Evaluating Website Maintenance Packages: 12 Questions IT Must Ask

Identifying the right website maintenance plan and provider can be challenging — but it doesn’t have to be. By taking the time to understand the right questions to ask, you’ll be better prepared to make the right decision when selecting between different website maintenance plans.

To help assist your selection process, here are 12 questions IT teams should ask when evaluating website support and maintenance services:

1. What specific services are included?

While this question may sound obvious, not all IT teams take the time to probe beyond surface-level package descriptions. But this is a mistake, as being underinformed can cause you to miss out on a service you need to keep your site functioning optimally.

One issue that contributes to these misunderstandings is that website maintenance can be more specialised than you may realise. Providers may focus on CMS management, security updates, design, APIs, coding, or UX psychology, though each of these areas require their own expertise.

If you don’t take the time to get clear on the services your business needs, several issues can arise. For instance, if you’re expecting that your maintenance plan will support key projects you’ve planned, you don’t want to find out after you’ve already kicked off work that the services you need aren’t included.

On the other hand, imagine that you end up choosing a website maintenance package that includes services you won’t ever need. In this case, you’ll pay more than you need to for services you can’t use. In addition to evaluating standard package options, it’s also worth looking for packages that can be personalised to your requirements.

2. How many similar clients do you have?

How many clients does the provider have that are of a similar size to your company? Have they worked with other clients in your industry?

Just because a potential provider has experience in one area doesn’t mean that their knowledge or skills will work for your business. Further, a website with 1000 average monthly visits looks very different from one that receives 100,000 visits. Make sure the providers you’re considering are capable of supporting your specific website (rather than learning on the job on your project).

3. How do you manage project communications?

How will you communicate with your chosen providers? Do they have a standard cadence for communications, or will you only receive ad-hoc updates? Will you be able to tell if they’re on schedule with their work? Will you work with a single stakeholder, or can you expect to receive messages from several different people?

Also, consider response times here — not just about resolving issues, but simply about responding to your requests as well. A number of Sitback clients have moved to our Support & Optimisation service because the agencies they were working with left them hanging when communicating how their issues would be addressed. It’s a frustrating position to be in — and not one you want to experience while your site’s performance hangs in the balance.

Asking these questions upfront will prevent frustrating communication breakdowns later on, after you’ve begun working together.

4. How do you determine what’s important for my business?

Is it more important that your site is fast, or is it more important that it looks good? There’s no right or wrong answer here; different companies will prioritise different features.

But if a provider you’re considering isn’t asking you these types of questions from the start, use caution. Website maintenance providers shouldn’t be making assumptions about your needs instead of asking you what they actually are. If they do, it’s possible that they’ll misallocate your package resources whilst failing to make progress on your higher priorities.

5. How is IP shared between team members to prevent gaps in coverage?

Turnover happens on every team — website maintenance providers are no exception. So although providers can’t guarantee you’ll have the same point of contact throughout your engagement, they should at least be able to describe the workflows they have in place to prevent gaps in coverage.

A good IP transfer process takes both security and productivity into account. Maintenance providers should protect your data while ensuring systems exist to bring additional team members in to help as needed.

6. How do you keep up-to-date with web technology changes?

Web technology changes at light speed. Your maintenance team must prioritise continually mastering these new technologies and protocols to be able to deliver optimal performance and security for your site.

Beyond technology, changes to compliance requirements deserve your attention as well. For instance, WCAG 2.2 is coming soon. Staying in compliance with these new standards will require regular auditing and updates to prevent potential non-compliance penalties. Make sure any support and optimisation provider you’re considering is across these requirements.

7. What are your areas of expertise? Where is your knowledge best-in-class?

Your support and maintenance vendor should offer expertise in several areas, not just one. Optimising your website to meet your business goals requires skill sets in UX, UI, development, project management, security, design, and human/consumer psychology.

That said, they should also be aware of their own limitations. No single company can be a master of all possible web disciplines, despite what they may say. If your requirements fall outside of their areas of expertise, reputable providers should be willing to refer you elsewhere.

8. Do you understand the local perspective?

Outsourcing your support and maintenance to countries with a lower cost of living can seem tempting from a purely financial perspective, but going this route presents a few issues.

For starters, time zones can be a problem. Even booking routine work-in-progress (WIP) meetings becomes challenging when parties are several time zones apart.

Further, your maintenance company should understand your local market. That’s why Australian companies choose to do business with Sitback. Being locally based, we’re able to bring a local perspective to our UX and UI work in a way that international providers can’t. This can have a huge impact on the experience and engagement of local end-users.

9. Do you have expertise on my CMS or platform?

Working with a provider that has expertise with your CMS is essential. Not only does this expertise allow work to be done faster and more efficiently, but it also reduces the likelihood of mistakes being made.

Website platforms may appear similar to one another on the surface. But under the hood, each contains a codebase that must be maintained and altered with precision. At Sitback, for example, we’re able to offer expert support on the following platforms, but not necessarily on others:

• Drupal
• WordPress
• Sitecore
• Umbraco
• Shopify
• Magento

10. Do you have a disaster recovery plan in place?

How does the provider plan for ‘worst-case scenario’ situations? No company likes to think that their employees could ever be hacked or persuaded to hand over sensitive access. But everyone wishes they had a plan when it happens.

Making sure your provider has a disaster recovery plan in place not only ensures they remain operational in the event of a crisis, but it also helps to protect your site and its data. That way, you’ll experience minimal interruption in your revenue or operations, should the worst occur.

11. Do you use multiple environments to safely develop and test new features/code (e.g. dev, staging, production)?

Implementing new features should be done via strict data silos, including accounting for different stages such as developing features, staging them, and sending them to live production.

Working with a company that cuts corners can mean unanticipated downtime or disruption if bugs or compatibility issues make it through to your live site.

12. Do you have a reliable and regular data backup process?

Finally, the backup processes your provider has in place are crucial. If a server or platform goes down, you could lose valuable data.

Instead, work with a support and maintenance provider that performs regular backups to protect your data. For instance, at Sitback, not only do we regularly backup client websites, we store these backups securely and separately from live versions to ensure data redundancy.

Ready to streamline your website maintenance with a support and optimisation package catered to your precise needs? Contact the team at Sitback today for more on how we can help you.

An earlier version of this article was published on the Sitback blog: https://blog.sitback.com.au/blog/evaluating-website-maintenance-packages-12-questions-it-must-ask