Portland, OR Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Portland, OR Websites

We see web maintenance as a reactive support service where we provide your Portland 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 Portland website support firms, including:

• Upgrading your website platform to the latest version.
• Keeping apps and plugins updated for better security and functionality.
• Adding new web pages as you release new products or services.
• Staying fresh with new blog content.
• Rearranging your Portland site's navigation menu.
• Improve your page speed 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 solutions to other website problems.

The previously mentioned services are just a glimpse of what we view as possible Portland web maintenance services. In fact, Portland website maintenance is really anything a web developer or digital marketer does to your website to change it in some manner.

Reactive Portland Website Support

The reason we consider web support to be a reactive service is that most Portland website owners wouldn't want a web developer going into their website and changing things around without their knowledge. Our agency will be your web support team on standby for any questions you have. However, we can offer some proactive Portland web maintenance services.

View Portland Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Portland Website Support

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

If you live in Portland, you probably love the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team. Go Portland Trail Blazers! In addition to supporting Portland-area websites, our website maintenance agency also offers Albany, Aloha, Beaverton, Corvallis, Eugene, Gresham, Medford, Redmond, Salem, Springfield, and Tigard small businesses and large corporations help with their websites.

Who Needs Website Support in Portland, OR

There will come a time when every Portland website needs some sort of maintenance. The reason is simply that the internet is always changing. Not to worry though, our Portland web maintenance cost isn't expensive so it should be affordable for you to maintain your website! There are a few reasons why a website in Portland might need maintenance:

• When a hosting company upgrades their servers, they may remove older versions of PHP that your Portland 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. 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". As a result, Magento 1.x ecommerce businesses in Portland were looking for ecommerce developers to help migrate their websites.
• An owner of a Portland 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 Portland website content when it's outdated or doesn't explain your organization, products, or services well enough for future visitors. This type of website maintenance is critical to ensuring your Portland website is benefiting you.

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. Plan your budget and schedules for website support and maintenance based on your Portland business's potential future needs.

How We Perform Portland, OR Web Support

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

Most web maintenance services start with an email from you, the owner of the Portland website. That email is routed into our ticket system and automatically assigned to the project manager on your account. We can then work on the ticket without delay, which leads to faster turnaround and easier internal communication.

For requests that originate from phone or live chat, a similar process to handling your Portland website maintenance services unfolds. 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 Web Support Service List for Portland, OR Businesses

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

Simple Portland Website Changes

Changes to your Portland website could be as simple as updating a paragraph, swapping images, or adding a new page. These are just normal, routine web maintenance tasks to keep content fresh for both search engines and visitors.

Portland Site Performance Improvements

Let us check your Portland 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

It's important to keep your Portland 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 your Portland website's plugins and extensions to reflect the latest changes by the developers. This is similar to the idea of updating the CMS platform since it helps patch security and functionality issues.

Google Search Console Fixes

Did Google Search Console tell you about a coverage problem? If so, we can review the coverage issues, fix the problems, and update you on the results. By making Google happy, you'll boost your search engine rankings throughout Portland 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 Portland business, or an ecommerce product.

Add Open Graph to Your Website

When people share links of your Portland 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? Not a problem! We can add Google Tag Manager to your Portland website and even give you a crash course in using Google Tag Manager.

Setup Conversion Tracking

If you are interested in understanding the benefit of an online advertising campaign for your Portland website, it is important to setup conversion tracking. Then you'll know where your conversions come from, whether it be direct traffic, organic search, or paid ads.

Image Compression (Optimization)

Do you have a Portland website that's slow because of large images? 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!

Add Live Chat

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

Review Error Log Files

Have you noticed large error_log files on your hosting account? To stop recurring error messages, we can diagnose the problem and update programming code.

Integrate reCaptcha on Contact Forms

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

Install a Caching Plugin

Interested in installing a caching plugin for your Portland 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

We can configure your contact form and website platform to send emails through an SMTP account instead of PHP mail to improve email deliverability.

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.

Create Website Backups

Would you like a backup of your Portland website? We can help you create one-time or scheduled backups that store locally or at an offsite location.

Create a Staging 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 Portland web design changes based on statistical data? A/B testing can help you decide between two or more design layouts based on the data collected.

Setup 301 Redirects

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

With years of experience developing websites for Portland 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. For that reason, our website maintenance firm for Portland websites tends to service only the following platforms:

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

As a web support company, we used to maintain and support Joomla and Magento websites for Portland-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 Portland, OR Web Maintenance Companies

Ask the Portland 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 Oregon web maintenance services before you submit payment and provide website access. Let's go over some simple questions to ask:

• Can you tell me how you handle website security? Do you run website security scans for clients?
• What is the turnaround time for Portland website maintenance requests?
• Is your Portland web support outsourced?
• How much might it cost to maintain an average Portland website?
• Are there minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Portland 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 Portland website services company 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.

Portland, OR Web Maintenance Plans and Tips

Companies in and around Portland often ask us for a website maintenance plan to establish routines and procedures. We are happy to help your Portland 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 Portland 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 has a new major release that will require an extensive website migration.
• 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 Portland.
• Take a look at the websites of your competitors (even those outside Portland) 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.
• 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 Portland 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.
• Ensure you have access to your hosting account and that it isn't expiring soon.
• Ensure you have access to your DNS in case you need to change anything.
• Find out if your SSL certificate will expire soon.
• Verify your website backup schedule is working properly, and you have remote backups outside of Portland.
• Make sure you're running an image optimization service.
• Make sure the website doesn't throw any console errors.

Check out this list of monthly Portland 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 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 Web Support Service in Portland, OR

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