Sterling Heights, MI Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Sterling Heights, MI Websites

We see web maintenance as a reactive support service where we provide your Sterling Heights business with the right web developer resources to fix just about any problem. These are some examples of website issues that Sterling Heights website maintenance agencies might fix:

• Updating your website platform.
• Installing app or plugin updates to improve security and functionality.
• Adding new web pages as you release new products or services.
• Writing new blog content to help you stay fresh.
• Rearranging your Sterling Heights site's navigation menu.
• Improve your page speed to pass Google Core Web Vitals.
• Take backups of your website's files and databases.
• Modifying the look and feel of your website's design.
• Troubleshooting Google Search Console coverage issues.
• Improving technical SEO by adding structured data, open graph tags, etc.
• Providing a solution to any other website problem.

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

Reactive Sterling Heights Website Support

Most Sterling Heights 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. You can count on our company to keep your Sterling Heights website running smoothly. However, we can offer some proactive Sterling Heights web support services.

View Sterling Heights Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Sterling Heights Website Support

We're happy to help website owners in Sterling Heights 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 Sterling Heights Website Management Pricing

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

Who Needs Website Maintenance in Sterling Heights, MI

There will come a time when every Sterling Heights website needs some sort of maintenance. It's just that the internet changes all the time. However, we don't charge a lot for Sterling Heights web support, so you'll be able to afford it! Here are some common reasons why a website in Sterling Heights might require website support services:

• When a hosting company upgrades their servers, they may remove older versions of PHP that your Sterling Heights website was originally developed to support. 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.
• 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". Sterling Heights-area ecommerce businesses running Magento 1.x found themselves looking for an ecommerce developer to help migrate their store.
• 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 can be a time-consuming activity, and often happens because the website owner wasn't being mindful of the first two web maintenance examples, listed above.
• To ensure future visitors to your Sterling Heights website receive accurate information about your organization, products, or services, your Sterling Heights website content needs to be refreshed. Keeping your Sterling Heights 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 web maintenance and support, consider your Sterling Heights business's potential future needs.

How We Perform Sterling Heights, MI Website Maintenance

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

Most Sterling Heights website support services start with an email from the website owner. Your email gets routed to our ticket system and automatically gets assigned to your project manager. From there, anyone on our team can work on the ticket without delay, leading to faster turnaround time and simplified internal communication.

For requests that originate from phone or live chat, a similar process to handling your Sterling Heights web maintenance services unfolds. 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 Website Maintenance Service List for Sterling Heights, MI Businesses

After the launch of a website, we're often asked for detailed examples of Sterling Heights web support requests. We've performed these Sterling Heights website support services in the past, and would be happy to do it for you too!

Simple Sterling Heights Website Updates

A simple change to your Sterling Heights website might include updating a paragraph on a page, swapping out an image, or adding a new page. These are just normal, routine web maintenance tasks to keep content fresh for both search engines and visitors.

Sterling Heights Page Speed Improvements

Let us check your Sterling Heights website for hosting, caching, image optimization, console errors, broken links, poor database queries, and other potential problems that might be impacting your page speed. It'll help improve page load times, which will make users and search engines happy.

Platform Upgrades / Security Updates

If your Sterling Heights website is running on a content management system, like WordPress, it is important to keep the platform updated. Updates help improve security and functionality - and they're usually quick, so it might be a simple task.

Plugin / Extension Updates

It's important to update plugins and extensions on your Sterling Heights 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.

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. Make Google happy, and you'll rank higher throughout Sterling Heights and beyond!

Implement 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 Sterling Heights 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.

Setup Google Tag Manager

Are you interested in adding Google Tag Manager to your website to help you manage custom scripts more easily? Not a problem! We'll happily install Google Tag Manager on your Sterling Heights website and 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 Sterling Heights website. This will help you understand where your conversions are coming from, such as a Google search or a Bing Ads campaign.

Image Compression (Optimization)

Are large images slowing down your Sterling Heights website? Not 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

Would you like to try live chat? If you'd like us to recommend the best live chat system for your Sterling Heights 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.

Reduce Spam with reCaptcha

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

Install a Caching Plugin

Are you interested in installing a caching plugin in your Sterling Heights website, but not sure how to properly configure the settings for best website performance? We can help recommend caching plugins, or just install and configure them for you!

Setup 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

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.

Run Website & Database Backups

Do you want to create a backup of your Sterling Heights website? Backups can be performed one-time, or scheduled at specific intervals, and stored locally or offsite.

Create a Testing Website

When you're doing a major upgrade or extension installation, you should set up a development or staging site first. 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 Sterling Heights 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.

Setup 301 Redirects

Have you launched a new website or removed pages? You will want to create 301 redirects for your Sterling Heights website to prevent broken pages from hurting your SEO. Having broken pages will cost your Sterling Heights business a lot of organic traffic if they aren't fixed with 301 redirects. 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 Sterling Heights website? We'll be happy to help if your Sterling Heights site was built on a platform we work with, such as WordPress or Shopify.

The Platforms We Maintain for Sterling Heights, MI Websites

With years of experience developing websites for Sterling Heights businesses (and those in other areas of the country), our web designers and web developers have been immersed in multiple platforms. Nevertheless, mastering a handful of platforms is better than trying to be an expert on everything. Because of that, we tend to service only these platforms for Sterling Heights websites:

• Sterling Heights WordPress Web Maintenance
• Sterling Heights WooCommerce Website Maintenance
• Sterling Heights Shopify Web Support

As a website support company, we used to maintain and support Joomla and Magento websites for Sterling Heights-area businesses. However, we chose to move away from those platforms to allow our website maintenance experts to focus more heavily on training and support within the other systems.

Questions to Ask Sterling Heights, MI Web Support Companies

Ask the Sterling Heights web maintenance company some questions about their services before you sign up for a package. By doing this, you'll be able to better understand your future experience with their expert Michigan website maintenance services before you submit payment or provide website access. You can ask these simple questions:

• How do you handle website security? Do you run security scans of customer websites?
• What is the turnaround time for Sterling Heights web support requests?
• Do you outsource your Sterling Heights website support services?
• How much might it cost to maintain an average Sterling Heights website?
• Are there minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Sterling Heights website updates?
• At what times of the day are you working and able to take our maintenance requests?
• Will you keep me informed about new updates within my platform?

If you ask these questions to a Sterling Heights 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.

Sterling Heights, MI Website Maintenance Plans and Tips

Companies in and around Sterling Heights often ask us for a web support plan to establish routines and procedures. Whether it's your website, hosting, or domain name, we'll make sure your Sterling Heights business has a website support plan to ensure optimum performance.

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

• Ask your web hosting company if they have newer servers you can migrate to.
• Check if your website platform has a new major release that will require an extensive website migration.
• 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 Sterling Heights.
• Take a look at the websites of your competitors (even those outside Sterling Heights) to see if you're missing out on anything.
• 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.
• Verify the necessity of any 3rd party tracking, live chat, or heat map scripts that are installed.
• Take down any unnecessary development or staging sites.

Here is a list of semi-annual Sterling Heights web maintenance tasks to consider:

• 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 have access to your DNS.
• Make sure your SSL certificate isn't expiring soon.
• Make sure you have remote backups outside Sterling Heights and that your website backup schedule is working.
• If you have an automated image optimization service, verify it is working properly.
• Make sure the website doesn't throw any console errors.

Check out this list of monthly Sterling Heights website maintenance 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.
• Provide some kind of update to your content to keep your website fresh.
• Check if there are available platform or extension updates.

The Cost of Web Support Service in Sterling Heights, MI

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

800-796-8263 Email Us