St. Paul, MN Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining St. Paul, MN Websites

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

• Making sure your website's platform is up to date.
• Keeping apps and plugins updated for better security and functionality.
• Adding new web pages as you release new information.
• Staying fresh with new blog content.
• Rearranging the navigation menu of your St. Paul website.
• Improving page speed to help you pass Google Core Web Vitals.
• Take backups of your website's files and databases.
• Changing the look and feel of your website.
• Troubleshooting Google Search Console coverage issues.
• Improving technical SEO by adding structured data, open graph tags, etc.
• Providing solutions to other website problems.

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

Reactive St. Paul Website Support

Most St. Paul 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. There are some web support services we can provide your St. Paul website in a proactive manner though.

View St. Paul Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive St. Paul Website Support

We're happy to help website owners in St. Paul 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 St. Paul Website Management Pricing

If you live in St. Paul, you probably love the Minnesota Wild hockey team. Go Minnesota Wild! In addition to supporting St. Paul-area websites, our website support company also offers Bloomington, Duluth, Minneapolis, Plymouth, Rochester, and Woodbury small businesses and large corporations help with their websites.

Who Needs Website Maintenance in St. Paul, MN

There will come a time when every St. Paul website needs some sort of maintenance. It's just that the internet changes all the time. But don't worry, our St. Paul web support costs aren't too high, so you can afford it! There are a few reasons why a website in St. Paul might need maintenance:

• When a hosting provider upgrades their servers, they may remove older versions of PHP that your St. Paul website was originally developed to support. This means you have to refactor your app or upgrade to a newer framework that supports the new PHP version. You can't expect custom web functionality programmed in the past to work forever without any improvements.
• 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 was no longer maintained by Magento after it reached "End of Life". As a result, Magento 1.x ecommerce businesses in St. Paul 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 can be a time-consuming activity, and often happens because the website owner wasn't being mindful of the first two website support examples, listed above.
• You need to refresh your St. Paul website content when it's outdated or doesn't explain your organization, products, or services well enough for future visitors. Keeping your St. Paul 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. Plan your budget and schedules for website support and maintenance based on your St. Paul business's potential future needs.

How We Perform St. Paul, MN Web Maintenance

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

Most St. Paul website maintenance services start with an email from the website owner. 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.

The process for St. Paul web support services that come from phone or chat is similar. We route the support request to the most appropriate web developer on our team based on the nature of the work needed on your website.

Example Website Support Service List for St. Paul, MN Businesses

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

Simple St. Paul Website Tweaks

Changes to your St. Paul website could be as simple as updating a paragraph, swapping images, or adding a new page. This is just normal, routine web support to keep content fresh for both search engines and visitors.

St. Paul Site Performance Improvements

If your St. Paul website isn't running as fast as it once was, we can review your website for hosting issues, caching issues, unoptimized images, console errors, broken links, poor queries, and much more. This will help improve page load times, which are beneficial to user experience and search engine optimization.

Platform Upgrades / Security Updates

It's important to keep your St. Paul 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.

Plugin / Extension Updates

It's important to update your St. Paul 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 Issues

Did Google Search Console tell you about a coverage problem? 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 St. Paul and beyond!

Setup Structured Data

Have you ever noticed information like reviews or product prices in the listing of a Google organic search result? This is structured data, which is a standardized way to describe the content on a webpage, whether it's a local St. Paul 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

Interested in using Google Tag Manager for managing custom scripts? No problem at all! We can add Google Tag Manager to your St. Paul website and even 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 St. Paul website. Then you'll know where your conversions come from, whether it be direct traffic, organic search, or paid ads.

Optimize Images

Are large images slowing down your St. Paul website? That won't be 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

Do you want to try live chat on your website? If you'd like us to recommend the best live chat system for your St. Paul 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.

Reduce Spam with reCaptcha

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

Setup a Caching Plugin

Are you interested in installing a caching plugin in your St. Paul website, but not sure how to properly configure the settings for best website performance? 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.

Restrict IP Addresses

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.

Backup Your Website Files

Would you like a backup of your St. Paul website? Let us help you create one-time or scheduled backups that you can store locally or offsite.

Create a Staging Website

It is often recommended that you setup a development or staging website before proceeding with a major upgrade or extension installation. If you'd like help creating and managing that development / staging site, just let us know!

Create A/B Testing Rules

Are you a fan of making St. Paul 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 St. Paul website. We've seen businesses in and around St. Paul 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 St. Paul website? If your St. Paul 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 St. Paul, MN Websites

With years of experience developing websites for St. Paul 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. Therefore, we tend to only maintain St. Paul websites on these platforms:

• St. Paul WordPress Website Support
• St. Paul WooCommerce Web Maintenance
• St. Paul Shopify Web Maintenance

As a website maintenance firm, we used to maintain and support Joomla and Magento websites for St. Paul-area businesses. However, we chose not to use those platforms so our website support experts could focus on training and support within the more popular platforms.

Questions to Ask St. Paul, MN Web Maintenance Firms

Ask the St. Paul web support 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 professional Minnesota web maintenance services before you submit payment or 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?
• When can I expect an average St. Paul web maintenance request to be completed?
• Is your St. Paul website maintenance outsourced?
• What are your St. Paul web support costs?
• Do you have minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for St. Paul 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 these questions to a St. Paul 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.

St. Paul, MN Web Maintenance Plans and Tips

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

Check out this list of annual St. Paul website support 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.
• Check if your website platform is releasing a major upgrade in the near future which will require a major overhaul of your website.
• Try restoring a website backup to make sure the data is good enough for a full recovery. Also, make sure your backups are stored somewhere else besides St. Paul.
• Look at competitor websites (even those outside of St. Paul) to see if you are missing out on new functionality for your own customers.
• Perform a full security review of your website to ensure nothing has been compromised or left vulnerable.
• 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.
• Take down any unnecessary development or staging sites.

Here is a list of semi-annual St. Paul web maintenance tasks to consider:

• 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 can access your DNS in case anything needs to be changed.
• Find out if your SSL certificate will expire soon.
• Make sure you have remote backups outside St. Paul and that your website backup schedule is working.
• Make sure you're running an image optimization service.
• Check if the website is throwing any console errors.

Here are a list of monthly St. Paul web maintenance tasks to review:

• 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.
• Take a look at your website platform and extensions for any available updates.

The Cost of Website Maintenance Service in St. Paul, MN

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