Illinois Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Illinois Websites

Web maintenance is a reactive support service that connects you with the right web developer to fix nearly any website issue. There are many examples of website issues that might require service from Illinois web support companies, including:

• Upgrading your website platform to the latest version.
• Installing app or plugin updates to improve security and functionality.
• Adding new web pages as you release new information.
• Writing new blog content to help you stay fresh.
• Rearranging the navigation menu of your Illinois website.
• Improve your page speed to pass Google Core Web Vitals.
• Backing up your website's files and databases.
• Modifying the look and feel of your website's design.
• Fixing site audit issues or Google Search Console coverage problems.
• Improving technical SEO by adding structured data, open graph tags, etc.
• Providing solutions to other website problems.

The previously mentioned services are just a glimpse of what we view as possible Illinois web maintenance services. In fact, Illinois web maintenance is really anything a web developer or digital marketer does to your website to change it in some manner.

Reactive Illinois Website Support

We consider website maintenance a reactive service because most Illinois website owners don't want a developer messing with their website without their permission. When you choose to have our firm maintain your Illinois website, we'll be your web support team on standby for any request. There are some website support services we can provide your Illinois website in a proactive manner though.

View Illinois Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Illinois Website Support

We're happy to help website owners in Illinois who need proactive website upkeep! There are several web maintenance 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 Illinois Website Management Pricing

Emergency Illinois Website Support

If you need off-hours support, including holidays and weekends, check out our Illinois web support service level agreements. It's important to set this up before you need Illinois website maintenance services at night, on the weekend, or during a holiday.

View Emergency Illinois Website Support Pricing

Our website maintenance and support company is happy to provide Aurora, Bloomington, Chicago, Decatur, Elgin, Joliet, Naperville, Palatine, Peoria, Rockford, Schaumburg, Skokie, and Springfield with fast website support services.

Who Needs Web Support in Illinois

Every Illinois website will need some website support at some point. The reason is simply that the internet is always changing. Not to worry though, our Illinois web maintenance cost isn't expensive so it should be affordable for you to maintain your website! Here are some common reasons why a website in Illinois might require web maintenance services:

• When a hosting provider upgrades their servers, they may remove older versions of PHP that your Illinois website was originally developed to support. When this happens, you need to refactor your application or upgrade to a newer framework that supports the newer PHP version. You can't expect custom web functionality programmed in the past to work forever without any improvements.
• In order to focus on maintaining the newer version of an ecommerce platform or content management system, they eventually have to deprecate the previous releases. Magento 1.x store owners recently had to migrate to Magento 2.x or an alternative ecommerce platform because Magento 1.x had reached "End of Life" status and wouldn't be maintained or updated. Illinois-area ecommerce businesses running Magento 1.x found themselves looking for an ecommerce developer to help migrate their store.
• When a website owner has become a victim of malware or some other form of malicious activity, the Illinois 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 website maintenance examples, listed above.
• You need to refresh your Illinois website content when it's outdated or doesn't explain your organization, products, or services well enough for future visitors. This type of web support is critical to ensuring your Illinois website is benefiting 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. When planning budgets and schedules for website support and support, consider your Illinois business's potential future needs.

How We Perform Illinois Web Maintenance

Our professional website maintenance team puts in a lot of effort to understand your needs, schedule your work on time, and follow up with your Illinois business after the work is done.

Most web support services start with an email from you, the owner of the Illinois website. That email is routed into our ticket system and automatically assigned to the project manager on your account. From there, anyone on our team can work on the ticket without delay, leading to faster turnaround time and simplified internal communication.

The process for Illinois website support services that come from phone or chat is similar. The support request is entered into our ticket system by the person in the conversation with you, which allows the work order to be routed to the most appropriate web developer on our team.

Example Web Maintenance Service List for Illinois Businesses

We're often asked for examples of Illinois web maintenance requests after a website launches. Here are several examples of Illinois website maintenance services we've been asked to perform in the past and would be more than happy to provide to you!

Simple Illinois Website Changes

A simple change to your Illinois website might include updating a paragraph on a page, swapping out an image, or adding a new page. This is just normal, routine web support to keep content fresh for both search engines and visitors.

Illinois Page Speed Improvements

If your Illinois 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. It'll help improve page load times, which will make users and search engines happy.

Platform Updates / Security Fixes

If your Illinois website is running on a content management system, like WordPress, it is important to keep the platform updated. This helps improve security and functionality - sometimes the updates are relatively quick to perform, which is a win-win!

Plugin / Extension Updates

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

Google Search Console Fixes

Has Google Search Console told you there's a coverage problem? If so, we can fix the coverage issues, and let you know how it went. This will help your search engine rankings, throughout Illinois and beyond, by making Google happy!

Setup 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 to describe the content on a webpage, whether it's a local Illinois business, or an ecommerce product.

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 Illinois business.

Implement Google Tag Manager

Would you like to manage custom scripts more easily with Google Tag Manager? Not a problem! We can add Google Tag Manager to your Illinois website and even give you a crash course in using Google Tag Manager.

Implement Conversion Tracking

Tracking conversions is important if you want to understand the benefits of online advertising for your Illinois website. This will help you understand where your conversions are coming from, such as a Google search or a Bing Ads campaign.

Optimize Images

Do you have a Illinois website that's slow because of large images? Not a problem! We can run all your images through our image compression tools and even setup recurring image compression for newly added images in the future!

Setup 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 Illinois business, install the tracking code, and customize the design for your branding, we can do it!

Review Error Log Files

Have you noticed large error_log files on your hosting account? If you're getting recurring error messages, we can update programming code or fix platform issues.

Integrate reCaptcha on Contact Forms

If spambots are attacking your Illinois website, we can setup a checkbox or invisible reCaptcha to help minimize unwanted submissions on your forms.

Setup a Caching Plugin

Are you interested in installing a caching plugin in your Illinois website, but not sure how to properly configure the settings for best website performance? We can help recommend caching plugins, or just install and configure them for you!

Setup 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 Illinois 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

Do you want to create a backup of your Illinois website? We can help you create one-time or scheduled backups that store locally or at an offsite location.

Create a Development Website

It is often recommended that you setup a development or staging website before proceeding with a major upgrade or extension installation. If you'd like help creating and managing that development / staging site, just let us know!

Implement A/B Testing

Do you prefer to make design changes based on statistical data regarding how users interact with your Illinois web page? If so, we can help you implement A/B testing to gather data to help inform you of the best choice between two or more design layouts.

Create 301 Redirects

Are you launching a new website or removing pages from your website? You should create 301 redirects for your Illinois website. We've seen businesses in and around Illinois 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

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

The Platforms We Maintain for Illinois Websites

For Illinois businesses, we have a team of web designers and web developers who have experience with multiple platforms. That said, it is better to become a master of a handful of platforms rather than try to specialize in them all. For that reason, our website support company for Illinois websites tends to service only the following platforms:

• Illinois WordPress Website Maintenance
• Illinois WooCommerce Web Support
• Illinois Shopify Website Support
• Illinois BigCommerce Web Maintenance
• Illinois Laravel Web Maintenance

We've managed Joomla and Magento platforms for Illinois businesses in the past. However, we chose to move away from those platforms to allow our website maintenance experts to focus more heavily on training and support within the other systems.

Questions to Ask Illinois Web Support Agencies

If you're thinking about signing up for any Illinois web maintenance package, make sure you ask the company how their services work. This will help you get a better idea of the relationship you will have with the Illinois website maintenance team before you give them money, provide them website access, and give them complete access to your website for one of their web support packages. Let's go over some simple questions to ask:

• How do you handle website security? Do you run security scans of customer websites?
• When can I expect an average Illinois website support request to be completed?
• Do you outsource your Illinois web maintenance services?
• What are your Illinois web maintenance costs?
• Are there minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Illinois website updates?
• Can you tell me what your normal business hours are?
• Will you keep me informed about new updates within my platform?

We find it beneficial to run these questions by any Illinois website services company before subscribing to their web support 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.

Illinois Website Support Plans and Tips

Larger companies in and around Illinois often ask us for a web maintenance plan. We are happy to help your Illinois business develop a website maintenance plan to ensure all aspects of your website, hosting, and domain name are routinely checked to ensure optimum performance and uptime.

Here is a list of annual Illinois web support tasks to review:

• Ask your web hosting company if they have newer servers you can migrate to.
• Check if your website platform is releasing a major upgrade in the near future which will require a major overhaul of your website.
• Attempt to restore a website backup to ensure the data being stored is sufficient for full recovery. Also make sure you are storing backups in a remote location away from Illinois.
• Look at competitor websites (even those outside of Illinois) to see if you are missing out on new functionality for your own customers.
• Take a look at your website's security to make sure nothing's been compromised.
• Make sure structured data, open graph, and social links are working.
• Verify the necessity of any 3rd party tracking, live chat, or heat map scripts that are installed.
• Remove any unnecessary development or staging websites.

Here is a list of semi-annual Illinois website support tasks to consider:

• 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.
• Ensure you have access to your hosting account and that it isn't expiring soon.
• Ensure you have access to your DNS in case you need to change anything.
• Make sure your SSL certificate isn't expiring soon.
• Make sure your website backup schedule is working and you have remote backups.
• Check if you have an automated image optimization service running.
• Check if the website is throwing any console errors.

Here are a list of monthly Illinois web maintenance tasks to review:

• Look for broken links on your website, which hurts SEO and user experience.
• Check for website performance issues from recent updates or changes on the website.
• Check Google Search Console for any coverage issues.
• Keep your website fresh by updating your content within one of your service pages or blog articles.
• See if there are any updates for your website platform or extensions.

The Cost of Web Maintenance Service in Illinois

The starting price for our Illinois 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 Illinois websites, starting at $50/month, if you'd like the peace of mind knowing a company is proactively upgrading your site. For Illinois businesses with mission-critical applications, we offer emergency Illinois website support subscriptions, starting at $495/month, to extend our availability into nights & weekends.

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 Illinois, 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 Illinois 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 Illinois 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 Illinois to charge a much higher hourly rate, but not bill out for communication and organization. Likewise, there are website support companies in Illinois 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 Illinois 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.