Professional Small Business Website Solutions
Our small business website maintenance solutions make it easy for busy business owners to make changes to their website and keep it up to date.
That’s right, we don’t just build awesome marketing websites we also help maintain and manage them! When you hire us it is like having your own in-house web development team.
Through our website maintenance plans we make it possible for small & mid-sized businesses to compete with much larger corporations.
Our goal is to provide an affordable solution for smaller companies to have a dedicated website administration, design, development, and marketing team.
When a company fully partners with z5 Marketing they gain a team member that handles all of their digital business needs.
With our business model, we are able to fill these roles for a fraction of the price it would cost to hire even one full-time employee much less the 2 or 3 that would realistically be required.
It’s Like Having A Web Developer On Your Staff
Do you ever have ideas you would like to implement or changes you would like to make to your website?
If you choose to go with one of our monthly plans we will basically become your web dev department for a fraction of the price it would cost you to hire a full-time developer.
Examples of common changes we make:
- make content changes
- add / remove pages
- add / enhance site features
- make site style changes
- change image or promotional banner
- add promotional product/service landing page
- add / remove employees
- add / remove promotions
Why Is Regular Maintenance Important?
A website can be a major investment into a companies marketing strategy. If done correctly your website will become an income-producing asset for your business.
Regular service and maintenance is simply part of protecting the goose that’s laying the golden eggs. Maintenacning your website is how you keep the gears in your marketing machine oiled.
Reasons To Keep Your Website Up To Day
- Keeping your website’s code and applications up to date is the best way to avoid costly site crashes, visual errors and security vulnerabilities.
- Fresh content helps keep your site relevant for the search engines
- Updated content helps keep your site relevant for your visitors
- Fresh content and features is the best way to keep your site appealing to potential customers
One of the biggest complaints we hear from business owners is that they do not know who to trust for these services. As a result, many business owners neglect maintenance issues and leave their site outdated and often vulnerable to hackers.
Dangers Of Ignoring Website Maintenance
A major part of maintenance involves making sure your code and any applications you may be using are up to date.
When popular applications such as WordPress release updates they typically include important security patches to cover any recently identified vulnerabilities.
The majority website hacks come from these “well known” and document vulnerabilities that have NOT been updated. Automated programs made by hackers will crawl the web looking for sites that have ignored security updates.
Here is what Google published back in 2017 on this issue
“We’ve seen an increase in the number of hacked sites by approximately 32% in 2016 compared to 2015. We don’t expect this trend to slow down. As hackers get more aggressive and more sites become outdated, hackers will continue to capitalize by infecting more sites.” From Google 2017
The longer your site goes without being updated the more vulnerable it becomes.
The problem with never updating your website is that after a certain point (years of neglect) your site may become so out of date that it would break (or crash) your site to run any updates.
This usually leads to just scraping the site and building a new one which ends up being the most expensive option.
Why Hackers Would Hack Your Website
In March 2016, Google reported that over 50 million websites were victims of cyber attacks by hackers.
In an article from 2017, CNBC stated, “In the last 12 months, hackers have breached half of ALL small businesses in the United States” and considered it a national crisis.
The first thing to understand is that these hacks rarely happen on an individual basis, they are usually automated attacks.
The motives always boil down to money and there is big money in cybercrimes.
Referring to several reports found in this article from USA Today, “Cyber attacks cost small businesses between $84,000 and $148,000” and “61% of breaches hit smaller businesses last year, up from the previous year’s 53%”.
Typical hacks include
- SEO Spam – They will add a bunch of spam links on your site or completely redirect your website to another website (often to PORN websites).
- Malware – A malware infected website is used as a tool to then spread malicious software to your company computers and computers of any visitors to your site with the goal of creating access points on these devices.
- Email Spam – They send out 1,000’s of emails containing spam or malware from your website IP address (until your IP becomes blacklisted which can be very bad for your business)
- Negative SEO Attack – The intent is to damage your site’s search engine rankings for a multitude of reasons
- Ransomware Attacks – Attempt to collect a ransom in exchange for not deleting your businesses critical data (which should be backed up anyway)
For more information here on why someone would hack your website check out this article from sitepoint.com – Why Would Someone Hack Your Small Business Website.
From a marketing standpoint, these attacks can be devastating because once Google and other search engines detect Malware or suspicious activity they will remove your site from the search engines and display a warning on your site for visitors.
Unfortunately, many businesses aren’t able to recover from these attacks.
In 2016 The Denver Post reported, “60% of small companies that suffer a cyber attack are out of business within six months.”
How We Charge For Service And Maintenance Work
Hourly Rates – For one time projects, we charge flat hourly rates.
Monthly Plans – For those that want to that want the comfort of know that their site always stays up to date we offer monthly maintenance plans. Also included with these plans are monthly service hours which gives you the ability to make regular changes to your website at no extra charge.
Why Commit To A Monthly Website Maintenance Plan
Partner with us and we will become your outsourced website administrator, design, and development team. This is a great solution for those that can’t afford to hire, manage and provide benefits their own in-house web team.
With our monthly plans, we make it possible for smaller businesses to have their own web-related IT Dept for a fraction of the price they could hire a single person in-house.
What All You Get
- Monthly website analytics reports
- Daily security monitoring
- Security updates
- Monthly routine maintenance
- Monthly website changes – Allotted in hourly credits for service work (amount of hours credited monthly vary depending on plan)
- The ability to roll over any unused credits for hourly service for up to 6 months.
- Discounted hourly rate on any additional service work that may exceed your available hourly credits (*some exclusions apply)
- Plans Starting at $150 per month
For more information on our small business website maintenance services contact us today.