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Ongoing Website Costs to Budget for!

by | Jun 17, 2019 | Budgeting for Web development, Domain Name Strategy, Marketing strategy Online, Web Design Strategy, Web Site Design Houston | 0 comments

Onging Web Site costs to budget for

Ongoing Website Costs to budget for!

Onging Web Site costs to budget forMany clients do not realize the ongoing expenses related to owning a website that pop up fairly often.  I prepare my clients up front for these but recently had a friend call in a panic concerning an email from his hosting service about an issue he did not know how to deal with.

Please allow me to share some of these “unexpected” events with you.

  1. Backing up the site – This should be done every time a change is made or plugins/themes are updated.  Last thing you want to have happen is have your site hacked with no backup to go!  Some hosting services include the option to back up daily, once a week or other defined times.  Once a day is over kill.  You can backup only when changes are made.  There are a couple of plugins for this to make it easy to save the site as a file on your computer and other devices.
  2. Up-dating WP Plugins – updates are often to patch a security issue.  All plugins need to be updated as soon as new versions are released.
  3. Security and Firewall settings – I recommend the WordFence plugin that can do a scan of selected files and other files, including themes.  I recommend the removal of all themes and plugins not being actively used. The reason is as time moves forward, themes and plugins have to be updated. Hackers learn which plugins are venerable and look for the presence of these in your site.
  4.  Review of Google Analytics to check on traffic, bounce rates and conversions – if you do not know what I am talking about, then you need to change web administrators. Education of the customer eliminates confusion and gives an understanding of reports provided on each site. Also, if you can not measure your progress on line, it does not exist,
  5. Emergency Planning – Sometimes website servers do go down.  It may take time for your web admin to figure out if it can be fixed quickly or not.  Have a backup you can forward your domain to temporarily so you do not loose potential clients.  I can’t tell you how many early morning fixes at 2:00 am have saved the day.

I will address more issues in future blogs.

Steven Carr