WEBSITE CARE PLAN

Content updates are changes or updates to text or images.

Examples:

• Adding a question & answer to a Frequently Asked Questions area
• Updating a Team Members area with a new staff photo & bio
• Updating store hours
• Adding a product to your eCommerce store

How it works: You email me the updates that you need once a month, or once a week, depending on your plan. Please provide at least a day or two in advance to allow me time to schedule your updates (depending on how involved they are).

What’s not included: Some changes are more than swapping out text or images. Sometimes you want to add new abilities like selling products, allowing automatic booking of your services, or create a highly complex forms, just to name a few amazing things a website can do for you.

Not sure if your situation is covered? No worries, just contact me and we can discuss what updates you need and if I can do it for you.

Yes.

The term “WordPress hosting” exists because not every web host is ideal for hosting WordPress, so it’s good to specialize. This ensures that there’s enough resources and that everything is as fast and efficient as possible.

More than that, it really helps to know how to use WordPress like the back of your hand if you host those websites. Hosts that don’t specialize may not even know where to start if you ask them to troubleshoot a problem.

I have ten years of experience with WordPress, so I’m able to avoid common pitfalls and keep things running smoothly. And if you email me saying “Hey, when I do x, it should do y, but instead I’m getting z,” I’m going to know exactly what you’re talking about because I’ve done x about a million times.

Yes, for two reasons.

1. One of the biggest factors that affects your website speed is your web hosting, so all care plans come with FAST web hosting on modern SSD server hardware and beefy resources.
2. The other major component of website speed is how it’s built & configured. As part of the onboarding process, your website may need some work to get it ready for care plan coverage, and this usually means some pretty fantastic speed improvements.

Keeping your website in good shape…

• increases your site’s traffic potential
• improves conversion rates (how many visitors become leads.)

One reason: both Google and users hate slow websites. If a user clicks your website in search results, but your website takes too long to load or returns server errors, they will usually be quick to hit the back button and keep searching. That signals Google to lower your website’s ranking in the search engine results pages.

Another reason is that any errors on your website may ruin the user experience. If the user has a bad experience, they are likely to distrust your website and it will be much harder to convert that user to a lead.

Actually, even errors that don’t effect the actual experience can decrease user trust way more than you’d think! So having someone taking care of your website, making sure it’s up and running, keeps your website from becoming a liability.

WordPress is open-source and 100% free. There are also lots of free third-party plugins that increase the functionality of WordPress by adding things like payment forms, contact forms, shopping carts, and more.

Some of the really useful plugins are paid, though. Things like professional form builders, spam blockers, email delivery services, SEO tools, data backup tools, etc all require licenses to use either yearly or monthly.

Because I buy licenses in bulk, I can provide access to these plugins and tools to all websites covered by a care plan. Sometimes that’s a big enough savings to make the care plan worth it by itself!

Yes, your website will absolutely keep working if you stop service. Your website is yours, and you are always free to take it where you like. Billing for the care plan is month-to-month.

You own your website. Most of my clients have been with me for years, but it’s not because I have long contracts!

Since my support includes web hosting, which is how your site is made available on the internet, if you stopped service you would need to find another web host and pay them a fee to host your website. Usually, they will migrate your site for free in order to get your business. I can wrap up your site in a migration-friendly package and send it along to you, and you can arrange to have them take it from there.

If your site uses premium plugins (see question # 2 above), your site will keep working– however, you’ll need to purchase the licenses to use the premium plugins on your own and keep the license(s) up to date. If you don’t, you won’t be able to update those plugins, which can lead to security issues like a hacked site.

Design refresh includes updating the look & feel of your site, but also making sure that your site is current behind-the-scenes as well. For example, as new mobile devices come on the market and screen sizes in general change, adjustments to image sizes, font sizes, or other minor layout issues might be best. I design sites that work flexibly on a very wide spectrum of screen sizes, so I find the 24 month schedule is well suited to keep sites looking their best.

No, email is not included with the care plan.

Web hosting and email hosting, though they both mention hosting, are very different products, and just because a company is good at web hosting doesn’t mean they’re good at email.

There’s a number of very good reasons to separate your email from your web host– getting your emails actually delivered instead of landing in the “spam” folder or simply disappearing into the ether is the #1 benefit.

You can have a professional, branded email like yourname@example.com for a low monthly cost from a dedicated email vendor (usually between $1-6 USD depending on the features you want), and I can help set that up for you if you need to transition away from the freebie setup at your current host or set up a brand new account. After that, your email host will provide support. Believe me, it’s worth it to get your emails delivered and read!