6 Reasons to Consider a Website Support Contract
A support contract gives you peace of mind that issues that may arise from time to time on your website will be dealt with quickly and efficiently by experts.
Often organisations find themselves with insufficient in-house resources to support, maintain or even update their website. A Support and Maintenance Contract is a service level agreement which can be put in place between an agency and their client. This provides peace of mind that your most valuable online asset will be kept in the best of health long after launch.
It could sound like a sales strategy but our own clients have told us that effective and readily available website support is one of their highest priorities. Think it could also benefit your organisation? Here are six reasons we feel it could be well worth considering.
1. Security and backups
The data your website holds about you and your customers is both valuable and confidential. This becomes particularly relevant if you’re asking for details to accept online payments from customers. At this point it may become a matter of legal compliance to protect them from security risks. Ongoing support can proactively identify and mitigate security issues resulting from a hardware failure, a hacker, a virus, or changes made by your hosting provider. Frequent and scheduled backups provide reassurance that information is safely stored and easily retrievable should the worst happen.
2. Faults and Bugs
Even the best websites are vulnerable to bugs from time to time. When it happens it’s essential that it is dealt with quickly and at no additional cost. The benefit of a support contract with your original website developer means your support team will be comprised of members who were involved in the original design and development of your website.
3. Updates
Open source platforms like Craft, WordPress and Magento 2 receive regular updates which can include bug fixes, critical security patches as well as new features. A support contract ensures that these are kept up-to-date, meaning your CMS will be too.
4. CMS Support
Many websites have multiple content editors with varying degrees of savvy when it comes to formatting and optimising content properly. If content managers need a quick refresher course, or if content management responsibility is changing hands, maintenance plans can build in time to provide the support needed.
5. Downtime
Website downtime is rare, but it’s comforting to know support is at hand should the worst happen. With website support, 24/7 monitoring proactively tracks your website and server health (such as HTTP, Memory, Disk, CPU, Network, and Load Time), alerting the support team in case of any critical failure so that they can react as fast as possible. If, despite all odds your website goes down, we’ll have it back up in no time, even if the breach happens out-of-hours.
6. Website monitoring
Advanced system performance monitoring can identify and help mitigate server performance issues. In the unlikely event of a major data centre outage, your website will be given priority to be restored on a new server environment if necessary.
Post-launch website support is important
Ongoing website support has a place in every organisation. With Eyekiller, this can be tailored to provide the service you value most within your preferred budget.
Want to learn more about our post-launch support services for a full-scale website redesign? Let's talk.
