Website Maintenance Packages
Websites that are regularly updated receive 97% more links and 55% more website visitors compared to those that don't. Boost your website’s performance and secure it from different malware attacks with our monthly website maintenance packages.
Why choose us:
- Strategic approach
- Attention to detail
- Experienced team
- Guidance throughout
- Flexibility and speed
- Handover and training
Why website maintenance is needed
performance
64% of all companies in the world have at least once experienced a cyber attack! And these include not only large businesses but small and medium ones as well. If you think that you’re not a target for hackers and cybercriminals, think again. Website maintenance services are essential for addressing vulnerabilities before they are exploited by hackers.
performance
Website core, software and plugin updates are essential for the proper functioning of the website. If the website is not updated according to the latest software releases, it will become an easy target for attackers, may work slowly, might have errors or might stop working altogether!
Slow loading time, design or functionality issues, outdated content and overall poor or infrequent website maintenance harm the user experience, directly or indirectly affecting the website’s SEO performance and search engine rankings.
A website that is frequently updated, loads fast, and has no functionality issues is more likely to get more traffic as it gives a reason for users to come back. Website maintenance can highly influence the user experience and help attract more customers to your website.
If a website has functionality issues or outdated content, users won’t trust it and will lose trust in the brand as well. So, keeping your website up-to-date is necessary to build trust among your customers and increase brand credibility.
When you regularly update your website, you give more possibilities for the users to engage with your content and increase the time they spent on your website. Even one small issue or a one-second delay in website speed can ruin the user experience and make visitors leave your website without even interacting with it.
Straightforward pricing plans
Basic
Standard
Advanced
All plans include:
- WordPress uptime support
- WordPress and plugin updates
- WordPress website backups
- Website malware scans
What our clients say about us
Why we're your one-stop-shop for good design
Strategic approach
We take a strategic approach to each of our client projects and pay great attention to all aspects of your website. Our most basic packages cover the essentials, including backups, software updates, malware scans and clean-ups. We also offer monthly website maintenance packages which grant access to all our services, which could be useful if you have ongoing graphic design and website content update needs. Subscribe and forget about your website maintenance and security, we’ll take care of everything for you!
Proven value for money
We believe in overdelivering and providing excellent value to our clients. Our rates are derived based on thorough research of dozens of comparable agencies that deliver similar quality service and output. And our rates are set to be the most competitive among them!
Attention to detail
We pay meticulous attention to the tiniest details of your website. Our website management service includes backups, software updates, malware scans and many other important website support services. The “Standard” and “Advanced” packages grant you access to a big range of design, development and optimisation services. You also get direct support, rapid turnaround on all requests, and an option to accumulate unused hours and use them for larger requests down the line.
Experienced team
Our team consists of highly experienced graphic, UI/UX and web designers, project managers and website developers, each with at least five years of experience in their area of expertise. We have vast experience in building and maintaining WordPress and other CMS-based websites, working with different industries and various types of websites, from e-commerce sites to blogs and forums. So we have tried and tested different approaches and tools to ensure your website’s healthy performance and complete protection against attacks.
Guidance throughout
Web design and website maintenance can take some time to implement, and many parts have interdependencies, but we guide our clients through the process from day one, setting accurate expectations and aiming to under-promise but overdeliver every time! Regardless of the project, you will work with an account manager and a project manager, who will update you every few days, ensuring you’re always aware of the progress.
Flexibility and speed
We appreciate that priorities and requirements might vary greatly even for similar tasks, sometimes it may be crucial to have something done on the same day, another time the important factor may be the budget. We always try to understand the priorities and accommodate specific requests wherever possible. We also pride ourselves on having a very fast turnaround speed by all design agency standards.
Handover and training
We aim to create long-term relationships with all of our clients so they’ll have a reliable partner to turn to whenever they need to make any updates down the line. Having said that, we believe in empowering our clients to maintain their websites as much as possible, so we provide all the access necessary together with detailed instructions and recordings to support the everyday management of the site, so they aren’t dependent on us for minor updates and instead can draw on our expertise for areas which need our assistance the most.
Frequently
Asked Questions
Can I request custom services?
Our website and graphic design services can cover a variety of requests, as long as the task fits within the hourly threshold you can submit the requests, and even if it is something we don’t typically do we will be happy to look into it for you. If you would like to only have hourly tasks and do not need the monthly WordPress updates or uptime checks, you can use one of our monthly graphic and web design subscription packages. If you have other questions please get in touch!
Can I cancel my subscription?
Yes. If you want to terminate your website maintenance subscription, you can easily do that from your account or by contacting us. You can cancel anytime and there are no cancellation fees, the subscription will simply not renew from the following month.
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Want to explore partnering with us? Book a call!
“Their attention to detail was brilliant with great design innovations where there was room for them.”
Hugh Fraser
Doorway
“Their comments and feedback are excellent, and they’ve gone beyond the scope of work. They’ve brought in their point of view and delivered excellent results, which will be the starting point for our company.”
Aldo Guiducci
Scynce
“Their project management is outstanding, always making sure that everything’s clear and participating actively in decision-making processes and delivering great work, extremely fast. Their level of creativity is outstanding and inspiring too!”
Gregory T
Meukow Cognac
“Their creativity and speed were impressive. Passionate Design Agency's ability to transform our ideas into a top-notch product stood out.”
Aaron Ganick
PreddioTech
“They were always quick to respond and proactively offered solutions. Their ability to provide solutions to complex problems sets them apart from other vendors.”
Freda L.
Scoop Solar
“The quality of their work stands out. Passionate always ensure the work is of the highest quality and delivered in a timely manner.”
Qadir Hussain
Primed Pharmacy
“Their attention to detail was brilliant with great design innovations where there was room for them.”
Hugh Fraser
Doorway
“Their comments and feedback are excellent, and they’ve gone beyond the scope of work. They’ve brought in their point of view and delivered excellent results, which will be the starting point for our company.”
Aldo Guiducci
Scynce
“Their project management is outstanding, always making sure that everything’s clear and participating actively in decision-making processes and delivering great work, extremely fast. Their level of creativity is outstanding and inspiring too!”
Gregory T
Meukow Cognac
“Their creativity and speed were impressive. Passionate Design Agency's ability to transform our ideas into a top-notch product stood out.”
Aaron Ganick
PreddioTech
“They were always quick to respond and proactively offered solutions. Their ability to provide solutions to complex problems sets them apart from other vendors.”
Freda L.
Scoop Solar
“The quality of their work stands out. Passionate always ensure the work is of the highest quality and delivered in a timely manner.”
Qadir Hussain
Primed Pharmacy
Why are website maintenance packages needed
One primary reason for this is to keep up with updates, and almost every technology has updates, some more frequently than others. In addition to this, generally, the more custom and multifunctional the website is, the more maintenance work it needs. For example, a website like eBay will need a lot more maintenance work than a website like TechCrunch (which, believe it or not, is also powered by WordPress), which in turn will need more maintenance work than a website like colourpop.com (which is powered by Shopify).
So why do more complex and multi-functional websites need more maintenance? First, let’s sort the updates which can affect a website into categories:
- Web technology updates
- Website core updates
- Extension, library or plugin updates
Web technology updates
Updates that happen to the web infrastructure, such as changes in accepted protocols, browser updates, etc.
Think of these updates as something similar to your phone or computer software updates, for example, Windows or IOS updates. These updates fix detected bugs and enable new and improved functionalities to be executed. If you do not update your phone or computer software, your device may be vulnerable or unable to execute some tasks.
Similarly, in the case of websites, if your site is not caught up with the latest accepted protocols and standards, you will probably experience speed, accessibility and general functionality problems. One example of such an update recently was browsers beginning to require an SSL certificate to be installed and showing the website as a threat if it didn’t have one. So even if you have a beautiful website with tons of great content, if there is no SSL certificate installed, your site will appear like malware to potential visitors, completely undermining the efforts you have put into the site.
Another such example is PHP updates. A few years back, the highest stable PHP version was 5.6, so regardless of the web host that you chose, this would be what you’d get.
Recently, PHP 8.0 was rolled out, which can execute almost twice as many requests per second as 5.6. In the case of most hosts, you need to update to the newest version of PHP manually and then check your website is compatible. So it’s no surprise that to date, just over 6% of WordPress websites are still on PHP 5.6 and below, missing out on amazing performance gains!
As part of our monthly website maintenance packages, we ensure your WordPress site is kept up to date with the latest PHP version.
Web technology updates are generally not very frequent, occurring every 4 – 8 months, but generally have major implications.
WordPress PHP versions, as of April 2023
Website core updates
Updates that need to be made to the engine or core backend code of the site for it to:
- Remain compatible with web technology updates,
- Add new features to the core
- Fix issues in the existing core
- Address new security threats
These updates are always ongoing, but how you administer them will depend on how your website works.
For example, if you have a custom-made website, then your development team will need to address these on an ongoing basis. If your site is working on a CMS like WordPress or Shopify, then the organisation that provides the CMS will implement the edits. It varies from one CMS to another as well.
For example, in the case of Shopify, because they also host your website and have complete control of the server environment, their development team takes care of core updates behind the scenes without even requesting the site owner’s permission.
On the other hand, WordPress cannot do this for self-hosted instances (i.e., not wordpress.com). One installation with its given hosting and plugin configurations may accommodate the update, whereas another instance may experience fatal errors. This is why WordPress notifies website admins of the new version being available and leaves it up to the website admin to install the update.
Some hosting providers allow you to set WordPress updates on automatic for both minor and major versions. However, we strongly advise not to use this as we have seen far too many websites go down because of these updates. The cause may be an incompatibility with one plugin, a theme, or some code in your functions.php. This is why as part of our website maintenance packages we always ensure to create a backup just before running the update manually, as then we can restore the most up-to-date version of the site if anything happens. We would recommend you also use this approach as automatic backups may be a day or even weeks old, so restoring them will also lose all the website data in the interval!
Web technology updates are generally frequent, occurring every 0.5 – 3 months (depending on the CMS), but typically have medium to significant implications.
Extension, library, theme or plugin updates
Extensions, libraries, themes and plugins are code packages available for free or for a fee, allowing you to extend your website functionality without having to develop the features.
One good example of this is payment gateways. Whether custom-made or based on a CMS, most websites do not develop a custom payment system but integrate a ready solution like Stripe or Paypal. This ensures that the website admin doesn’t need to keep up to date with all financial regulations, such as being PCI compliant and can focus on running the site instead. Paypal and Stripe then bear the responsibility for the infrastructure updates (for a fee per transaction) but request the web admin to make updates every now and then to ensure that code remains functional.
One such example recently was the move to 3D secure cards, as part of which Paypal and Stripe gave instructions that should be implemented (which is generally a few lines of code) for the sites to remain compatible with Stripe and Paypal cores. Failure to enforce this update would mean that the website would no longer accept payments from 3D secure cards, which comprise the vast majority of cards.
These plugins, extensions, themes and libraries are updated for similar reasons to the website core, in particular to:
- To remain compatible with web technology updates,
- To add new features
- To fix issues in the existing code
- To address new security threats
- To remain compatible with the target core or software
These sit on top of the website core, usually developed by different developers to the website core. This makes them more likely to have incompatibilities as not all developers are as experienced and familiar with the core and may not account for all interdependencies. Likewise, the theme, plugin, extension or library may lack the testing and quality control or may simply be compatible with the core but incompatible with another extension that’s also used.
Still, although plugins, extensions, themes and libraries generally pose some additional risks, in most instances, the pros of time and money savings outweigh the additional maintenance needed! It is vital to ensure all libraries, extensions, plugins and themes are from trusted and experienced providers as poor choices can also affect the rest of the website.
Assuming you have chosen the right suppliers, it is still essential to always keep plugins, themes, libraries and extensions up to date as new updates range from functionality and compatibility improvements to critical security patches. In fact, in the case of a WordPress website, if your site is experiencing problems, your first action should be to backup your site and update all plugins and themes as this can fix it!
Like core updates, we don’t recommend enabling automatic plugin updates, as this runs the risk of breaking the site without you knowing what caused it. Again we recommend always backing up the site and updating the plugins and themes one at a time (standard practice with any of our clients on our website maintenance packages).
Extension, library, theme or plugin updates are generally frequent, occurring every 0.5 – 3 months (depending on the CMS), but generally have medium to major implications.
If you keep on top of these updates on an ongoing basis, your website downtime and errors will be kept to a minimum (assuming you have good hosting).
Is there any other maintenance that you need? It depends on how you use your site. If the site shows general information and acts more like a digital business card, assuming it was built well at the start, you probably won’t need much more maintenance beyond the above.
However, if you use your website as a marketing tool, run traffic ads, or work on SEO, you will certainly need to undertake some design and content updates. For example, if you have a blog, then the general consensus is to post every two weeks, if not more!
Although we offer custom website maintenance as well, the amount of work generally varies dramatically with the technologies, languages, development practices and features of the custom website.
So if you have a custom-developed website and are looking for maintenance packages, please contact us, and we will find a package that suits your requirements the best once we review the site source code!
For WordPress websites (one of our specialities), on the other hand, it is pretty straightforward to estimate the amount of maintenance work, so we have put together the following WordPress website maintenance packages for our clients: