When a site is not properly maintained

There are many underlying parts that have gone into the building of your site, all of which need regular attention to keep your site running smoothly for maximum user experience and revenue potential. When a site is not maintained, random errors and sluggish performance become noticeable, vulnerabilities develop and can be exploited by hackers, your content gets old, your domain name may expire which means you could lose your site if you don’t catch it in time! Links get broken, images disappear, and your search engine rankings fall, making it much harder for potential customers to find you. These are just a few of the issues that can happen if you don’t maintain your site. Some of these services may be offered by your hosting company where you may be one of thousands. If you want individual attention by someone who knows your site you can count on Rice Dean Graphics to make sure your site is running smoothly and at peek performance to give your visitors the best possible experience.

Software Updates

Rice Dean Graphics uses state of the art software when building sites, then regularly checks and updates all your site’s software including core, themes, plugins, databases, and programming language versions. Many of these updates contain security solutions. For that reason Rice Dean Graphics installs all updates as soon as they become available. If this causes an incompatibility it is fixed by reverting to the previous version or using your most recent backup. (More about backups below.) Innovation in web technology is always advancing and so should the software used to power your site. 

Content Updates

You can choose to make your own content updates with the user friendly Content Management System (CMS) that comes with your site. Your maintenance plan also includes some content updates and small fixes performed by Rice Dean Graphics. If you should require more time it is available at $60/hr. Contact Rice Dean Graphics for a free estimate.

Scheduled Backups

Regular off-site backups are crucial to save you from loss should your site be hacked or other unforeseen mishap at the server level. Occasionally, software updates can cause an incompatibility making it necessary to revert to the most recent backup. Depending on how often you publish new content on your website, Rice Dean Graphics offers backup on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. E-commerce sites will need hourly or some even real-time backup (contact for estimate) to retain all the order and customer information.

Security Scanning

Performing regular security scans is a must. If you notice something odd with your site, it may not be just a technical glitch, but hackers using your resources to run their scripts which can affect your websites performance. Rice Dean Graphics performs security scans on all it’s maintenance plan sites. This security includes a firewall and other safety measures to block hackers from gaining entry in the first place. 

Uptime Monitoring

Regardless of whether a server goes down, or there is something wrong with a site’s code, Uptime Monitoring sends alerts, allowing Rice Dean Graphics to assess and get your site back up and running in the shortest time possible.

Database Optimization

Revisions to your site store versions of your content which allow you to revert your changes should you need to. However, these revisions and other data such as spam comments use up space in your database which are loaded each time someone visits your site. Cleaning out such useless data on a regular basis goes a long way to maintaining the performance of your website. 

Broken Links

Broken links can annoy visitors who are trying to find the information they require and can also hurt your search engine ranking. By regularly fixing broken links not only will your website be easier to use, you’re engine optimization will remain intact. Rice Dean Graphics can check your site for broken links on a weekly or monthly basis. 

Traffic Analytics

Checking in on your analytics will enable you to see trends and check if your goals are being met.  By identifying where your website needs improvement you can make tweaks, for which you can test and improve gradually and then replicate the successes to different areas of your website. Rice Dean Graphics offers standard and custom monthly reports depending on your needs.

Testing

It’s important to check periodically the functionality within your website to ensure that everything is working as expected. Some of the things Rice Dean Graphics checks for include testing your website on different devices and browsers for bugs, testing your forms to ensure deliverability, and checking your navigation to ensure that each link goes to it’s intended destination. 

On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Your site was built using current SEO best practices. Keeping your on-page SEO optimized is critical to your site’s ranking because for the tech-savvy consumers of today, all purchasing and hiring decisions start with research on the Internet. Every page, post and category should at least have a meta description to ensure that you’re telling the search engines what everything is so they can best find it and show it to people searching for your content. Other tasks include optimizing your images and including alt text, adding links to your content – including references to show that you’ve done your research, and ensuring that your keyword for a particular page, or post is used within the first 100 words of your content.