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Hi, Liza here from Content Maximiser. Here I am sitting in the little cabana in front of our little beach house for the week here in Byron Bay.

So we’re about to go live with a website that we just built for a real estate agent. And they said to me, “Oh, I didn’t realize that there’s an ongoing fee. I thought it was just simply a build and forget.” And this is such a common question. So I thought I’ll make a quick video sharing with you the six reasons why you want to have an ongoing fee for the support of your website.

1. Website Hosting

So the first one is that your website needs to be hosted. It’s kind of like you need to rent a space to put your website in so that people can access it. So the simplest form and the first reason you will have an ongoing fee for the website is the hosting, which is simply paying rent to put your website in.

2. Premium Theme

The second reason you will have an ongoing maintenance fee for the website is that you, say that you want to pay for a premium theme. So for WordPress sites, there’s this thing called a theme.

“Theme” is like a template, but the thing is you can get free templates, and you can get premium templates. Premium templates mean that the designer or the developer of the theme will continuously update the version of the theme so that it will work with the latest version of WordPress.

You want to have a premium theme that is always compatible with the latest version of WordPress. Otherwise, you’ll get to a point where the WordPress version is not compatible with your theme, and your theme was now breaking down. So as part of the maintenance fee, what should be included is the ongoing support or the latest version of the theme which your developer will have to pay for to have access to that.

3. Premium Plugins

The third reason is that just like a computer or your phone, where very often you see a little pop up that says, “Latest version available, please download now.” So its exactly the same, where your website will have different functionalities depending on your requirements.

The functionalities could be a form or a photo gallery, or you might have a specific display style that you like, and it requires a premium plugin. Now once again, just like a theme where you can have the free theme, but not supported and if something goes wrong you’ve got no one to turn to. Same as plugins. So plugins, you want to use premium plugins.

So for us here at Content Maximiser, we always only use premium plugins that you have to pay every single year to have the latest version and updates and support of those plugins for those functionalities. So another reason why you’d be paying on an ongoing basis is to make sure that you always have the latest updates and being able to support those plugins if something goes wrong.

4. Manual Update and Maintenance

Now, the fourth reason is that just because you’ve got access to those latest updates and the latest versions, someone still needs to manually go in every month to do the updates. Now with a lot of hostings what they now have is that is automatic updates, which are great. But this is the thing that you might not realize, is that when they do the latest updates, what they do is they will have AI to actually scan your site and go, this is how it looks before the updates. And once it’s updated, they’re going to scan it again and see if there are discrepancies. And if there are discrepancies, they will manually reverse the update and then send the developer an email and go, “We have got issues updating these particular plugins, please go in and check manually.” So you will still need to have someone manually update those plugins or check if their problem goes wrong.

And for us here at Content Maximiser we do it once a month that we schedule to do manual updates of those plugins for all our clients. And it is absolutely critical to have your latest versions with all the plugins. And as a matter of fact, we had one client who, after we built the site for them, they want to use a company that they have been using to support their website. So we’re like, “Yep sure, all good.” And the thing is that company don’t have all the licenses, so they only update what they can, but a lot of the licenses they don’t have, so they were not being updated and as a result, what ended up happening is that the site got hacked numerous times and malware got installed. So what they then have to do is that they have to pay a premium of a $1000 to get the website cleaned up.

So you want to make sure that your website, all the plugins are always up-to-date so that it reduces vulnerabilities. Because if a website got hacked, chances are it gets in through plugins that are not updated.

5. Manual Plugin Support and Maintenance

The fifth reason why you will want to pay for another monthly support. Even when there are updates, what can happen is that one plugin can conflict with another. So that is where you will need the developer to go into the support of that plugin software and resolve those conflicts with them. Things might break, or things are not displaying properly, the function is gone, that’s because one plugin might actually conflict with another, then you will need someone to manually do it.

If you do a build and forget and not get someone to maintain your sites continuously and if something goes wrong, who are you going to go to? And if you’re going to go to a developer to help you fix it, then number one, it’s going to cost them time, which means you money, the time to diagnose what is the cause and once they find out what the cause is, then you’ll need to pay to get them to help you resolve it. So it’s so much better to get things maintained and update on a monthly basis and that you’ve got someone to deal with the support communication if things do break down.

6. Backup Storage

The sixth reason why you would want to have ongoing support for your website is that you need backup. Sometimes the website could be screwed up, something goes wrong, and it’s just easier to restore the whole site, so you access the backup.

To access the backup, that means you need additional space. So not only are you paying for the hosting, which is hosting the main site, but you also need to pay for the backup, which is more space for the backup. And that backup needs to happen on a daily basis. And then also how many versions of the backup is being kept. So you might have one week of back-ups which means seven versions. If you have one month of backup, that must be 30 versions. So all of that would require additional space for you to rent to host those backups in addition to the hosting of the website itself.

Next Step

So if you are looking after a web development company who can look after you both in the short term to build you a beautiful website that focuses on conversion, as well as on an ongoing basis to look after you in the long term, then we’d love to help!

We’ve got clients back from 2012 who are still with us, who have built multiple versions of websites with us and we continue to host them and look after them so that it gives them peace of mind and they can focus on their business.

So just click the button below or fill in the website on our enquiry form, and we’ll be in touch, and hopefully, we can look after you. Cheers!

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