Introducing WordPress Care and Maintenance Plans

Pixel Cloud Designs is thrilled to announce that we now offer maintenance via WordPress Care Plans. Effective immediately, this opt-in service will be available to everyone for a monthly fee and will greatly improve the performance and stability of your site.

What Is It?

All websites, but particularly WordPress sites, operate their best when properly maintained. Heck, doesn’t everything? This service is meant to keep your WordPress site run like a well oiled machine.

Gone are the days of manually updating all of your plugins, themes and (cringe…) WordPress installs. Some of you can vouch from experience that these are stressful at times due to the sheer volume of updates, or just because some updates have bugs that will break your site and need to be rolled back. Is your site running slow and you can’t figure out why? We will analyze it regularly and help you fix the problem. Our plans include a Basic plan to take care of all the stuff you should be doing regularly at a minimum. The Premium plan adds some more value to the Basic plan by including a block of incidents you can use to have something fixed or just to have us make edits to your site at no charge. Lastly, our Ultimate plan includes everything the previous plans have to offer, with the addition of more comprehensive views into your site’s performance as well as consultations and strategy sessions to get your business to the next level.

What Do I Need to Do?

Not much. We handle all of the maintenance, all you need to do is sign up for the plan of your choice. Some tasks are performed daily, and others weekly. At the end of the month we send you a client report that shows what maintenance has been performed on your site as well as any problem areas we found. The Basic plan includes a basic summarization of events, whereas the Ultimate plan includes a full report including analytics, performance, and security risks. All plans and details are available here and require a one-time setup fee, but plans can be suspended, changed or cancelled anytime.

Why Maintenance Plans?

Your focus should be your business, not keeping your website running. Our core competency is WordPress. When we aren’t designing your next masterpiece or promoting your business, we focus on your site’s needs. We found that the best way to ensure you are getting what you need is to allow you to choose the level of service that meets your needs. By doing this, we can ensure that you aren’t overloaded with information you don’t need, or tie up our time working on things that won’t help you succeed. This approach also gives you the flexibility to make changes to your subscription at any time. If you want to upgrade, downgrade, cancel, or just put your plan on hold you can do so at anytime without having to call or wait. Additionally, we can also customize plans for you. If you need hourly backups instead of daily, or want to purchase blocks of time for us to fix issues, we’re happy to do that as well.

We still offer all of our design services to clients, but hope that this will be a welcome addition for everyone. If these maintenance plans are not for you, but you still need help with your site, we would be glad to accommodate. Just contact us and let us know what you need.

Can’t I Just Maintain It Myself?

As a cost-saving’s measure, some people want to update and maintain their own site. Yes, it can be done, but no it doesn’t always save you money. In fact, maintaining your website yourself could end up costing you more money than you think. If you just update from your WordPress admin, there’s no record of it happening. All of the changes we make are logged accordingly and put into a handy report for you to view at the end of the month. We also include the results of our regular performance and security scans in these reports. In the event we ever catch an issue, we address it before you, our client ever knows there is a problem. We also take care about which plugins we are updating and single out large updates (like Woo Commerce) as its own task for additional quality control.

On the other hand, if you don’t have an active web site maintenance contract, you may actually be throwing money out the window by not providing proper maintenance to your site. Think about it this way: when you go to a web site and notice certain problems or formatting issues, do you hang around anyway? I certainly know that I don’t. I hit the back button and look for a new site that looks have their act together. If your site is the one I just left because it wasn’t working properly or designed well, you’ve lost a potential customer.

It Usually Always Costs More to Fix Than to Maintain

These days, almost everyone has a website. However, inexperience and neglect can damage its look and functionality. When this happens, you have a tough choice to make. Option 1: leave it alone or try and repair it on your own (which might cause even more damage), or Option 2: You can then pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone experienced to fix it. Think of it like your car, it costs more to fix it than it does to maintain it properly, doesn’t it? Just as regular oil changes help keep your car running properly, regular site maintenance helps keeps your web site running smoothly.

Experience Really Can Save You Money

Ultimately, your website and your business is your baby – you know what’s best for it. One of our most important jobs is to help you do what’s best for your website. This reflects strongly on your business. You know your product, we know ours. Why not deal with what you know best and let us deal with what we know best? Would you try to fight that court battle without a lawyer? Try to fix your damaged heart valve or heal your sick child without the benefit of medical advice? Then why try to maintain your own web site if you’re not a professional web designer?

By investing in an experienced designer to update and maintain your site properly you are actually saving money in lost sales and visitors. You’ve no doubt heard the old cliche “you have to spend money to make money” and this is so true when it comes to your web site. The goal of having your site is to impress your visitors, get them to come back and if you have products to purchase, you want them to buy from you. Well, you can either keep your site updated and properly maintained or, give your business to your competitors.

The Choice is Yours

If you’re interested in securing a care plan for your web site, contact us to learn how you can have a professional web designer keep your site in proper working order. It’s really not as expensive as you may think!