Bloomington, MN Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Bloomington, MN Websites

We view web maintenance to be a reactive support service that provides your Bloomington business with the appropriate web developer resources to solve nearly any website problem. There are many examples of website issues that might require service from Bloomington website maintenance firms, including:

• Upgrading your website platform to the latest version.
• Installing app or plugin updates to improve security and functionality.
• Adding new pages whenever you release something new.
• Writing new blog content to help you stay fresh.
• Rearranging your Bloomington 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.
• Enhancing technical SEO with structured data, open graph tags, etc.
• Providing solutions to other website problems.

Those services are just a taste of what Bloomington website support might look like. In fact, Bloomington web maintenance is really anything a web developer or digital marketer does to your website to change it in some manner.

Reactive Bloomington Website Support

The reason we consider website maintenance to be a reactive service is that most Bloomington website owners wouldn't want a web developer going into their website and changing things around without their knowledge. When you choose to have our agency maintain your Bloomington website, we'll be your web support team on standby for any request. There are some website support services we can provide your Bloomington website in a proactive manner though.

View Bloomington Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Bloomington Website Support

For website owners in Bloomington 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 Bloomington Website Management Pricing

In addition to supporting Bloomington-area websites, our web maintenance agency also offers Duluth, Minneapolis, Plymouth, Rochester, St. Paul, and Woodbury small businesses and large corporations help with their websites.

Who Needs Website Maintenance in Bloomington, MN

At some point in time, every Bloomington website will require some form of web support. The reason is simply that the internet is always changing. Not to worry though, our Bloomington website support cost isn't expensive so it should be affordable for you to maintain your website! Here are some common reasons why a website in Bloomington might require web maintenance services:

• Hosting companies sometimes upgrade their servers, removing PHP versions that were used by your Bloomington 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.
• 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". Bloomington-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 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 Bloomington website content when it's outdated or doesn't explain your organization, products, or services well enough for future visitors. Keeping your Bloomington website up to date is key to its success.

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 Bloomington business when planning budgets and schedules for website maintenance and support.

How We Perform Bloomington, MN Web Support

We have an experienced website support team who puts forth great effort to understand your maintenance needs, schedule your work in a timely fashion, and follow up with your Bloomington business after the tasks have been completed.

Most web maintenance services start with an email from you, the owner of the Bloomington website. That email is routed into our ticket system and automatically assigned to the project manager on your account. From there, anyone on our team can work on the ticket without delay, leading to faster turnaround time and simplified internal communication.

Phone or live chat requests follow a similar process to Bloomington 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 Website Maintenance Service List for Bloomington, MN Businesses

We are often asked for detailed examples of Bloomington web support requests that might come up after the launch of a website. Here are several examples of Bloomington website support services we've been asked to perform in the past and would be more than happy to provide to you!

Simple Bloomington Website Changes

A simple change to your Bloomington website might include updating a paragraph on a page, swapping out an image, or adding a new page. Keeping content fresh for search engines and visitors is just normal, routine web maintenance.

Bloomington Page Speed Improvements

Let us check your Bloomington 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 Bloomington 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.

Extension / Plugin Updates

It's important to update your Bloomington 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.

Google Search Console Fixes

Did you get a report from Google Search Console telling you about a coverage issue? If so, we can review the coverage issues, fix the problems, and update you on the results. This will help your search engine rankings, throughout Bloomington and beyond, by making Google happy!

Setup Structured Data

Do you ever see product prices or reviews in Google organic 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 Bloomington, and ecommerce product or some other common data type.

Add Open Graph to Your Website

When people share links of your Bloomington 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.

Add Google Tag Manager

Are you interested in adding Google Tag Manager to your website to help you manage custom scripts more easily? No problem at all! We'll happily install Google Tag Manager on your Bloomington website and teach you how to use it.

Setup Conversion Tracking

Tracking conversions is important if you want to understand the benefits of online advertising for your Bloomington website. This will help you understand where your conversions are coming from, such as a Google search or a Bing Ads campaign.

Optimize Images

Are large images slowing down your Bloomington 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!

Add Live Chat

Do you want to try live chat on your website? If you'd like us to recommend the best live chat system for your Bloomington business, install the tracking code, and customize the design for your branding, we can do it!

Resolve Errors in Log Files

Are your error_log files big? We can help diagnose the issue and update programming code or repair platform issues to prevent recurring error messages.

Reduce Spam with reCaptcha

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

Install a Caching Plugin

Looking to install a caching plugin on your Bloomington website, but not sure how to configure it? 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 IP Addresses

Is your Bloomington website being bombarded with fake orders, contact submissions or live chats from a specific network? If you want to protect your website from malicious traffic, we can help by implementing IP restrictions.

Create Website Backups

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

Create a Testing 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!

Create A/B Testing Rules

Are you a fan of making Bloomington 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.

Create 301 Redirects

Are you launching a new website or removing pages from your website? You should create 301 redirects for your Bloomington website. We've seen businesses in and around Bloomington 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.

Train You on Your Website

Do you need help learning how to make changes to your Bloomington website? We'll be happy to help if your Bloomington site was built on a platform we work with, such as WordPress or Shopify.

The Platforms We Maintain for Bloomington, MN Websites

We have a diverse team of web designers and web developers, for Bloomington businesses, who have been immersed in multiple website platforms over the years. 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 agency for Bloomington websites tends to service only the following platforms:

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

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

Questions to Ask Bloomington, MN Web Maintenance Firms

Before signing up for any Bloomington web support package, it is important to ask the Bloomington website support company some questions about how their services work. This will help you get a better idea of the experience you will have with their premium Minnesota web maintenance services before you submit payment and provide website access. Let's go over some simple questions to ask:

• How do you handle website security? Do you run security scans of customer websites?
• What's the turnaround time for Bloomington website maintenance?
• Do you outsource your Bloomington web support services?
• How much might it cost to maintain an average Bloomington website?
• Are there minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Bloomington 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 Bloomington website services agency, you'll gain a better understanding of the future relationship, the security of your website, and the turnaround time for important maintenance requests.

Bloomington, MN Web Maintenance Plans and Tips

We are often asked for a website maintenance plan by larger companies in and around Bloomington looking to establish routines and procedures within their IT department. We are happy to help your Bloomington 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 Bloomington website support tasks to review:

• Ask your web hosting company if they have newer servers you can migrate 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 Bloomington.
• Take a look at the websites of your competitors (even those outside Bloomington) 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.

Read through this list of semi-annual Bloomington 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 your hosting account credentials and make sure it's not about to expire.
• 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.
• Verify your website backup schedule is working properly, and you have remote backups outside of Bloomington.
• Check if you have an automated image optimization service running.
• Check if the website is throwing any console errors.

Check out this list of monthly Bloomington web maintenance tasks to consider:

• 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 are any coverage issues in Google Search Console.
• Update some of your service pages or blog articles to keep your website fresh.
• Check if there are available platform or extension updates.

The Cost of Website Maintenance Service in Bloomington, MN

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