Website Maintenance Packages For Small Businesses in 2024

Website maintenance is the process of monitoring a site to ensure it is functioning properly. There are many tasks involved in maintaining a website, so you need to pay for someone with the knowledge and experience to prevent your site from issues that could negatively impact its performance. Read on to learn more about website maintenance packages On The Map Marketing offers.

How Much Do Website Maintenance Services Cost?

Website maintenance costs vary depending on several factors, like the size and complexity of the site, services included, and frequency of the maintenance, among others. But it can range from $60/year (for a basic personal website) to $60,000/year (for an enterprise-level site). The price increases if website design is included for as low as $2,000/year.

Here’s How Website Maintenance Plans by On The Map Marketing Look Like

What Do Website Maintenance Costs Include For Local Businesses?

Local businesses aren’t as demanding as medium- to large-sized businesses regarding website maintenance needs. However, they have specific requirements to guarantee that their site is working properly and is helping them generate more sales and revenue. Below are the factors included in website maintenance packages and costs of each: 

Domain and Hosting

The domain name is what people type on their browsers to access your site. Most domain names use .com as their domain extension. But if your desired domain name is already taken, there are other domain extensions you can choose from (.net, .org, .co). In fact, the extension dictates the price of the domain name you will buy, ranging from $8 to $1,000+ yearly.

Web hosting serves as a storage for all your website files. Without one, nobody can access your site. There are different hosting types to choose from. Shared hosting is the most affordable ($20-$120/year) because you share the hosting servers with other sites. A dedicated hosting offers the best performance for your site but is the most premium type ($1,200-$25,000/year).

Conversion-Focused Design

Most web design services only make your website look good. But a website design that aims to convert visitors into leads or customers of your business takes other factors into account. Aside from effectively incorporating brand assets (font, colors, logo), the design should have large and attention-grabbing call-to-action (CTA) buttons and forms that people click and fill out.

At the same time, they must also have a compelling copy to persuade people to take your desired action. From here, the agency may track the performance of your site and make changes to its conversion elements to help it generate better conversion rates. The average cost for this service (not including testing) is $6,000/year.

SSL Certificate

A security sockets layer (SSL) certificate authenticates a website’s identity. More importantly, it encrypts the connection between the visitor and the site. A website with an SSL certificate has a padlock icon on the browser bar, just beside the URL. 

This is very important, especially if your website collects sensitive information from users, like credit card numbers, passwords, and others. An SSL certificate obfuscates this information, preventing online threats from stealing them.

There are different SSL certificates, each of which comes at different costs. Domain-validated (DV) certificates are the most common and cost between $0-$100. Ecommerce and financial sites that require the highest level of trust from users, however, need organization validated (OV) or extended validated (EV) certifications, both of which can reach up to thousands of dollars.

SEO Optimization 

To improve your site’s online presence through search engine optimization (SEO), you must develop a content strategy. This includes content updates, like making edits to old pages, resolving broken links, and checking for plugin updates (if you have a WordPress website). Also, consider publishing new content optimized for search queries relevant to your industry.

Web design also contributes to your site’s SEO by improving its Core Web Vitals (CWV), a collection of metrics that measure a site’s loading speed and efficiency. You can view your site’s CWV from your Google Search Console or by analyzing a page on Google PageSpeed Insights.

To score high on these variables, choose a lightweight theme, use a caching plugin, minify your CSS and JS files, and compress your image files. These things, among others, can make your site load faster and provide a much better user experience for visitors.

SEO is normally separate from monthly website maintenance packages due to the wide scope of tasks it covers. However, some service providers will charge hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly for services to help maintain your website rankings on Google and Bing.

Tech Support

There will be times when your website breaks, and you don’t know why. If your business is dependent on your site properly functioning, you must reach out to a support team. Whatever the issue, whether it’s downtime, broken contact forms, or shopping carts not working, tech support should be able to resolve them and recover your site at a reasonable time.

The level of tech support dictates its price. Most teams offer office hours support–you can’t contact them during the weekends if your site breaks. Some can offer 24/7 support reserved for website owners with demanding business needs. Other tasks covered by tech support include regular updates, uptime monitoring, and backups.

Site Analytics

This optional service shows how your website is performing over time. The data it gathers includes the number of visitors your site received, the pages that generated the most traffic, how long they’ve stayed on the site, and how soon some left immediately after arriving at your website.

You can view this information on your Google Analytics if you installed it correctly. Others may share other data with you, like keyword rankings, click-through rates (CTR), and conversion rates. You may gather these on your own as well, but you must use various tools to do so. You can get your site analytics data for as much as $30 if you want someone else to do this.

Website Maintenance Plan Examples

Aside from us at On The Map Marketing, WebFX has publicly published its website maintenance packages. Its basic plan includes daily security scans, as well as website and content updates during office days. The after-hours maintenance plan offers the same quality of support during the weekends but is the most premium among all plans.

Studio Barn Creative has more streamlined and affordable plans at WebFX. All plans contain content updates, CMS and plugin updates, uptime and security monitoring, performance optimization, etc. The higher plans offer more content updates, phone support, and access to better plugins and uptime and security monitoring.

Lastly, FM Enterprises! offers three tiers for its website maintenance services. The Basic plan is suitable for businesses that don’t require a lot of upkeep but need the occasional content updates, backups, and email/hosting support. The Pro and Premium plans cater to websites that need more service requests, longer support hours, and other services like form creation, web design, and SEO work.

How Often Do You Need Website Maintenance?

A website must undergo regular maintenance. But its frequency depends on the website’s needs and the packages available. For example, small businesses that use their sites to showcase their portfolio may not have a huge demand for web maintenance. They’re more suited for basic support that includes website updates and backups on a monthly basis.

On the other hand, e-commerce websites that constantly process orders and take support tickets need all the website support they can get. So, the package they’ll choose should not only offer daily updates and backups. It should also feature on-call customer support whenever they or their customers experience problems with the site.

Should You Do Website Maintenance DIY or Hire a Web Design Agency?

The choice of doing website maintenance and monitoring yourself depends on three things. First, you must have web development skills to implement the changes or fix issues that happen to your site. The second is when you have a development team that can take care of making your website run smoothly. 

If you don’t have both, the time to hire an agency that will address your web maintenance and design needs is now. Aside from ensuring that your site is operating at its peak, the company can change your site’s layout and interface to improve user experience. You need these if you want your site to remain competitive in your industry.

The last thing to consider between choosing DIY site maintenance or an agency to manage it for you is resources. The former may be cheaper in the long run, but it will take most of your time to learn and implement the fixes for managing your site. The agency will carry this burden for you but expect to spend more on their services.

What to Look for in a Website Maintenance Partner?

If you’ve decided to hire an agency to care for your site maintenance needs, you must know what factors to consider when looking for one. Aligning these variables with your website needs should help you find the right partner that your site runs at optimum levels. 

• Ability to address website needs – The company offers packages containing services you’re looking for in a website maintenance provider. All plans should include at least regular security scans, backups, and customer support chat or email.
• Provides increased security – The agency should conduct security scans and software updates to address vulnerabilities and prevent hackers from attacking your site. 
• Knows how to fix malware-infected websites – It must also have a track record of resolving malware and security breaches causing problems to your site. Worse comes to worst, your chosen partner should be able to build your site back up quickly from the regular backups it conducts on your WordPress site. 
• Improves website performance – The company can increase website loading speed by migrating your website to a different content management system (CMS) or hosting provider. It should also make your site more lightweight by removing bloated code and unnecessary apps and plugins.
• Has digital marketing experience – While this is an optional service, sustaining your site’s online visibility and presence is a great way to spotlight your fully-functioning website. Find an agency that can launch results-driven campaigns promoting your site on various online channels.

On The Map Marketing is a Value for Money Bet For Website Maintenance!

We at On The Map Marketing offer affordable WordPress website maintenance packages that include website backups, web design and development, and tech support. Our development team has a sterling record of ensuring excellent website performance for all our clients. Contact us so we can provide you with a web maintenance package that’s right for your business.