Grande Prairie, AB Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Grande Prairie, AB Websites

We see website maintenance as a reactive support service where we provide your Grande Prairie business with the right web developer resources to fix just about any problem. There are many examples of website issues that might require service from Grande Prairie web maintenance firms, including:

• Making sure your website's platform is up to date.
• Keeping apps and plugins updated for better security and functionality.
• Adding new pages whenever you release something new.
• Freshen up your blog with new content.
• Rearranging your Grande Prairie site's navigation menu.
• Making your page faster to pass Google Core Web Vitals.
• Taking backups of your website's files and databases.
• Making your website look and feel better.
• Fixing site audit issues or Google Search Console coverage problems.
• Improving technical SEO by adding structured data, open graph tags, etc.
• Investigating the cause and providing a solution to any other website issue.

Those services are just a taste of what Grande Prairie web support might look like. In fact, Grande Prairie website support is basically anything a web developer or digital marketer does to your website.

Reactive Grande Prairie Website Support

Most Grande Prairie 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. When you choose to have our agency maintain your Grande Prairie website, we'll be your web support team on standby for any request. However, we can offer some proactive Grande Prairie website maintenance services.

View Grande Prairie Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Grande Prairie Website Support

Interested in a proactive website management service for some of your website upkeep? We're happy to help! We can take care of platform upgrades, app/extension updates, website backups, performance monitoring, and broken link monitoring as part of our proactive website management service.

View Grande Prairie Website Management Pricing

In addition to supporting Grande Prairie-area websites, our web support agency also offers Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, small businesses and large corporations help with their websites.

Who Needs Web Maintenance in Grande Prairie, AB

There will come a time when every Grande Prairie website needs some sort of maintenance. The reason is simply that the internet is always changing. But don't worry, our Grande Prairie website maintenance costs aren't too high, so you can afford it! There are a few reasons why a website in Grande Prairie might need maintenance:

• Hosting companies sometimes upgrade their servers, removing PHP versions that were used by your Grande Prairie website. That means you'll have to refactor your app or upgrade to a newer framework that supports the latest PHP release. There's no way you can expect custom web functionality to work forever.
• Content management systems or ecommerce platforms eventually deprecate old versions so their teams can focus on the new ones. 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. Because of that, Magento 1.x ecommerce businesses in Grande Prairie were suddenly looking for an ecommerce developer to help migrate their website to a supported platform.
• When a website owner has become a victim of malware or some other form of malicious activity, the Grande Prairie website will need to be reviewed for security exploits and cleaned of malware. This can be a time-consuming activity, and often happens because the website owner wasn't being mindful of the first two web support examples, listed above.
• When the content on your Grande Prairie website, which explains your organization, products, or services becomes outdated and needs to be refreshed to help ensure future visitors receive accurate information about your operation. Keeping your Grande Prairie website up to date is key to its success.

Above and beyond just updating something, there are plenty of reasons why a website might need maintenance. Plan your budget and schedules for website support and maintenance based on your Grande Prairie business's potential future needs.

How We Perform Grande Prairie, AB Website Support

It's our job to understand your web maintenance needs, schedule your work in a timely fashion, and follow up with your Grande Prairie business after the work is done.

Most web maintenance services start with an email from you, the owner of the Grande Prairie website. Your email gets routed into our ticket system and automatically 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 Grande Prairie website maintenance. A support request is entered into our ticket system by the person in the conversation with you, so the work order can be routed to the right web developer.

Example Web Support Service List for Grande Prairie, AB Businesses

After the launch of a website, we're often asked for detailed examples of Grande Prairie website support requests. Here are several examples of Grande Prairie web maintenance services we've been asked to perform in the past and would be more than happy to provide to you!

Simple Grande Prairie Website Tweaks

Changes to your Grande Prairie 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 maintenance.

Grande Prairie Website Speed Improvements

Let us check your Grande Prairie website for hosting, caching, image optimization, console errors, broken links, poor database queries, and other potential problems that might be impacting your page speed. User experience and SEO will both benefit from better page load times.

Platform Upgrades / Security Patches

Keeping your Grande Prairie website's content management system updated is important if it's running on WordPress. This helps improve security and functionality - sometimes the updates are relatively quick to perform, which is a win-win!

Plugin / Extension Updates

If your Grande Prairie website has functionality developed and maintained by a third-party, it is important to update those plugins and extensions to include the latest changes by the developers. The idea is similar to updating the CMS platform since it fixes security and functionality problems.

Fixing Search Console Issues

Did Google Search Console tell you about a coverage problem? If so, we'll look at the coverage issues, fix them, and update you on the status. This will help your search engine rankings, throughout Grande Prairie and beyond, by making Google happy!

Implement Structured Data

Have you ever noticed information like reviews or product prices in the listing of a Google organic search result? This is structured data, which is a standardized way of describing content on the web, whether it's a local business in Grande Prairie or an ecommerce product.

Add Open Graph to Your Website

When people share links of your Grande Prairie business on social media, your website will look better if you add Open Graph Tags. These tags help define an image, title, and description for your each page on your website.

Add Google Tag Manager

Interested in using Google Tag Manager for managing custom scripts? No problem at all! We can add Google Tag Manager to your Grande Prairie website and even give you a crash course in using Google Tag Manager.

Add Conversion Tracking

If you are interested in understanding the benefit of an online advertising campaign for your Grande Prairie 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.

Optimize Images

Is your Grande Prairie website slow because of large images? That won't be a problem! All your images can be compressed by our tools, and we can even setup recurring compression for newly added images!

Integrate a Live Chat

Do you want to try live chat on your website? If you'd like us to recommend the best live chat system for your Grande Prairie business, install the tracking code, and customize the design for your branding, we can do it!

Review Error Log Files

Do you have a lot of error_log files on your hosting account? To stop recurring error messages, we can diagnose the problem and update programming code.

Setup reCaptcha on Forms

To reduce unwanted submissions on your Grande Prairie website, we can setup an invisible or checkbox reCaptcha.

Install a Caching Plugin

Looking to install a caching plugin on your Grande Prairie website, but not sure how to configure it? We can help recommend caching plugins, or just install and configure them for you!

Implement SMTP Email

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

Restrict IP Addresses

Is your Grande Prairie website being bombarded with fake orders, contact submissions or live chats from a specific network? Our team can help set up IP restrictions so your website doesn't get hit with as much malicious traffic.

Run Website & Database Backups

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

Create a Development Website

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

Setup A/B Testing

Are you a fan of making Grande Prairie web design changes based on statistical data? A/B testing can help you decide between two or more design layouts based on the data collected.

Add 301 Redirects

Have you launched a new website or removed pages? You will want to create 301 redirects for your Grande Prairie website to prevent broken pages from hurting your SEO. We've seen businesses in and around Grande Prairie lose huge amounts of organic traffic due to widespread broken pages. We can help you set up 301 redirects in .htaccess files, nginx templates, and CMS platforms.

Provide Website Training

Do you need help learning how to make changes to your Grande Prairie website? If your Grande Prairie site was developed in a platform we work within, such as WordPress or Shopify, we'll be happy to help!

The Platforms We Maintain for Grande Prairie, AB Websites

With years of experience developing websites for Grande Prairie businesses (and those in other areas of the country), our web designers and web developers have been immersed in multiple platforms. That said, it is better to become a master of a handful of platforms rather than try to specialize in them all. Therefore, we tend to only maintain Grande Prairie websites on these platforms:

• Grande Prairie WordPress Web Support
• Grande Prairie WooCommerce Website Support
• Grande Prairie Shopify Web Maintenance

In the past, we provided website maintenance and support for Joomla and Magento platforms of Grande Prairie businesses. The reason we moved away from those platforms was to let our web maintenance experts focus more on training and support.

Questions to Ask Grande Prairie, AB Website Maintenance Firms

Ask the Grande Prairie website support company some questions about their services before you sign up for a package. This will help you get a better idea of the experience you will have with their professional Alberta website maintenance services before you submit payment and provide website access. Here are some simple questions to ask:

• Can you tell me how you handle website security? Do you run website security scans for clients?
• What's the turnaround time for Grande Prairie web support?
• Are you outsourcing your Grande Prairie website support services?
• How much might it cost to maintain an average Grande Prairie website?
• Are there any minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Grande Prairie website updates?
• What are your normal hours of operation?
• How will I know about new updates to my platform?

We find it beneficial to run these questions by any Grande Prairie website services firm before subscribing to their web maintenance packages, since it will provide much better understanding for you regarding the future relationship, the security of your website, and the expected turnaround time for important maintenance requests.

Grande Prairie, AB Website Maintenance Plans and Tips

Companies in and around Grande Prairie often ask us for a web support plan to establish routines and procedures. We are happy to help your Grande Prairie business develop a website support plan to ensure all aspects of your website, hosting, and domain name are routinely checked to ensure optimum performance and uptime.

Check out this list of annual Grande Prairie web maintenance tasks to review:

• 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.
• Restore a website backup to make sure the data is enough for full recovery. Also, make sure your backups are stored remotely.
• Take a look at the websites of your competitors (even those outside Grande Prairie) to see if you're missing out on anything.
• Ensure your website is secure by performing a full security review.
• Verify structured data, open graph, and social links are all working properly.
• Check if any 3rd party tracking, live chat, or heat map scripts are installed but no longer necessary.
• Remove any unnecessary development or staging websites.

Here is a list of semi-annual Grande Prairie website maintenance tasks to consider:

• Ensure you have access to your domain name and that it isn't expiring soon. This will be helpful when you have to process a domain name renewal.
• Check your hosting account credentials and make sure it's not about to expire.
• Make sure you have access to your DNS.
• Find out if your SSL certificate will expire soon.
• Make sure you have remote backups outside Grande Prairie and that your website backup schedule is working.
• Check if you have an automated image optimization service running.
• Make sure the website doesn't throw any console errors.

Here are a list of monthly Grande Prairie web support tasks to review:

• Ensure your website doesn't have any broken links, which affect user experience and SEO.
• Make sure your website isn't having performance issues after recent updates.
• See if there are any coverage issues in Google Search Console.
• 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 Website Support Service in Grande Prairie, AB

The starting price for our Grande Prairie 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 Grande Prairie 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 Grande Prairie, 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 Grande Prairie 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 Grande Prairie 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 Grande Prairie to charge a much higher hourly rate, but not bill out for communication and organization. Likewise, there are website support companies in Grande Prairie 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 Grande Prairie 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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