Columbia, MD Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Columbia, MD 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 Columbia web support companies, including:

• Upgrading your website platform to the latest version.
• Installing app or plugin updates to improve security and functionality.
• Adding new pages whenever you release something new.
• Freshen up your blog with new content.
• Rearranging the navigation menu of your Columbia website.
• Improve your page speed to pass Google Core Web Vitals.
• Take 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 a solution to any other website problem.

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

Reactive Columbia Website Support

We consider website maintenance a reactive service because most Columbia website owners don't want a developer messing with their website without their permission. You can count on our firm to keep your Columbia website running smoothly. There are some website support services we can provide your Columbia website in a proactive manner though.

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Proactive Columbia Website Support

We're happy to help website owners in Columbia who need proactive website upkeep! 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 Columbia Website Management Pricing

In addition to supporting Columbia-area websites, our web maintenance firm also offers Annapolis, Baltimore, Bethesda, Frederick, Rockville, Salisbury, and Silver Spring small businesses and large corporations help with their websites.

Who Needs Web Support in Columbia, MD

Every Columbia website will need some website support at some point. The reason is simply that the internet is always changing. Not to worry though, our Columbia 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 Columbia might require web maintenance services:

• Hosting companies sometimes upgrade their servers, removing PHP versions that were used by your Columbia website. That means you'll have to refactor your app or upgrade to a newer framework that supports the latest PHP release. 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 was no longer maintained by Magento after it reached "End of Life". As a result, Magento 1.x ecommerce businesses in Columbia 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 website maintenance examples.
• To ensure future visitors to your Columbia website receive accurate information about your organization, products, or services, your Columbia website content needs to be refreshed. This type of web support is critical to ensuring your Columbia 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. It is important to understand the future needs of your Columbia business when planning budgets and schedules for website maintenance and support.

How We Perform Columbia, MD Website Support

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

Most website maintenance services start with an email from you, the owner of the Columbia 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.

Phone or live chat requests follow a similar process to Columbia web support. 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 Website Support Service List for Columbia, MD Businesses

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

Simple Columbia Website Changes

A simple change to your Columbia website might include updating a paragraph on a page, swapping out an image, or adding a new page. Keeping content fresh for search engines and visitors is just normal, routine website maintenance.

Columbia Website Speed Improvements

If your Columbia 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 Upgrades / Security Updates

It's important to keep your Columbia 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 plugins and extensions on your Columbia website if they were developed and maintained by a third-party. This is similar to the idea of 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 can fix the coverage issues, and let you know how it went. Make Google happy, and you'll rank higher throughout Columbia and beyond!

Setup Structured Data

Do you ever see product prices or reviews in Google organic search results? This is structured data, which is a standardized way to describe the content on a webpage, whether it's a local Columbia business, or an ecommerce product.

Add Open Graph to Your Website

By adding Open Graph Tags to your website, digital platforms can better understand the content of your page, which improves its appearance on social media.

Add 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 Columbia website and even give you a crash course in using Google Tag Manager.

Implement Conversion Tracking

It's important to setup conversion tracking for your Columbia website if you want to understand the benefits of online advertising. It'll help you understand where your conversions come from, like direct traffic, referral links, organic search, or paid ads.

Optimize Images

Do you have a Columbia website that's 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

Is your website ready for live chat? Our experts can help you pick the right live chat system, install the tracking code, and customize the design to match your Columbia business branding!

Review Error Log Files

Have you noticed large error_log files on your hosting account? We can help diagnose the issue and update programming code or repair platform issues to prevent recurring error messages.

Setup reCaptcha on Forms

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

Setup a Caching Plugin

Interested in installing a caching plugin for your Columbia website, but don't know how to set it up? We can help you figure out which caching plugins to install and configure on your website!

Send Website Emails Over SMTP

If you want to improve email deliverability, we can set up your contact form and website platform to send emails via SMTP instead of PHP mail.

Restrict Malicious IP Addresses

Is your Columbia website getting fake orders, contact submissions, or live chats? 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 Columbia website? Backups can be performed one-time, or scheduled at specific intervals, and stored locally or offsite.

Create a Testing Website

It is often recommended that you setup a development or staging website before proceeding with a major upgrade or extension installation. Just let us know if you need help creating and managing that development / staging site!

Create A/B Testing Rules

Are you a fan of making Columbia web design changes based on statistical data? We can help you run A/B testing to help you decide which design or content layouts are best.

Add 301 Redirects

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

For Columbia 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 web support agency for Columbia websites tends to service only the following platforms:

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

As a website support firm, we used to maintain and support Joomla and Magento websites for Columbia-area businesses. However, we chose not to use those platforms so our web maintenance experts could focus on training and support within the more popular platforms.

Questions to Ask Columbia, MD Website Maintenance Firms

If you're thinking about signing up for any Columbia website support package, make sure you ask the company how their services work. This will help you get a better idea of the experience you will have with their professional Maryland website maintenance services before you submit payment and provide website access. Let's go over some simple questions to ask:

• How do you handle website security? Do you run security scans of customer websites?
• What's the turnaround time for Columbia web support?
• Are you outsourcing your Columbia website support services?
• What are your Columbia web maintenance costs?
• Are there minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Columbia website updates?
• At what times of the day are you working and able to take our maintenance requests?
• When there are new updates on my platform, will you let me know?

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

Columbia, MD Website Maintenance Plans and Tips

Larger companies in and around Columbia often ask us for a web support plan. We are happy to help your Columbia 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.

Here is a list of annual Columbia web maintenance tasks to review:

• Ask your web hosting company if they have newer servers you can migrate to.
• 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.
• Look at competitor websites (even those outside of Columbia) 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.
• Ensure that structured data, open graph, and social links are all working.
• 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 Columbia website maintenance tasks to review:

• Make sure you have access to your domain name and it's not about to expire. When you have to renew your domain name, this will come in handy.
• 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.
• Check if your SSL certificate will be expiring in the near future.
• Make sure your website backup schedule is working and you have remote backups.
• If you have an automated image optimization service, verify it is working properly.
• Check if the website is throwing any console errors.

Check out this list of monthly Columbia web support tasks to consider:

• Look for broken links on your website, which hurts SEO and user experience.
• Make sure your website isn't having performance issues after recent updates.
• See if there's anything wrong being reported within Google Search Console.
• Update some of your service pages or blog articles to keep your website fresh.
• See if there are any updates for your website platform or extensions.

The Cost of Website Support Service in Columbia, MD

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