How to Get Website Maintenance Done

There are so many websites out there that are not up to date. About 4 in 5 seem to be out dated. If your business is struggling to keep your website up to date, then maybe it’s time to take another look at hiring a website maintenance company to help you out. It’s easy to do and if you pick the right firm, then it won’t be expensive at all.

Here, you will find some helpful tips on what you should look for when hiring someone or a company to do website maintenance for you.

The Benefits of a Website Maintenance Firm

There Are Many!

A good website maintenance company will provide you with a myriad of services. You typically are not looking for the old “one man shops” that has one, very overloaded person that cannot keep up with everything that needs to be done. You want a firm that has full-time staff on hand, just waiting for your maintenance request. This will get your work done right and done quickly.

Here are some more benefits of hiring a web maintenance company:

1. They should take backups of their work before they start so that changes can be rolled back if necessary.
2. They should quote their work before they begin – if that’s what you want. Some firms will not quote projects under an hour and instead opt to just get the work done. This is fine.
3. They should get the work done quickly. A good turnaround time is 48 hours.
4. A good website maintenance company should be checking their work in multiple web browsers and operating systems. Make sure that your website works well with Internet Explorer on a PC and Safari on a Mac.
5. You should get a discount for pre-payment.
6. You should not have to enter into a long term contract.
7. It should be easy to submit work to them.

Go With Your Gut

There’s a lot of competition out there, so choose a firm that you are comfortable working with. That is what matters maybe most of all. How they communicate with you and what your gut is telling you will tell you if a certain web maintenance firm is right for you or not.

Who Updates Your Website?

Is it Anyone’s Responsibility?

Sometimes things just fall through the cracks. It’s very common that updating the company website will be one of those tasks. Maybe the person that used to do it left or was laid off. Maybe it’s up to the IT department to work on but they’re too busy. So maybe nobody is doing it.

When you arrive at that question, it’s time to think about what to do to solve this problem.

Is it OK to Outsource?

Outsourcing Isn’t a Dirty Word – You Do It All the Time!

Think about it – you outsource things all the time.

Every time you go to a store to buy something, that’s outsourcing. You didn’t make the product yourself – you paid for someone else’s work. Even filling up your car with gas or taking it to the shop is outsourcing. We can’t do everything ourselves. Learning to fix your own car takes time and would be way more expensive than taking it somewhere to get fixed.

So why not leave website design to the experts?

Back about 8-10 years ago, website design was easy. There wasn’t a whole lot you could do. But now with social media and people wanting the latest information right now, websites have become more complicated. Behind most websites now is what is called a CMS, which stands for Content Management System. It’s a way to update your website yourself. If you have one of these, then sometimes you need some extra help.

There are usually “Contact Us” forms on websites and even those need to be updated from time to time. If you haven’t received a lead in a while, you might want to first check that it’s working. Next, check to see who should be getting those leads.

With websites now, there are a million things that can go wrong. Even by just leaving them alone, they can actually break. It’s true. If your web host upgrades software on the server (which they have to do for security reasons), it could cause your website not to work properly.

When you look at it, it just only makes sense to leave your website in the hands of experts.

What You Will Need to Provide to a Web Maintenance Firm

What to Prepare for Them

As you get ready to hire a company to help you with website maintenance, it would be helpful to get a few things ready so that once you hire them, things will move quickly. Getting just a few, simple things together can avoid a few days or weeks of phone calls and emails. These are the things that they will typically ask you for in order to get started working on your website.

FTP Information

This is like a car mechanic opening the hood. They can’t do much without opening the hood, right? FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol” which is just a fancy way of saying that they need access to the files that are sitting on your web server. The problem often is that nobody knows where this information is. It was written down somewhere or is in a file some place but it can’t be found. The best place to get this is to just contact your website host. Your web host is where your web server is and where your website is. They will either have this information or will be able to reset it for you. The three things you want are:

1. FTP Host / Server Name
2. FTP User Name
3. FTP Password

Some optional information you might get would include the Remote Path or a control panel login – more about that in a minute. Sometimes FTP is referred to as “SFTP” which is the same thing but with a secured connection. This is actually preferred, so if you get that information instead, that’s fine.

Website CMS Login

If your website runs on a Content Management System, then having the login URL (web address), username and password will be necessary.

Control Panel Login

Many websites now are on web servers that include control panel software. This is simply a place to login and change things about your website’s configuration. I won’t get into all the technical aspects of it but it’s something that could be helpful to get. If you don’t have one, then don’t worry. If something needs to be changed in the configuration, then placing a call to your web host should take care of it.

Domain Name Registration

This isn’t always needed but is useful to have in case you do need to change web hosts. When a domain name is purchased, it’s bought through a domain name registrar – like GoDaddy, for example.

Probably the most important information to have is the FTP information and then the information to login to the back end of the website, if your website runs on a Content Management System of some sort.