Massachusetts Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Massachusetts Websites

We see website maintenance as a reactive support service where we provide your Massachusetts business with the right web developer resources to fix just about any problem. Here are a few examples of website problems that might need Massachusetts web maintenance:

• Making sure your website's platform is up to date.
• Updating apps and plugins to make them safer and more functional.
• Adding new pages whenever you release something new.
• Writing new blog content to help you stay fresh.
• Rearranging your Massachusetts site's navigation menu.
• Improving page speed to help you pass Google Core Web Vitals.
• Backing up 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.

Those services are just a taste of what Massachusetts website maintenance might look like. Basically, Massachusetts web support is anything a web developer or internet marketer does to change your website.

Reactive Massachusetts Website Support

We consider website support a reactive service because most Massachusetts website owners don't want a developer messing with their website without their permission. Our firm will be your web support team on standby for any questions you have. There are some web maintenance services we can provide your Massachusetts website in a proactive manner though.

View Massachusetts Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Massachusetts Website Support

For website owners in Massachusetts interested in a proactive management service for some of their website upkeep requirements, we are happy to accommodate! As part of our proactive website management service, our team can take care of platform upgrades, app / extension updates, website backups, performance monitoring, and broken link monitoring.

View Massachusetts Website Management Pricing

Emergency Massachusetts Website Support

You might want to check our Massachusetts web support service level agreements if you need off-hours support, including holidays and weekends. This service must be in place before a website emergency happens at night, on the weekend, or during a holiday.

View Emergency Massachusetts Website Support Pricing

Our website maintenance and support company is happy to provide Boston, Cambridge, Lawrence, Lowell, Medford, Plymouth, Springfield, and Worcester with fast website support services.

Who Needs Website Maintenance in Massachusetts

There will come a time when every Massachusetts website needs some sort of maintenance. It's because the internet is always changing. But don't worry, our Massachusetts web support costs aren't too high, so you can afford it! Website maintenance in Massachusetts might be needed for these reasons:

• Hosting companies sometimes upgrade their servers, removing PHP versions that were used by your Massachusetts website. When this happens, you need to refactor your application or upgrade to a newer framework that supports the newer PHP version. There's no way you can expect custom web functionality to work forever.
• 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 had reached "End of Life" status and wouldn't be maintained or updated. As a result, Magento 1.x ecommerce businesses in Massachusetts 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 support examples.
• To ensure future visitors to your Massachusetts website receive accurate information about your organization, products, or services, your Massachusetts website content needs to be refreshed. Keeping your Massachusetts website up to date is key to its success.

There are many reasons why a website might need maintenance, other than just to update something. When planning budgets and schedules for web maintenance and support, consider your Massachusetts business's potential future needs.

How We Perform Massachusetts Website Maintenance

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

A Massachusetts website support service usually starts with an email from you. Your email gets routed into our ticket system and automatically assigned to your project manager. Anyone on our team can work on the ticket without delay, resulting in faster turnaround time.

Phone or live chat requests follow a similar process to Massachusetts web 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 Maintenance Service List for Massachusetts Businesses

After the launch of a website, we're often asked for detailed examples of Massachusetts website maintenance requests. The following are some examples of Massachusetts web support services we've provided in the past.

Simple Massachusetts Website Tweaks

Your Massachusetts website might need a paragraph updated, an image changed, or a new page added. Keeping content fresh for search engines and visitors is just normal, routine website support.

Massachusetts Page Speed Improvements

Let us check your Massachusetts website for hosting, caching, image optimization, console errors, broken links, poor database queries, and other potential problems that might be impacting your page speed. This will help improve page load times, which are beneficial to user experience and search engine optimization.

Platform Updates / Security Fixes

It's important to keep your Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts website if they were developed and maintained by a third-party. The idea is similar to updating the CMS platform since it fixes security and functionality problems.

Google Search Console Issues

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. By making Google happy, you'll boost your search engine rankings throughout Massachusetts and beyond!

Setup Structured Data

When you search Google organically, have you noticed reviews or prices in the 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 Massachusetts, and ecommerce product or some other common data type.

Implement Open Graph on 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? That won't be a problem! We'll happily install Google Tag Manager on your Massachusetts website and teach you how to use it.

Add Conversion Tracking

It's important to setup conversion tracking for your Massachusetts website if you want to understand the benefits of online advertising. Then you'll know where your conversions come from, whether it be direct traffic, organic search, or paid ads.

Image Optimization

Are large images slowing down your Massachusetts website? That won't be 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!

Add Live Chat

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

Review Error Logs for Issues

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

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

Implement a Caching Plugin

Interested in installing a caching plugin for your Massachusetts website, but don't know how to set it up? We can help recommend caching plugins, or just install and configure them for you!

Send Website Emails Over SMTP

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.

IP Address Restrictions

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

Is it time to make a backup of your Massachusetts website? Let us help you create one-time or scheduled backups that you can store locally or offsite.

Create a Staging Website

Before you do a major update or extension installation, it's a good idea to setup a development or staging site. Just let us know if you need help creating and managing that development / staging site!

Setup A/B Testing

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

Create 301 Redirects

Do you have a new website or are you removing pages? You will want to create 301 redirects for your Massachusetts website to prevent broken pages from hurting your SEO. Having broken pages will cost your Massachusetts 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.

Train You on Your Website

Do you need help learning how to make changes to your Massachusetts website? If your Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts Websites

With years of experience developing websites for Massachusetts businesses (and those in other areas of the country), our web designers and web developers have been immersed in multiple platforms. Having said that, it's better to master a few platforms than try to specialize in them all. Therefore, we tend to only maintain Massachusetts websites on these platforms:

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

We've managed Joomla and Magento platforms for Massachusetts businesses in the past. 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 Massachusetts Website Maintenance Firms

Ask the Massachusetts website support company some questions about their services before you sign up for a package. It'll give you a better idea of the relationship you'll have with the Massachusetts web maintenance team before you pay them, give them website access, and give them full access to your hosting. Here are some simple questions to ask:

• What kind of security do you have on your site? Do you scan client websites for security?
• What's the turnaround time for Massachusetts website maintenance?
• Do you outsource your Massachusetts web support services?
• How much might it cost to maintain an average Massachusetts website?
• Do you have minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Massachusetts website updates?
• Can you tell me what your normal business hours are?
• When there are new updates on my platform, will you let me know?

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

Massachusetts Web Maintenance Plans and Tips

Companies in and around Massachusetts often ask us for a web maintenance plan to establish routines and procedures. We can help your Massachusetts business set up a website maintenance plan so all aspects of your website, hosting, and domain name are monitored regularly.

Check out this list of annual Massachusetts web support tasks to review:

• Check if your web hosting provider has newer servers that your account can be migrated to.
• 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 Massachusetts.
• Take a look at the websites of your competitors (even those outside Massachusetts) to see if you're missing out on anything.
• Perform a full security review of your website to ensure nothing has been compromised or left vulnerable.
• Make sure structured data, open graph, and social links are 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 Massachusetts website support 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.
• Check your hosting account credentials and make sure it's not about to expire.
• Make sure you can access your DNS in case anything needs to be changed.
• Make sure your SSL certificate isn't expiring soon.
• Make sure your website backup schedule is working and you have remote backups.
• Make sure you're running an image optimization service.
• Check if the website is throwing any console errors.

Read through this list of monthly Massachusetts web maintenance tasks to review:

• Check for broken links on your website, which negatively impact user experience and SEO.
• Check your website for performance issues after recent updates or changes.
• 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 Website Maintenance Service in Massachusetts

The starting price for our Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts websites, starting at $50/month, if you'd like the peace of mind knowing a company is proactively upgrading your site. For Massachusetts businesses with mission-critical applications, we offer emergency Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts, 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 Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts to charge a much higher hourly rate, but not bill out for communication and organization. Likewise, there are website support companies in Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts 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.