With 2024 approaching, we’re shaping up our website hosting agreements to add “Care Maintenance Plans” to add more value to you and your websites. We recently wrote a blog on why you need a Maintenance Care Plan for your website, which you can check out here.
We currently offer more behind-the-scenes work when we host a website than most companies, and many don’t realize all that we do to ensure our hosted websites are up and running. In the past, our team did monthly maintenance as part of our regular hosting agreements for each and every website, but as the security threats continued to rise and the number of websites increased requiring plug-ins that needed care, we had to change our way of managing website care for our hosting clients. We needed to add features and team members, which became cost-prohibited for us in doing things our prior way of website hosting.
What’s included in our Basics Plan: WordPress core and plugin updates, daily security scans, daily backups, daily uptime monitoring, monthly performance scans, immediate updates on plugins for security vulnerabilities, monthly website review (correcting small issues we catch from updates), and as needed web host communication during our office hours.
In 2024, we are moving over to a Website Care Plan for every client. We are introducing something new: everything we do will be compiled in a monthly PDF with Google Analytics that will be sent to your inbox!
If you would like to control your costs for hourly assistance updating your website, like pricing changes, photo changes, etc., you can upgrade to an enhanced plan and get dedicated monthly support time. These plans come with our BG Digital Group based support team, who are willing to assist in completing your request!
Now for the new features:
- SEO Keyword tracking: We now can include SEO keyword tracking in your monthly PDF reports!
- Improving your search results: We now monitor most of our client’s websites in Google Search Console. We now act on notifications for small issues from Google Search Console, included in your plan, at no extra cost to you.
- Improving optimization: SSL (your site being https://) is so important to Google search ranking now that we also include fixing small SSL mixed content issues. So if we spot any on our end, we adjust those at no cost to you.
- A better process for time tracking and overtime notification: Please read the note below for details.
A word about the website “Overtime” *Important, please read:
Our enhanced monthly plans include a fixed amount of time for support desk requests that does not roll over. This way we have resources set aside for you every month whether you need us or not. Our overtime policy is below to help with communication between you and our team on how many hours monthly have used or need.
- Notification when you are nearing your limit: When you send in a request and you are above 50% of your monthly support time, we will do our best to inform you so you are aware for future requests.
- Approval before proceeding with overtime charges: If you are already over your monthly limit, we will inform you and only proceed over your monthly time with your approval. We will also be happy to wait until your plan reset date to carry out any of those requests to avoid overtime. *If you approve proceeding, overtime charges will be invoiced on your plan’s reset date.
- All requests are tracked, regardless of if implemented: Work requested through the desk is tracked in our time-tracking system. We do account for adjusting the time for miscommunication and issues, but please note, if you roll back a request, change it completely, or don’t approve work to go live from staging, you are still tracked for this requested time.
- Quotes for large requests: If requests sent to the desk will clearly exceed your monthly support time, we will provide you with the option to have these bundled into a quote as a small project. Quotes will be required for any request that requires the set up of a new plugin (typically), any request that requires design, or any request that exceeds your monthly support time by 2 hours.
As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions. For our current website hosting clients, thank you for being a BG Digital Group Website Partner! If you aren’t currently a website partner with us, schedule a call with one of our experts to see how we can enhance your website and improve your digital footprint in 2024.
