Lansing, MI Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Lansing, MI Websites

Web maintenance is a reactive support service that connects you with the right web developer to fix nearly any website issue. Here are a few examples of website problems that might need Lansing web support:

• Updating your website platform.
• Updating apps and plugins to make them safer and more functional.
• Adding new web pages as you release new products or services.
• Freshen up your blog with new content.
• Rearranging your Lansing website's navigation menu.
• Making your page faster to pass Google Core Web Vitals.
• Take backups of your website's files and databases.
• Changing the look and feel of your website.
• Fixing Google Search Console coverage issues.
• Adding structured data, open graph tags, etc.
• Providing a solution to any other website problem.

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

Reactive Lansing Website Support

Most Lansing website owners wouldn't want a web developer messing around with their site without their permission. That's why we consider web maintenance a reactive service. Our company will be your web support team on standby for any questions you have. However, we can offer some proactive Lansing web support services.

View Lansing Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Lansing Website Support

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

If you live in Lansing, you probably love the Michigan State Spartans football team. Go Michigan State Spartans! In addition to supporting Lansing-area websites, our website support company also offers Ann Arbor, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Sterling Heights, Taylor, and Troy small businesses and large corporations help with their websites.

Who Needs Website Maintenance in Lansing, MI

Every Lansing website will need some web support at some point. It's because the internet is always changing. However, we don't charge a lot for Lansing website support, so you'll be able to afford it! Website maintenance in Lansing might be needed for these reasons:

• When a hosting company upgrades their servers, they may remove older versions of PHP that your Lansing website was originally developed to support. 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.
• Content management systems or ecommerce platforms eventually deprecate old versions so their teams can focus on the new ones. 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 Lansing were looking for ecommerce developers to help migrate their websites.
• An owner of a Lansing 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.
• To ensure future visitors to your Lansing website receive accurate information about your organization, products, or services, your Lansing website content needs to be refreshed. Keeping your Lansing 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. It is important to understand the future needs of your Lansing business when planning budgets and schedules for website maintenance and support.

How We Perform Lansing, MI 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 Lansing business after the work is done.

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

For requests that originate from phone or live chat, a similar process to handling your Lansing website support services unfolds. 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 Web Maintenance Service List for Lansing, MI Businesses

We're often asked for examples of Lansing website maintenance requests after a website launches. The following are some examples of Lansing web support services we've provided in the past.

Simple Lansing Website Updates

Your Lansing website might need a paragraph updated, an image changed, or a new page added. These are just normal, routine website support tasks to keep content fresh for both search engines and visitors.

Lansing Website Speed Improvements

We can analyze your Lansing website for hosting issues, caching issues, unoptimized images, console errors, broken links, poor queries, and more if it's slow. User experience and SEO will both benefit from better page load times.

Platform Upgrades / Security Updates

It's important to keep your Lansing website updated if it runs on a CMS like WordPress. The updates improve security and functionality - sometimes they're quick, so it's an easy win!

Plugin / Extension Upgrades

It's important to update plugins and extensions on your Lansing 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

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 Lansing and beyond!

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

Implement Open Graph on Your Website

When people share links of your Lansing 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

Interested in using Google Tag Manager for managing custom scripts? That won't be a problem! We can add Google Tag Manager to your Lansing website and even give you a crash course in using Google Tag Manager.

Setup Conversion Tracking

It's important to setup conversion tracking for your Lansing 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.

Image Compression (Optimization)

Is your Lansing website slow because of large images? Not a problem! Using our image compression tools, we can compress all your images and even set up recurring compression for new images!

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 Lansing business branding!

Review Error Log Files

Are your error_log files big? If you're getting recurring error messages, we can update programming code or fix platform issues.

Reduce Spam with reCaptcha

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

Install a Caching Plugin

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

Implement SMTP Email

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

Is your Lansing website being bombarded with fake orders, contact submissions or live chats from a specific network? Our team can help set up IP restrictions so your website doesn't get hit with as much malicious traffic.

Backup Your Website Files

Would you like a backup of your Lansing website? Let us help you create one-time or scheduled backups that you can store 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. 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 Lansing 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 Lansing website. We've seen businesses in and around Lansing 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 Lansing website? If your Lansing 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 Lansing, MI Websites

For Lansing businesses, we have a team of web designers and web developers who have experience with multiple platforms. Having said that, it's better to master a few platforms than try to specialize in them all. Because of that, we tend to service only these platforms for Lansing websites:

• Lansing WordPress Web Maintenance
• Lansing WooCommerce Web Maintenance
• Lansing Shopify Website Maintenance

As a web support agency, we used to maintain and support Joomla and Magento websites for Lansing-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 Lansing, MI Website Maintenance Agencies

If you're thinking about signing up for any Lansing website support package, make sure you ask the company how their services work. It'll give you a better idea of the experience you'll have with their premium Michigan web maintenance services prior to making payment and providing website access. You can ask these simple questions:

• What kind of security do you have on your site? Do you scan client websites for security?
• What is the turnaround time for Lansing website maintenance requests?
• Are you outsourcing your Lansing web support services?
• How much does Lansing website support cost?
• Are there any minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Lansing 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 any Lansing website services company these questions before subscribing to their website 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.

Lansing, MI Web Support Plans and Tips

Larger companies in and around Lansing often ask us for a website support plan. We can help your Lansing business set up a web maintenance plan so all aspects of your website, hosting, and domain name are monitored regularly.

Read through this list of annual Lansing web maintenance tasks to consider:

• Check if your web hosting provider has newer servers that your account can be migrated to.
• Check if your website platform has a new major release that will require an extensive website migration.
• 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 Lansing) to see if you're missing out on any competitive advantages they have over you.
• Ensure your website is secure by performing a full security review.
• 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.
• Delete any development or staging websites you don't need.

Check out this list of semi-annual Lansing 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.
• 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.
• Check if your SSL certificate will be expiring in the near future.
• Make sure you have remote backups outside Lansing and that your website backup schedule is working.
• Make sure you're running an image optimization service.
• Make sure the website doesn't throw any console errors.

Read through this list of monthly Lansing web support tasks to review:

• Look for broken links on your website, which hurts SEO and user experience.
• Check your website for performance issues after recent updates or changes.
• 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.
• Take a look at your website platform and extensions for any available updates.

The Cost of Website Support Service in Lansing, MI

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