Affordable, Trusted Website Care
Your website is a significant asset – take a few seconds to think of what it means when your site is down, or worse, has been hacked and diverted to other purposes. Even if your site is up and running, is it losing visitors because pages are just.too.slow?
Website Care is much more than peace of mind that your website is actually there and serving visitors. Website Care is about achieving YOUR success through your website. However you define “success”, we want to help you get there. You already know a website can play a big part in that – and like any member of staff, any machine, any device, if you give care and attention, you reap rewards.
Our Features
All Care Plans Include
Software Updates
The core website software that powers your website should be checked for updates several times a week. This is to close off any security holes and fix up any bugs that have been discovered.
Add-On & Plugin Updates
The additional bells & whistles that have been installed into your website (eg. a booking system, an online shop etc) frequently need updating – again for security and/or bugs. We take care of that, subject to any licencing requirements.
Website Backups
If there’s a disaster of some sort and your website ‘lives’ goes off-air, what happens? We’re here to get your site up and running again, as quickly as possible, even if that means moving it to new webhosting.
Site Security
Believe it or not, your site is constantly under attack – 24/7, by automated ‘bots’ looking for known weaknesses. We add extra security to help stop trouble.
Speed Optimisation
If your site is taking a-a-ages to download, visitors will move on to someone else. We’ll apply basic optimisation to your pages and your images.Â
Weekly Maintenance
We’ll optimise the website’s database, clear out any digital rubbish and left-overs, and get rid of the spam comments.
Website Care
Plans For Every Need
* sites not created/built by Winch Websites may need an initial Website Speed Optimisation project for an additional fee. This will be determined in the Website Care Plan Audit, which all such sites (ie. not made by Winch Websites) must undertake.
The Audit is to get familiar with your website, and see how much work is required (if any, of course) to bring it up to our standards.
Have Questions?
Check our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) below
or let’s discuss your situation;
Frequently Asked Questions
So why do I REALLY need Website Care?
(WIIFM or What’s In It For Me)
Website Care takes the load off your shoulders.
You shouldn’t need internet security in the home or office, but you’d be crazy not to have it.
It would be great to run a car that never needs servicing or checkups, but again, you’re going to run into trouble sooner or later if you just keep driving one along as it is.
So it is with a website. The software that powers your website is constantly being fixed, updated and made more secure. The ‘extras’ that your website uses (eg. online forms) likewise need to be kept up-to-date. Then there’s day-to-day maintenance to keep the site and its words, images, and links operating as they should, quickly and smoothly.
And here’s the thing. Your website is constantly under attack. I know that sounds like scaremongering, but if you hit the Google and search for “how often is my website being attacked?” you can see for yourself what’s going on. Security is essential, and it is a moving goal with an arms race between attackers and protectors. We’ll take care of that for you, and even if something goes wrong, we’ll have the backups to get you going again quickly.
It boils down to you, at the end of the day. How much is your time worth? Which is a better use of your time – managing and maintaining the website, or instead spending those couple of hours a week on activities directly related to growing, improving and building your organisation or business?
How will you know if there's a problem with my website?
(Website Monitoring)
We use monitoring services (yes, more than one) to automatically advise us whenever a website isn’t there.Â
This is more than a simple ‘ping’ to your domain name. We actually check for specific words or phrases unique to your website.Â
This means if your website is still technically ‘up’ but has been hacked or replaced with some rubbish, we’ll be informed within a couple of minutes and can respond accordingly.Â
We aren’t 24/7 mind you, so it will be business hours when we attend to the issue. However, we’ll be all over it pretty quickly!Â
If your site is more essential than most, there are services available to ensure 24/7 responses – we’ll happily put you in touch. Prepare your budget for it though, as you can imagine, that’s not going to be cheap.
How much will it cost to restore my website from backups?
(Website Backups)
If you need to restore your website for some reason, it’s included as part of your Website Care plan.
Obviously there are limits and caveats. If your website is not hosted with Winch Websites, there may well be other issues to sort out first (for example, the webhosting account has been compromised or hacked, or the webhost has gone out of business, or they’re having technical troubles).
Assuming all is well with your webhosting account, we can either rollback to an earlier version of your website (eg, the day before after some disastrous edits were made to the Home Page) or we can completely reinstall the website back to any point in the last 360 days (subject to the history being available). There is no extra fee involved for straightforward website restores.
Sensible limits do apply. If you have someone editing your site and stuffing it up 2 or 3 times a week and requiring restores, additional fees may well be incurred for restores. The intention of this service is disaster recovery, not training or experimentation exercises.
What happens if I cancel my Website Care plan?
(Website Care termination)
We sincerely hope you see the value of our Website Care to your organisation and its website, but if you do decide to move away and cancel the plan, there will be some impact.
We will ensure your website keeps going pretty much as normal, but we will deactivate any software licences that belong to us. This includes services such as image optimisation, speed optimisation, and/or security plugins. They will operate as normal but you won’t be able to update them to the latest version until you purchase your own licence(s).
Some services will of course be withdrawn completely, for example independent backups. Past backups may or may not be available in future, and fees will apply to use them.
You will need to take over all maintenance activities such as dealing with spam comments/form submissions, database cleanups etc.
In short, you take on everything to do with making sure your website runs smoothly, efficiently, securely and quickly on at least a weekly basis. Which is why we offer the Website Care service, of course!Â