Charleston, SC Website Maintenance Services

What is Involved in Maintaining Charleston, SC Websites

Web maintenance is a reactive support service that connects you with the right web developer to fix nearly any website issue. These are some examples of website issues that Charleston website support firms might fix:

• Making sure your website's platform is up to date.
• Installing app or plugin updates to improve security and functionality.
• Adding new web pages as you release new products or services.
• Freshen up your blog with new content.
• Rearranging your Charleston website's navigation menu.
• Making your page faster to pass Google Core Web Vitals.
• Taking backups of your website's files and databases.
• Changing the look and feel of your website.
• Troubleshooting Google Search Console coverage issues.
• Enhancing technical SEO with structured data, open graph tags, etc.
• Providing solutions to other website problems.

These are just a few of the Charleston web maintenance services we offer. Basically, Charleston website maintenance is anything a web developer or internet marketer does to change your website.

Reactive Charleston Website Support

We consider web support a reactive service because most Charleston website owners don't want a developer messing with their website without their permission. When you choose to have our agency maintain your Charleston website, we'll be your web support team on standby for any request. There are some web maintenance services we can provide your Charleston website in a proactive manner though.

View Charleston Website Maintenance Pricing

Proactive Charleston Website Support

Interested in a proactive website management service for some of your website upkeep? We're happy to help! 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 Charleston Website Management Pricing

If you live in Charleston, you probably love the Charleston Cougars basketball team. Go Charleston Cougars! In addition to supporting Charleston-area websites, our website maintenance agency also offers Aiken, Columbia, Florence, Greenville, Hilton Head Island, Mount Pleasant, Myrtle Beach, North Charleston, Rock Hill, and Summerville small businesses and large corporations help with their websites.

Who Needs Website Support in Charleston, SC

Every Charleston website will need some web maintenance at some point. It's just that the internet changes all the time. But don't worry, our Charleston web maintenance costs aren't too high, so you can afford it! Here are some common reasons why a website in Charleston might require website maintenance services:

• When a hosting company upgrades their servers, they may remove older versions of PHP that your Charleston 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. This recently happened to Magento 1.x ecommerce store owners who were forced to migrate to Magento 2.x, or an alternative ecommerce platform, because Magento 1.x had reached an “End of Life” status and would no longer be maintained or updated by Magento. As a result, Magento 1.x ecommerce businesses in Charleston 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 is time-consuming, and often happens when the website owner isn't paying attention to the first two web support examples.
• You need to refresh your Charleston website content when it's outdated or doesn't explain your organization, products, or services well enough for future visitors. Maintaining your Charleston website is key to making sure it's working for you.

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 Charleston business's potential future needs.

How We Perform Charleston, SC Website Support

Our professional web maintenance team puts in a lot of effort to understand your needs, schedule your work on time, and follow up with your Charleston business after the work is done.

Most Charleston 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. 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 Charleston web 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 Website Support Service List for Charleston, SC Businesses

We're often asked for examples of Charleston web maintenance requests after a website launches. We've performed these Charleston web maintenance services in the past, and would be happy to do it for you too!

Simple Charleston Website Tweaks

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

Charleston Website Speed Improvements

We can analyze your Charleston 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 Patches

It's important to keep your Charleston 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.

Extension / Plugin Updates

It's important to update your Charleston website's plugins and extensions to reflect the latest changes by the developers. It's similar to updating the CMS platform since it helps patch security and functionality issues.

Google Search Console Issues

Did Google Search Console tell you about a coverage problem? If so, we can fix the coverage issues, and let you know how it went. This will help your search engine rankings, throughout Charleston and beyond, by making Google happy!

Setup 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 of describing content on the web, whether it's a local business in Charleston or an ecommerce product.

Add Open Graph to Your Website

Adding Open Graph Tags to your website will help search engines better understand your page content and improve the appearance of your website in social media platforms when people share links of your Charleston business.

Add Google Tag Manager

Interested in using Google Tag Manager for managing custom scripts? No problem at all! We'll happily install Google Tag Manager on your Charleston website and teach you how to use it.

Add Conversion Tracking

It's important to setup conversion tracking for your Charleston 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 Optimization

Are large images slowing down your Charleston website? No problem at all! All your images can be compressed by our tools, and we can even setup recurring compression for newly added images!

Add Live Chat

Is your website ready for live chat? We can make recommendations on the best live chat systems for your business requirements, install the tracking code, and configure the design to match the branding of your Charleston business!

Review Error Logs for Issues

Are your error_log files big? 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 Charleston website.

Implement a Caching Plugin

Looking to install a caching plugin on your Charleston website, but not sure how to configure it? We can recommend caching plugins, or we can 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 Malicious IP Addresses

Is your Charleston website getting fake orders, contact submissions, or live chats? Our team can help set up IP restrictions so your website doesn't get hit with as much malicious traffic.

Create Website Backups

Would you like a backup of your Charleston website? Let us help you create one-time or scheduled backups that you can store 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!

Setup A/B Testing

Are you a fan of making Charleston 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.

Create 301 Redirects

Are you launching a new website or removing pages from your website? You will want to create 301 redirects for your Charleston website to prevent broken pages from hurting your SEO. Businesses in and around Charleston have lost a lot of organic traffic because of broken pages. It is a very common mistake when launching new websites, removing content pages, or disabling product pages. We are happy to help you resolve broken pages through the creation of 301 redirects within .htaccess files, nginx templates, and CMS plugins.

Provide Website Training

Want to learn how to make simple edits to your Charleston website? We'll be happy to help if your Charleston site was built on a platform we work with, such as WordPress or Shopify.

The Platforms We Maintain for Charleston, SC Websites

For Charleston businesses, we have a team of web designers and web developers who have experience with multiple platforms. Nevertheless, mastering a handful of platforms is better than trying to be an expert on everything. Therefore, we tend to only maintain Charleston websites on these platforms:

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

In the past, we provided website maintenance and support for Joomla and Magento platforms of Charleston businesses. However, we chose not to use those platforms so our website maintenance experts could focus on training and support within the more popular platforms.

Questions to Ask Charleston, SC Web Support Companies

If you're thinking about signing up for any Charleston web maintenance package, make sure you ask the company how their services work. By doing this, you'll be able to better understand your future experience with their expert South Carolina website maintenance services before you submit payment or provide website access. Here are some simple questions to ask:

• How do you handle website security? Do you run security scans of customer websites?
• What is the turnaround time for Charleston web support requests?
• Are you outsourcing your Charleston website support services?
• How much does Charleston web maintenance cost?
• Are there any minimum deductions or minimum billable expenses for Charleston website updates?
• What are your normal hours of operation?
• When there are new updates on my platform, will you let me know?

If you ask these questions to a Charleston website services firm, you'll gain a better understanding of the future relationship, the security of your website, and the turnaround time for important maintenance requests.

Charleston, SC Web Support Plans and Tips

Larger companies in and around Charleston often ask us for a website support plan. Whether it's your website, hosting, or domain name, we'll make sure your Charleston business has a web maintenance plan to ensure optimum performance.

Check out this list of annual Charleston web maintenance tasks to review:

• 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.
• 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 Charleston) 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.
• Verify structured data, open graph, and social links are all working properly.
• 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.

Read through this list of semi-annual Charleston website 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 that your hosting account isn't about to expire and you can access it.
• 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 your website backup schedule is working and you have remote backups.
• Check if you have an automated image optimization service running.
• Check if the website is throwing any console errors.

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

• Ensure your website doesn't have any broken links, which affect user experience and SEO.
• Make sure your website isn't having performance issues after recent updates.
• Check Google Search Console for any coverage issues.
• Update some of your service pages or blog articles to keep your website fresh.
• Take a look at your website platform and extensions for any available updates.

The Cost of Website Support Service in Charleston, SC

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