your website? We can make recommendations on the best live chat systems for your business requirements, install the tracking code, and configure the design to match the branding of your Huntsville business!

Review Error Logs for Issues

Are your error_log files big? To stop recurring error messages, we can diagnose the problem and update programming code.

Reduce Spam with reCaptcha

We can set up a checkbox or invisible reCaptcha to help minimize unwanted submissions on your Huntsville website.

Setup a Caching Plugin

Are you interested in installing a caching plugin in your Huntsville website, but not sure how to properly configure the settings for best website performance? We can help you figure out which caching plugins to install and configure on your website!

Send Website Emails Over SMTP

We can configure your contact form and website platform to send emails through an SMTP account instead of PHP mail to improve email deliverability.

IP Address Restrictions

Is your Huntsville website being bombarded with fake orders, contact submissions or live chats from a specific network? We can help setup IP restrictions to prevent malicious traffic from interacting with your website.

Create Website Backups

Would you like a backup of your Huntsville website? Let us help you create one-time or scheduled backups that you can store locally or offsite.

Create a Testing Website

When you're doing a major upgrade or extension installation, you should set up a development or staging site first. Just let us know if you need help creating and managing that development / staging site!

Implement A/B Testing

Do you prefer to make design changes based on statistical data regarding how users interact with your Huntsville web page? We can help you run A/B testing to help you decide which design or content layouts are best.

Add 301 Redirects

Do you have a new website or are you removing pages? Make sure your Huntsville website has 301 redirects to prevent or at least minimize 404 errors. We've seen businesses in and around Huntsville lose huge amounts of organic traffic due to widespread broken pages. We can help you create 301 redirects within .htaccess files, nginx templates, and CMS platforms.

Provide Website Training

Want to learn how to make simple edits to your Huntsville website? We'll be happy to help if your Huntsville site was built on a platform we work with, such as WordPress or Shopify.

The Platforms We Maintain for Huntsville, AL Websites

We have a diverse team of web designers and web developers, for Huntsville businesses, who have been immersed in multiple website platforms over the years. That said, it is better to become a master of a handful of platforms rather than try to specialize in them all. Because of that, we tend to service only these platforms for Huntsville websites:

• Huntsville WordPress Web Maintenance
• Huntsville WooCommerce Website Maintenance
• Huntsville Shopify Web Support

In the past, we provided website maintenance and support for Joomla and Magento platforms of Huntsville businesses. However, we chose not to use those platforms so our website support experts could focus on training and support within the more popular platforms.

Questions to Ask Huntsville, AL Web Maintenance Agencies

Before signing up for any Huntsville website maintenance package, it is important to ask the Huntsville web support company some questions about how their services work. This will help you get a better idea of the experience you will have with their expert Alabama web maintenance services before you submit payment and provide website access. You can ask these simple questions:

• Can you tell me how you handle website security? Do you run website security scans for clients?
• What's the turnaround time for Huntsville website maintenance?
• Is your Huntsville web support outsourced?
• What are your Huntsville website support costs?
• Do you have minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Huntsville website updates?
• What are your normal hours of operation?
• When there are new updates on my platform, will you let me know?

If you ask these questions to a Huntsville website services firm, you'll gain a better understanding of the future relationship, the security of your website, and the turnaround time for important maintenance requests.

Huntsville, AL Web Maintenance Plans and Tips

We are often asked for a website maintenance plan by larger companies in and around Huntsville looking to establish routines and procedures within their IT department. We are happy to help your Huntsville business develop a web support plan to ensure all aspects of your website, hosting, and domain name are routinely checked to ensure optimum performance and uptime.

Read through this list of annual Huntsville website support tasks to consider:

• Message your web hosting firm to see if they have upgraded servers you can switch your website to for faster page speeds.
• Ask your web developer if your website has a major platform release coming up that will require a lot of work to install.
• Try restoring a website backup to make sure the data is good enough for a full recovery. Also, make sure your backups are stored somewhere else besides Huntsville.
• Look at competitor websites (even those outside of Huntsville) to see if you are missing out on new functionality for your own customers.
• Perform a full security review of your website to ensure nothing has been compromised or left vulnerable.
• Verify structured data, open graph, and social links are all working properly.
• Remove any unnecessary 3rd party tracking, live chat, or heat map scripts that may have been installed in the past.
• Take down any unnecessary development or staging sites.

Read through this list of semi-annual Huntsville web maintenance tasks to review:

• Check that your domain name doesn't expire soon and that you have access to it. You'll appreciate this when it's time to renew your domain.
• Check that your hosting account isn't about to expire and you can access it.
• Ensure you have access to your DNS in case you need to change anything.
• Check if your SSL certificate will be expiring in the near future.
• Make sure you have remote backups outside Huntsville and that your website backup schedule is working.
• If you have an automated image optimization service, verify it is working properly.
• See if there are any console errors on the website.

Check out this list of monthly Huntsville website maintenance tasks to consider:

• Check for broken links on your website, which negatively impact user experience and SEO.
• Check for website performance issues from recent updates or changes on the website.
• Check Google Search Console for any coverage issues.
• Update some of your service pages or blog articles to keep your website fresh.
• Take a look at your website platform and extensions for any available updates.

The Cost of Web Support Service in Huntsville, AL

The starting price for our Huntsville website maintenance services is $119.50/hour, but we offer discounts for pre-purchased blocks of time that bring the rate as low as $99.95/hour. We also offer website management for Huntsville websites, starting at $50/month, if you'd like the peace of mind knowing a company is proactively upgrading your site.

To get started, if you are new to our web maintenance company, we'll need you to pre-purchase a block of time which includes a discount on our hourly rate. If you are an existing client in Huntsville, you are welcome to choose monthly billing at our higher hourly rate or continue to pre-purchase time and receive discounted hourly rates for your website updates.

If you pre-purchase a block of time for your Huntsville web maintenance services, you will be happy to know there are no contracts, there are no hidden fees, the time never expires, and there are no minimum deductions for small website update requests. Please keep in mind we rarely see tasks take less than 10 minutes, since the process of reviewing an email or taking a phone call, checking on whatever was asked, providing some form of feedback, and then logging the task usually takes at least 10 minutes of time. To keep you informed of the time usage on your pre-purchased block of web maintenance time, you will receive a monthly email update letting you know how much time remains on your account.

What is Considered Billable Time?

When talking with prospective Huntsville website maintenance clients, we are often asked what is considered billable time. You will find the answers to vary greatly within the website support industry. In some situations, you may find a website maintenance company in Huntsville to charge a much higher hourly rate, but not bill out for communication and organization. Likewise, there are website support companies in Huntsville who charge a more affordable hourly rate, but also bill out for most communication and organization. This is the approach we take. To help provide clarification, let's go over some examples of what we consider billable time when it comes to maintaining and supporting your Huntsville website.

Here are examples of what is considered billable time:

• Reading through lengthy emails to understand what is being requested.
• Preparing responses to lengthy or complex email messages.
• Helping you figure out your domain name or web hosting provider.
• Scheduling your website maintenance to be completed by the best team member.
• Talking with you on the phone about ideas or tasks you want to discuss.
• Reviewing completed work for quality control purposes.
• Providing you training on how to handle administrative tasks.
• Researching unique solutions to difficult questions you present our team.
• Providing more detailed time usage reports, beyond the automated monthly update email.
• Helping you figure out email client issues within Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.
• Almost any other task not specifically mentioned in the list below.

Here are examples of what is not considered billable time:

• Talking with you about personal matters, such as the weather, a recent vacation, or a sporting event.
• Responding to simple email messages that don't require research or lengthy feedback.
• Handling accounting-related tasks, such as invoice generation, payment confirmations, etc.

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