Grand Rapids, MI Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Grand Rapids, MI Websites

We see website maintenance as a reactive support service where we provide your Grand Rapids 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 Grand Rapids web support agencies, 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 Grand Rapids website's navigation menu.
• 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 Google Search Console coverage issues.
• Adding structured data, open graph tags, etc.
• Providing solutions to other website problems.

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

Reactive Grand Rapids Website Support

Most Grand Rapids 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. When you choose to have our company maintain your Grand Rapids website, we'll be your web support team on standby for any request. However, we can provide some proactive web maintenance services for your Grand Rapids website.

View Grand Rapids Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Grand Rapids 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 Grand Rapids Website Management Pricing

In addition to supporting Grand Rapids-area websites, our web maintenance company also offers Ann Arbor, Detroit, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Sterling Heights, Taylor, and Troy small businesses and large corporations help with their websites.

Who Needs Web Support in Grand Rapids, MI

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

• Hosting companies sometimes upgrade their servers, removing PHP versions that were used by your Grand Rapids 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 from the past to work forever.
• 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. Grand Rapids-area ecommerce businesses running Magento 1.x found themselves looking for an ecommerce developer to help migrate their store.
• An owner of a Grand Rapids website who has been infected by malware or some other kind of malicious activity needs to check the site for exploits and clean it up. In most cases, this happens because the website owner didn't pay attention to the first two web maintenance examples.
• You need to refresh your Grand Rapids website content when it's outdated or doesn't explain your organization, products, or services well enough for future visitors. Keeping your Grand Rapids 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. When planning budgets and schedules for website maintenance and support, consider your Grand Rapids business's potential future needs.

How We Perform Grand Rapids, MI Web Support

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

Most web maintenance services start with an email from you, the owner of the Grand Rapids 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 Grand Rapids web 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 Website Maintenance Service List for Grand Rapids, MI Businesses

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

Simple Grand Rapids Website Tweaks

Changes to your Grand Rapids 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.

Grand Rapids Website Speed Improvements

We can analyze your Grand Rapids website for hosting issues, caching issues, unoptimized images, console errors, broken links, poor queries, and more if it's slow. It'll help improve page load times, which will make users and search engines happy.

Platform Updates / Security Fixes

If your Grand Rapids website is running on a content management system, like WordPress, it is important to keep the platform updated. The updates improve security and functionality - sometimes they're quick, so it's an easy win!

Plugin / Extension Upgrades

It's important to update your Grand Rapids website's plugins and extensions to reflect 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

Has Google Search Console told you there's 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 Grand Rapids and beyond, by making Google happy!

Add Structured Data

When you search Google organically, have you noticed reviews or prices in the search results? This is structured data, which is a standardized way of describing content on the web, whether it's a local business in Grand Rapids or an ecommerce product.

Add Open Graph to Your Website

When people share links of your Grand Rapids 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.

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 Grand Rapids website and even teach you how to use it.

Add Conversion Tracking

Tracking conversions is important if you want to understand the benefits of online advertising for your Grand Rapids website. It'll help you understand where your conversions come from, like direct traffic, referral links, organic search, or paid ads.

Image Compression (Optimization)

Do you have a Grand Rapids website that's slow because of large images? 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? Our experts can help you pick the right live chat system, install the tracking code, and customize the design to match your Grand Rapids business branding!

Review Error Logs for Issues

Do you have a lot of error_log files on your hosting account? If you're getting recurring error messages, we can update programming code or fix platform issues.

Setup reCaptcha on Forms

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

Implement a Caching Plugin

Interested in installing a caching plugin for your Grand Rapids 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.

IP Address Restrictions

Have you been getting fake orders, contact submissions, or live chats from a particular network? We can help setup IP restrictions to prevent malicious traffic from interacting with your website.

Backup Your Website Files

Would you like a backup of your Grand Rapids website? Backups can be performed one-time, or scheduled at specific intervals, and stored locally or offsite.

Create a Testing 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 Grand Rapids web page? A/B testing can help you decide between two or more design layouts based on the data collected.

Setup 301 Redirects

Have you launched a new website or removed pages? You will want to create 301 redirects for your Grand Rapids website to prevent broken pages from hurting your SEO. Having broken pages will cost your Grand Rapids business a lot of organic traffic if they aren't fixed with 301 redirects. We can help you set up 301 redirects in .htaccess files, nginx templates, and CMS platforms.

Offer Website Training

Do you need help learning how to make changes to your Grand Rapids website? Let us know what training you need if your Grand Rapids site was built on a platform we work with, like WordPress or Shopify!

The Platforms We Maintain for Grand Rapids, MI Websites

With years of experience developing websites for Grand Rapids 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 Grand Rapids websites on these platforms:

• Grand Rapids WordPress Website Maintenance
• Grand Rapids WooCommerce Web Support
• Grand Rapids Shopify Website Support

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

Questions to Ask Grand Rapids, MI Web Maintenance Companies

Ask the Grand Rapids web 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 expert Michigan web 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 Grand Rapids website maintenance?
• Are you outsourcing your Grand Rapids web support services?
• How much does Grand Rapids website support cost?
• Are there minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Grand Rapids website updates?
• Can you tell me what your normal business hours are?
• Will you keep me informed about new updates within my platform?

If you ask any Grand Rapids website services firm these questions before subscribing to their web maintenance packages, you'll have a much better idea of the future relationship, the security of your website, and the expected turnaround time for important requests.

Grand Rapids, MI Website Maintenance Plans and Tips

Companies in and around Grand Rapids often ask us for a web support plan to establish routines and procedures. We are happy to help your Grand Rapids 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 Grand Rapids 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.
• Check out competitor sites (even those outside of Grand Rapids) to see if you're missing out on any competitive advantages they have over you.
• 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.
• Delete any development or staging websites you don't need.

Check out this list of semi-annual Grand Rapids website 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 your hosting account credentials and make sure it's not about to expire.
• Make sure you have access to your DNS.
• Make sure your SSL certificate isn't expiring soon.
• Make sure you have remote backups outside Grand Rapids and that your website backup schedule is working.
• Check if you have an automated image optimization service running.
• See if there are any console errors on the website.

Read through this list of monthly Grand Rapids 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.
• 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 Website Support Service in Grand Rapids, MI

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