Rockville, MD Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Rockville, 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 Rockville website support firms, including:

• Upgrading your website platform to the latest version.
• Keeping apps and plugins updated for better security and functionality.
• Adding new pages whenever you release something new.
• Writing new blog content to help you stay fresh.
• Rearranging the navigation menu of your Rockville website.
• Improving page speed to help you 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 solutions to other website problems.

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

Reactive Rockville Website Support

Most Rockville website owners wouldn't want a web developer messing around with their site without their permission. That's why we consider web support a reactive service. Our agency will be your web support team on standby for any questions you have. There are some web maintenance services we can provide your Rockville website in a proactive manner though.

View Rockville Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Rockville Website Support

For website owners in Rockville interested in a proactive management service for some of their website upkeep requirements, we are happy to accommodate! 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 Rockville Website Management Pricing

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

Who Needs Website Support in Rockville, MD

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

• Hosting companies sometimes upgrade their servers, removing PHP versions that were used by your Rockville website. 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.
• 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. 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 Rockville 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.
• You need to refresh your Rockville website content when it's outdated or doesn't explain your organization, products, or services well enough for future visitors. Maintaining your Rockville 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 Rockville business when planning budgets and schedules for website maintenance and support.

How We Perform Rockville, MD Web Support

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

Most web maintenance services start with an email from you, the owner of the Rockville website. That email is routed into our ticket system and automatically assigned to the project manager on your account. 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 Rockville website maintenance. 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 Support Service List for Rockville, MD Businesses

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

Simple Rockville Website Changes

Changes to your Rockville 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 web maintenance.

Rockville Page Speed Improvements

If your Rockville 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 Updates

It's important to keep your Rockville 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 Rockville 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. By making Google happy, you'll boost your search engine rankings throughout Rockville and beyond!

Setup Structured Data

Have you ever noticed information like reviews or product prices in the listing of a Google organic search result? 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 Rockville, and ecommerce product or some other common data type.

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

Interested in using Google Tag Manager for managing custom scripts? No problem at all! We can add Google Tag Manager to your Rockville website and even teach you how to use it.

Implement Conversion Tracking

If you are interested in understanding the benefit of an online advertising campaign for your Rockville website, it is important to setup conversion tracking. It'll help you understand where your conversions come from, like direct traffic, referral links, organic search, or paid ads.

Image Optimization

Are large images slowing down your Rockville website? No problem at all! We can run all your images through our image compression tools and even setup recurring image compression for newly added images in the future!

Integrate a Live Chat

Is your website ready for live chat? If you'd like us to recommend the best live chat system for your Rockville business, install the tracking code, and customize the design for your branding, we can do it!

Review Error Logs for Issues

Are your error_log files big? 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 Rockville website, we can setup a checkbox or invisible reCaptcha to help minimize unwanted submissions on your forms.

Install a Caching Plugin

Interested in installing a caching plugin for your Rockville website, but don't know how to set it up? 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 Malicious IP Addresses

Have you been getting fake orders, contact submissions, or live chats from a particular 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 Rockville website? Backups can be performed one-time, or scheduled at specific intervals, and stored locally or offsite.

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. Whenever you need help with creating and managing your development site, just let us know!

Setup A/B Testing

Do you prefer to make design changes based on statistical data regarding how users interact with your Rockville 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

Have you launched a new website or removed pages? You will want to create 301 redirects for your Rockville website to prevent broken pages from hurting your SEO. Having broken pages will cost your Rockville business a lot of organic traffic if they aren't fixed with 301 redirects. We are happy to help you resolve broken pages through the creation of 301 redirects within .htaccess files, nginx templates, and CMS plugins.

Offer Website Training

Do you need help learning how to make changes to your Rockville website? If your Rockville 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 Rockville, MD Websites

For Rockville 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 maintenance firm for Rockville websites tends to service only the following platforms:

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

As a web support company, we used to maintain and support Joomla and Magento websites for Rockville-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 Rockville, MD Web Maintenance Companies

If you're thinking about signing up for any Rockville web 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 expert Maryland web maintenance services before you submit payment and provide website access. Let's go over 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 Rockville website maintenance?
• Do you outsource your Rockville web support services?
• What are your Rockville website support costs?
• Do you have minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Rockville 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 Rockville 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.

Rockville, MD Web Maintenance Plans and Tips

Larger companies in and around Rockville often ask us for a website maintenance plan. We are happy to help your Rockville 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.

Here is a list of annual Rockville website support 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.
• 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 Rockville.
• Look at competitor websites (even those outside of Rockville) 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.
• 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 Rockville 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 Rockville and that your website backup schedule is working.
• Make sure you're running an image optimization service.
• Check if the website is throwing any console errors.

Here are a list of monthly Rockville website maintenance tasks to review:

• Check for broken links on your website, which negatively impact user experience and SEO.
• 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.
• Take a look at your website platform and extensions for any available updates.

The Cost of Web Support Service in Rockville, MD

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