Why is the maintenance of your website important?

1. What is the role of the developer during the maintenance phase?

Remember that the maintenance of your website is a preventive solution.

It will allow you, in the long term, to save money, time and unnecessary stress since your website will be operational and up to date.

It will also allow you to avoid as much as possible the big breakdowns preventing its presence on Internet during a long period.

Indeed, small regular updates are less risky to implement than a big update done more rarely. In this case, the risk of unavailability of your website would be more important and your losses in turnover and visibility would be felt.

During the maintenance of your website, like a doctor, the developer will analyze the "good health" of your website in order to prevent a serious problem. He will do this by paying particular attention to the following points.

2.1 Updates

Updating your website regularly is very important, especially for security reasons.

And this is even more true if you use a CMS (Content Management System) more commonly called content management system.

As CMS are more and more used, they are also more and more attacked and therefore require regular security updates.

There are currently many CMS such as WordPress, PrestaShop, Wix or Wagtail, to name only the best known.

As these CMS are updated regularly, it is advisable to also update your website to follow the technical evolutions as well as the security updates.

The developer, in this case, will proceed to the update of your website but will verify at the same time that the plugins, themes and other libraries which call upon your website have been updated too.

He will also check that the calls are good and that there are no broken links or redirection problems.

2.2 Backups

In the same way that we regularly back up our personal data, it is strongly recommended, not to say essential, to act in the same way with the data from our websites and to back them up.

Thus, if during the update of the CMS, an incident occurred, such as the non-compatibility between a plugin and the last update of the CMS, the developer could recover all your data and put them back online immediately.

Good to know: It is possible to ask your developer to set up automatic backup plans. Some even perform local backups to be completely sure not to lose any data.

It is possible to perform these tasks on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. By automating this task, no part of your website will be lost. The backup will include the backup of your website and all the elements associated with it such as the database.

2.3 Monitoring

Monitoring consists in tracking and measuring the activity of your website in order to, among other things, make it more efficient. The performance of a website is part of the SEO parameters.

A page or an image that takes too long to display, a problem with your database due to a crash in your DBMS (Database Management System), an operating error on your part or on the part of one of your collaborators can slow down your website or even take it offline. And a website that runs slowly or does not display can, on the one hand, cause you to lose visitors, but also harm your image and cause you to lose sales.

Also, by entrusting the monitoring part to a developer, the latter will be able to constantly monitor your website and immediately repair any damage that it may suffer. The monitoring also allows you to detect more quickly, and thus to counter them, the attacks known as Ddos (attacks by Distributed Denial of Service) as well as the viruses.

This step may seem unnecessary, but in fact it is indispensable.

Good to know: The so-called Ddos attacks or Distributed Denial of Service attacks are attacks that consist, for example, in sending a lot of requests at the same time to make the server unavailable or to crash the database.

2.4 Bug fixing

When updating browsers, or when you decide to add content or images to your website, it can happen that errors or bugs occur.

These bugs can be minor, like display errors, or more important like redirection problems (links to pages that don't work anymore) or even DBMS (Database Management System) crashes that prevent you from accessing your databases.

If unfortunately your website was the target of an attack, a Trojan horse or a virus, the developer could quickly restore the functionality of your website and clean up the databases if necessary.

It is in these situations, and for these situations, that you will be happy to have a developer maintain your website.

Because, generally, a new and trained eye in this field will be able to correct the problem more quickly and put your website back online as soon as possible.

Thus, by delegating the management and correction of bugs and other malfunctions to a qualified developer, you will gain in productivity, stress and mental load. You will be able to concentrate fully on your main activity.

3. How much does it cost to maintain a website?

When you outsource the maintenance of your website, we talk about TMA (Third Party Application Maintenance).

To carry out the maintenance of your website, three solutions are generally proposed:

• By consumption: The developer or the TMA invoices you each month, according to the real time spent on the maintenance of your website.
• Fixed price: You contractually agree on a fixed number of hours per month during which the developer or TMA will manage and maintain your website. This solution is often considered when you have a high traffic on your website or when the updates are relatively sensitive.
• Prepaid: You buy a book of tickets corresponding to a certain number of hours of intervention from the developer. This solution may be appropriate if your website does not have too much traffic or a large volume of data to manage.

Good to know : Some developers offer application maintenance services starting at about thirty euros per month. But generally, count on a basis of 0.5 to 1 equivalent daily rate per month. It goes without saying that this type of service is offered for simple websites with small databases and level 1 traffic.

If you have a website with large databases, foreign key systems, highly sensitive data and a lot of traffic, the corrective maintenance and fixed price solution will be more interesting for you. In this case, do not hesitate to ask us for a quote via the form.